Annette Messager: The Messengers
Hayward Gallery, London
LIKE cubist paintings of the early part of the 20th century, which offered multiple perspectives on a busy and fragmented world, so the French artist Annette Messager presents many aspects of herself. She is, she says, “‘several people at the same time”, listing Trickster, the Practical Woman, the Liar and the Peddler as possibilities. So far, so intriguing – and a challenging theme for a retrospective.
At the centre of Messager’s work is the exploration of her identity as a woman, which involves challenging the traditional roles assigned to women. One series of photographs showing only the crotches of men parodies the male gaze as obsessed with women’s breasts, while asserting women’s right to objectify and speculate – or to behave like men.
She also takes the ordinary materials and skills of everyday, usually associated with women rather than men – be they needlework, knitting or sewing – and uses them to fashion objects that are far from the cosy, reassuring world of the soft toy, the cardigan or the teapot warmer.
With a strong sense of the dramatic, Messager creates assemblies and large-scale installations from cloth dolls that depict a society caught up in dull, mindless and often violent rituals. In Articulated-Disarticulated, Messager uses motorised contraptions to mimic human activity. Rag dolls are trailed round the floor on a never ending treadmill, some couples hump half-heartedly while others wriggle and shake in a gruesome dance of misery, all trapped on a never ending treadmill in the activities of daily life but without any sense of pleasure or enjoyment.
Spectacle and theatre are brought together in Casino, in which a vast billowing blood-red sheet, blown by a powerful wind, rises and falls to obscure and reveal objects lying beneath. Based on the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, the effect is womb-like and strangely intimate, though it reads more as a setting for contemporary dance rather than a metaphor for life and death.
The aimlessness of human activity is satirised in one installation made up of a series of body parts, including a vast penis, which become erect and floppy as they are inflated before collapsing limply. It combines humour and embarrassment in equal measure. More sinister – and more subtle -– is an assembly of black gloves from the fingers of which protrude colouring crayons.
At first glance the unusual juxtaposition resembles the way lace is made, colourful and harmless, but on closer inspection, becomes horribly sinister, the innocent crayons assuming the appearance of witch-like talons.
Like Louise Bourgeois, Messager makers use of “domestic” materials and objects as a means of commenting on the experience of women living in a male dominated culture. But whereas Bourgeois’s work is explicitly autobiographic, Messager is insistent that her work in no sense reflects her own personal experience – “my real life”, but is about the way she sees women are perceived in our society giving the work a more universal context.
Like the clown or the puppeteer, she observes and interprets, exposing the often-repressed desires of society. While there is a welcome element of humour, suggesting that not all is not gloom and doom, the potent mix of the angry and the comic can be as confusing as it is engaging.
Emmanuel Cooper
Annette Messager: The Messengers continues until May 25
