Louise Bourgeois' dark and emotionally ambiguous "Maman," a giant spider sculpture in Tokyo's Roppongi Hills district, has been covered in brightly colored yarn for the 15th anniversary of Roppongi Hills and the ninth iteration of Roppongi Art Night.
The artist behind this is American Magda Sayeg, who has been covering various street monuments, vehicles and objects around the world as minor acts of rebellion against modern urban life. In a TED Talk on her work Sayeg, who is considered to be one of the originators of the worldwide phenomenon of "yarn bombing," says she started covering things in multicolored crochet and knitting work when she had the desire to see something "warm, fuzzy and human-like on a cold steel grey facade" that she saw everyday.
With textiles being an integral part of Bourgeois' life and work, there is certainly a pleasing resonance in this intervention, though of course it's not without irony. Sayeg ostensibly aims to "enhance the ordinary, the mundane ... even the ugly," but in this instance she's covered the one object in a commercial district whose main function as an art piece is to invoke thought and feeling about human relations.
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