Annette Messager

Two interesting articles about Annette Messager:

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Annette Messager: A bold messenger for feminist art

By Alan Riding

Published: Tuesday, June 26, 2007

PARIS — Annette Messager remembers feeling lonely when she set out to become an artist in her 20s. The role models before her were all men: not only the greats of the past but also her father, an amateur painter, and her boyfriend, Christian Boltanski, already a heralded new talent when they met in 1970.
"In my family, my father was the artist," Messager recalled in a conversation at her home on the outskirts of Paris. "With Christian, I was the girlfriend. And since I was cute, well, it was thought impossible to be an artist and cute. At first, I felt proud when someone said, 'Your work looks like a man did it.' Then I realized that was stupid."
The path Messager chose instead was to embrace her gender, to become an artist who interpreted life - sex, love, beauty, pain, yearning, power - through the eyes of a woman. In this narrative, the petite, bright-eyed artist could be the fictional storyteller, and she would play all the roles.
It was a strategy - one might call it feminism à la française - that evidently worked.
Now 63, Messager has long been one of France's leading artists, a status she shares with Boltanski, who is still her partner. Two years ago, she represented France at the Venice Biennale, taking the prize for the best national pavilion. This month, a retrospective of Messager's 35-year career opened at the Pompidou Center in Paris. (The exhibition runs through Sept. 17.)
The show's title, "Les Messagers" (The Messengers), is of course a play on her surname. But it is also an invitation into the many worlds she has created. And in these various worlds in the show's jigsaw of rooms, she hopes visitors will write their own stories, blending their experience with the elements she has provided.
The works on display are enormously varied, although none is a traditional painting or sculpture. They all fall loosely into the category of installations: in some cases, elaborately arranged collections of photographs; in others, compositions of stuffed animals and their limbs. In recent years, she has also added movement to some of her installations, like "Pinocchio's Ballad in Beaubourg," created for this show.
Still, if her installations are becoming more complex and sophisticated, the message of her work has always been simple and to the point: She wants to free women from the roles assigned to them by men, by the marketplace, and by society. And she tries to do so through satire and caricature, using the images and materials of everyday life.
Some early ventures raised eyebrows, as when she presented newspaper photographs of babies with their eyes scratched out by pen lines to protest the way the media seemed to demand that women procreate. (Messager herself has no children.) In other works, like "Voluntary Tortures," she dwelled on women's need - a need, she implies, imposed by men - to appear beautiful through makeup, facials and plastic surgery.
She also treated her art as a game that she called "false biography," variously portraying herself as Annette Messager the Collector, the Artist, the Cheater, the Peddler, the Practical Woman.
"I wanted to look for an identity through others," she said over tea. "I asked myself, 'Who am I?' I am nothing. So I asked what people said about women. I appropriated the identity of others."
One work from the 1970s comprised photographs of "The Men I Love," although Messager had never in fact met any of them. In another, she imagined through small sketches how her friends would portray her. And in yet another, underlining a television stereotype, she photographed herself as a pretty nurse in an operating room.
More controversially, in "The Approaches," she followed men through streets in order to photograph the crotches of their trousers.
"It was a way of treating men as objects when it's usually women who are treated as objects," Messager explained. "Men never stop checking out women's bottoms, breasts, everything."
In 1974, she began collecting French proverbs, all of them denigrating women, and embroidered them onto cloth. Among those on view in the show are "Women's tears are worth a lot and cost them little"; "Women are educated by nature, men by books"; "When a girl is born, even the walls cry"; and "Beware of a bad woman and distrust one who is good."
The series that has proved most popular came later: "Mes Voeux" (My Vows), inspired by the ritual offerings left beside altars in Roman Catholic churches, often in gratitude for answered prayers.
Here, evoking these so-called ex-votos, dozens of small photographs of body parts, including breasts and genitals but also arms, legs, tongues and ears, hang on cords and are arranged into patterns.
"They led some people to say I was a pornographic artist," she said dismissively, "or that I was obsessed with sex."
It was also a charge that followed Messager when she began working with stuffed animals, mostly children's castoffs that she bought at flea markets or that were donated to her as they became a familiar feature of her art. Some critics suggested that she was perverted for dismembering these stuffed bears and giraffes.
She chose to work with stuffed animals rather than dolls, she explained, precisely because dolls have a sexual identity. "All those Barbies with their Ken," she said with a laugh. "Barbie must be sick of him. If only she could run off with someone else. In any event, children always mistreat their stuffed animals."
Today, her menagerie often comes alive, as with one installation from 2001-2 called "articulés/désarticulés," in which animals and limbs rise and fall while a dead cow - stuffed of course - is dragged around the room. "The idea is to confront movement and immobility," she said, "but people only see the movement."
With "The Ballad of the Hanged Ones," which opens the show, stuffed animals, limbs, a toy plane and other playroom objects circle overhead. And in "Pinocchio's Ballad in Beaubourg," large stuffed body parts rise and fall over a minuscule and mobile Pinocchio, to represent the puppet's dream of becoming human.
More recently, Messager has harnessed fabric for her moving artworks, notably in "Casino" for the 2005 Venice Biennale, in which a wind machine stirs a large red silk sheet so that it resembles a rocking sea. In "Gonflés/Degonflés" hand-painted silk cushions, in many cases in the form of body parts, inflate and deflate.
"When I start to repeat myself, I get bored," she said. "So I am always trying something new."
So in the end, she was asked, what message does "Les Messagers" convey?
"Two kinds of people look at my work," she replied. "Those who find it funny, droll, and those who find it very morbid, very sad."


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These childish things

 
For a long time, Annette Messager did things with dead sparrows. She scratched out the eyes on photographs of small children, and she took other photographs of men's crotches, and much worse besides. But she's over all that now. Growing up, she had dreams of becoming a ballerina or a nun, but became an artist instead.
The black carpet of her installation Inflated-Deflated, now at the Hayward Gallery in London, is a wheezing, heaving mass of inflatable body parts and fanciful creatures. A jellyfish-cum-pouffe keeps rising from the floor like a deranged soufflé, then collapsing, dejectedly. A penis erects itself, then goes all droopy and sad. Next to it, a blow-up louse gets puffed up, then squashed like a bug. Pfffft. Inflated-Deflated is pathetic, in the best sense. It runs on hot air, and all its elements are made from sewn and painted parachute fabric. It also comes as a bit of light relief after those disturbing photographs. It was tough being a woman artist in France in the 1970s, and Messager adopted extreme measures to save herself from invisibility. She parodied the woman artist, women's work and women's preoccupations. She had her dead sparrows, some wearing crocheted little bonnets and knitted capes, lain out in rows in vitrines, as though in retirement homes. Other sparrows - the disobedient ones, presumably - were banged-up in a separate vitrine. Messager attempted to reanimate yet more of these sorry little bundles of feathers and bone with wind-up clockwork motors. "I was winding them up to make them jump," she has said. "There was a kind of pathos about it." Here, there are some drawings of Messager, glimpsed in a sort of Sadean romp. Originally drawn in blue biro on a tiny, furtive scale, these "Horrifying Adventures of Annette Messager Trickster" have been photographed and blown up for all to see. Annette Messager Trickster is just one of the artist's personalities. There is also the Tinkerer Handywoman and the Practical Woman. Once, Messager wrote out her signature in dozens and dozens of styles, looking for her best one. She has arranged this graphol-ogist's nightmare beside innocent-looking, coloured pencil drawings of castles. My Collection of Castles, the title reads, proudly. There is nothing innocent anywhere in Messager's work, nor has there ever been. More stuff can be spied through the holes in the walls of a "secret room". Things you cannot look at properly become all the more intriguing. Here comes a big red wave. In 2005, Messager won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Casino, a rumbustious, inventive and gloriously theatrical interpretation of the Pinocchio story, all done with computer-assisted pneumatic servos, seas of billowing red silk, and a cast of undersea creatures and weird dangly bat-like forms. One element, a grinning skeleton with a scythe-like nose, now lurks behind the Hayward's back staircase. Part of Casino was restaged at the Liverpool Biennial last year, and yet another has come to the Hayward. I miss seeing the whole thing again, though the section here, which takes place in the crimson gloom of the belly of a whale, is genuinely magical and mysterious. The darker side of childhood is accommodated in "articulated-disarticulated", a 2001-2 tableau based on mad cow disease, which ravaged France as well as the UK. A cuddly big brown cow is endlessly dragged around the floor on its belly, while a rag-bag cast of witless giant soft toys hump, twitch, jolt and spasm in a circus of jarring movements. These abject marionettes bounce up and down on cords, with Messager their puppet-master. Something like a human being twirls disjointedly on a trapeze above our heads. Messager's work can be obvious as well as secretive and strange. Like a child, she can go on a bit, and at times this show gets fractious and overwrought. She shares her theatricality, and her preoccupation with the play and fantasies of childhood, with artists as different as Mike Kelley and Susan Hiller. The wonderfully dirty and sadistic animations of Nathalie Djurberg tap the same source. But at best Messager's work is as accessible as it is sinister; as monstrous as it is funny. Children will love all the soft toy abuse, the inflatable creatures and magic seas. Now, behave.