In the subterranean depths of the Art Gallery of NSW’s Tank gallery, in footage projected on to a wall, octogenarian artist Louise Bourgeois is peeling a tangerine. It’s not a snack but a demonstration of a formative and damaging childhood experience; she starts by sketching the outline of a female figure on the skin in thick black marker, before carving out the lines with a knife and unpeeling the fruit.
The tangerine routine was a party trick that Bourgeois’s father performed when she was a child at Sunday dinners, often in front of guests; “I’m making a little portrait of my daughter,” he would announce. The navel would be left till the end, for a reveal with a twist: not a girl after all but a boy, complete with pithy penis. “Well, I am sorry that my daughter does not exhibit such beauty,” he would declaim.
