Steve Bierley, tennis correspondent, on visual art
Louise Bourgeois at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, May 31

　　From the top of the Pompidou Centre, Roland Garros - the home of the French Open tennis championship, and my home for a fortnight every spring - was lost in the morning mist. Sport is essentially about youth, and about absolutes. Sport makes you feel elated or depressed. The works of Louise Bourgeois, 97 years old this December, make you feel unsettled, repelled. Roland Garros seemed a million miles away.

　　Faced with a new sport, which is unusual these days, my first instinct is to ignore the detail. Observe and record; don't get bogged down in too many facts or statistics. So I came to Bourgeois with no prior knowledge of her work, no inkling of the deeply disturbing web she was about to wind around me. Her huge spider, installed on the ground floor, should have been a hint.

　　Art galleries are not alien territory for me. The US Open brings an annual visit to New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, or the Metropolitan Museum, while the Musée d'Orsay in Paris has long been a favourite. But this was specific. One artist. No escape.

　　Numerous photographs ran along the wall outside the gallery. Bourgeois the small child, innocent of the first world war; Bourgeois the young woman, with long flowing hair and a sharp beauty; Bourgeois the bird-like octogenarian. As a preparation for what was to come, it had no more relevance than pictures of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal posing at the net before hitting a ball. Oh yes, there she was with Andy Warhol. But she might have been his maiden aunt.

　　In sport you are always waiting: the great shot, the goal, the end. You are also distanced from the others who watch, the supporters. "Fans with typewriters," an English journalist once scathingly described Scottish football reporters when they were covering their national team. Sports writing demands, though often does not get, degrees of objectivity and balance. But how can you be objective about art? Sport has rarely spooked me. But Bourgeois did, all the time.

　　Sports journalists only occasionally get to know the people they write about intimately. There is generally no need to explore the correlation or intertwining of the biographical line and its relation to sporting achievement. In the arts, you realise it is a constant focus.

　　Watch sport and you think about sport. Observe art and you discover yourself. Spirals, nests, lairs, refuges. Bourgeois leads you to dark places you are not sure you want to revisit. Sport is the toyshop; Bourgeois proffers no hint of a welcome. Even the "je t'aime" embroidered on the pillow in one of her claustrophobic rooms seemed like a threat. Rooms inside cages; bones inside glass spheres.

　　Outside the gallery, on a looped video, Bourgeois speaks about her art as if she were giving a talk to the Llansilin Women's Institute. It should have carried a warning: This woman is deeply dangerous. I go back to the comfort of Roland Garros, though Bourgeois remained a haunting and disturbing presence. I'm still spooked.

（来源：Gurdian，点击参看译文）