Annette Messager
Annette Messager, a French artist of international repute whose first solo Chicago exhibit now occupies several rooms at the Art Institute, makes self-contradictory works that transgress the established boundaries between object and photograph, reality and representation, high art and mass culture, art and life. Hers is an uncannily obsessive art–she knits garments for dead birds; she writes the same words again and again on the wall. It’s also frequently creepy. Photographs of body parts hanging from strings suggest a whole body, but each photo seems to have come from a different person; photos of body parts combined with toy animals make one wonder which is more “real.” Photographs, she has said, are like taxidermized animals: both of them represent arrested motion and past life. The collector in her wants to preserve each animal, each photo, in its precise place; but the artist brings them all to a new life, in installations the viewer must walk around or through. Conflicting impulses are at play throughout her work: for example, between the aggressive artist who wants to own and remake objects and the artist who accepts the imperfections of things as they are. Most of her objects simultaneously suggest the life they record as well as stasis, death.
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Each installation occupies half or all of one room, mounted in the center or hanging from the ceiling; those mounted on a wall typically round a corner and continue on the next wall. My Little Effigies (1988), 22 plush toys filling two walls of a darkened room, seems both a religious shrine from a religion not yet founded and a play on the issue of representation. Around the neck of each toy hangs a small framed photograph of some body part: a knee, a nipple, a foot, a nose. Below each toy a single French word is written on the wall in colored pencil–“promise,” “rumor,” “forget”–then repeated again and again in a narrowing triangle. Which is more real? The toy or the simulacrum of a human body? In Messager’s hopelessly fragmented vision of identity, humans are themselves fragments with no more presence than the kitsch objects they grew up hugging.
Born in 1943 in Berck in northern France, Messager, who now lives near Paris, is the product of a wide range of influences, described in the helpful catalog. Her architect father, an amateur painter, encouraged her to make art; he also took her to museums and churches. “I was awed by the images of the church,” Messager says, and as a child she was devout. She attended art school, took photographs, and experienced the May 1968 near-revolution as formative: “I wanted to work on the everyday, the ordinary, things from the street, from magazines. That was my ’68….In exhibitions, I saw strong and powerful painting, grandiose pictures, and I said to myself that perhaps there was something else. At the same time, I realized that the history of art was linked to a male history.” Her artistic influences include the surrealists and the Fluxus artists, Jean Dubuffet and the outsider art he collected, Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Gilbert and George, Gerhard Richter. She not only draws inspiration from mass culture but opposes the familiar distinction between high and low art: “I like being able to refer to Edward Lear and James Ensor without establishing a hierarchy, putting on the same plane William Blake and Walt Disney, comedy and tragedy, the sublime and the tacky.”
The most labyrinthine of Messager’s installations is Parade (1995). Strands of black yarn stretch from points on three walls across the open space between them, forming a loose net. Messager has attached various objects to the yarn: three ghostlike heads made out of stockings, a fabric doughnut with colored pencils sticking out of it, a taxidermized bird head atop a humanoid stuffed-toy body. Parade seems an unsolvable puzzle, with each object connected to every other: the piece is alive with metaphoric possibilities. Yet it’s also mostly empty: there’s more open space than yarn or objects. The strands of yarn and the nodes every few feet make explicit another dichotomy animating Messager’s art: the contrast between open space and fetishistic objects, between things and emptiness, presence and absence. The viewer alternates between the commanding nothingness of the empty spaces and entrapment by these enigmatic objects so powerful they almost seem to require worship–a dichotomy that finally articulates the difference between being and nonbeing, life and death.
