The French-born artist Annette Messager works with a tremendously wide range of materials: manipulated photographs, embroidery, netting, random household objects, and stuffed animals (both the toy kind and the taxidermist kind). In many of her installations, the objects are suspended by...
[more]The French-born artist Annette Messager works with a tremendously wide range of materials: manipulated photographs, embroidery, netting, random household objects, and stuffed animals (both the toy kind and the taxidermist kind). In many of her installations, the objects are suspended by yarn from the ceiling, hanging alongside one another so that they almost rain down on the viewer.
Messager pillages movies, advertising, and other forms of mass media for subject matter, commingling disparate sentiments like irony and tenderness within a single piece. Her work shows a preoccupation with notions of femininity, especially those based on ideal visions of the home and the female body. Another set of themes focuses on death, the morbid, and the tortured. Messager defends the use of these disturbing experiences in art: "Vulnerability is so much greater in the world than in any art work that it is impossible today to create anything that is more obscene than reality."
Another of Messager's concerns involves the literary and the nature of writing; she wants to displace the privileged canons and the conventional ways of thinking these canons represent. In her "Attack of the Colored Pencils" ("L'Attaque des crayons de couleurs"), a carefully arranged display of pencils is placed on a wall with the pencil points facing the viewer in a threatening manner. If the viewer comes too close, a buzzing sensor goes off. As Messager explains, "In my work...the colored crayon becomes a weapon; it is pointed. I stab with it; it keeps the formal aspect of the pretty colored pencil but is lethal, deadly."
Sometimes Messager's work can have the effect of a ritual or exorcism. For her, creation is still an act of love, and love "is still one of the most essential things in life. It can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done ("Le jardin du tendre," 1988), mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love."
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