Savage mercies - mixed media art of Annette Messager

Now 50 years elderly Annette Messager is one of a true few French woman artists to have shown extensively within and beyond her nation's borders above the last two decades. Her disquieting, idiosyncrattic and unabashedly female sensibility has continued to stand without in a Parisian scene more inclined toward consensual self-restraint. Among her first works were the 56 "Album Collections" (1972-73) each a compilation of photographs, drawings, handwritten true copys or embroidered sentences. The notebooks are identified by dint of short descriptive titles such as Me depense quotidiennes pendant un mois (My Daily expenditures during a Month), Mes moyen de protection (My Means of Protection) and Le enfants aux yeus rayes (The Children with Crossed-Out Eyes) In their relentles enemuration of ultimate parts selected from what may or may not be Messager's actual life, they are early evidence of her amalgamate of disingenuousness, ironic domesticity and violence.

Black-and-white photographs of parts of the material substance have remained an almost constant composing of Messager's work. Torn up colored and spliced, they gave birth to the spooky "Chimeres" of 1982-84; greatly enlarged, they became the clod of fantastic landscapes and cabalistic signs in "Me trophees" (1986-88) In "Me petites effigies" (1988) photographs, printed down to the scale of ex-votos and individually framed, are juxtaposed with small toy animals, each attached to the wall above an inverted triangle compos of scribbled verbal fragments; similar pictures are hung--sometimes with fragments of handwritten texts--in impressive clusters to form "Me voeux" (1988) owned by an omnivorous appetite for images, Messager has discloseed a sure eye for accumulation and repetition.

Last September, Messager's work, along with that of George Kuchar and Cindy Sherman, was shown in the reconfigured contemporary galleries of the midst Pompidou, and she was single of five women (out of 51 artists) included in the approximately harmonizing Biennale de Lyons, a display which is on the way to becoming the greatest in quantity important contemporary art exhibition in France. In a somewhat surprising departure from the 1991 Biennale (see A.i.4, Dec '91) the curators Thierry Raspail and Marc Dachy prosperously mixed equal parts historical and contemporary works beneath the title "Et tous, ils changent le monde" (And They All Change the World). Messager installed her three pieces in small noncontiguous fields all so darkened that they have the appearanceed removed from the flow of the exhibition. Her sweeps were of a scale single expects in private homes on the other hand not in big international productions like the Biennale, which takes place in a magnificent 19th-century slaughterhouse.

The smallest compass housed Le repos des pensionnaires, 1972 The "boarders" of the title, 65 small dead birds, are kindly laid out in five ranks on a folded white sheet placed in a large tabletop vitrine. They are swaddled in various pastel-colored garments knitted by means of the artist and reminiscent of homemade newborn finery one time dear to petit bourgeois grandmothers. individual feels a disturbing mix of tendernes and sadism at work here, and it's altogether natural to bewilderment who Idlled the birds and commissioned the taxidermist to give them their pathetic permanence. The quasi-scientific display of the little creatures step quicklys counter to the crudely knit coverings hopelessly fashioned to detain them warm. Are these corpses the evidence of light-hearted slaughter, or did Messager attempt to retouch their deaths with the doubtful magic effected by a labor of love? Ambivalence--whether, as here, between tendernes and violence or, more newly between the familiar and the menacing--has remained central to Messager's practice.

The sum of two units other pieces she showed at Lyon and four of the five pieces she showed at Beaubourg incorporate animals that have been raw materialed Hers are familiar creatures, singles often met in farmyards, forests and folk tales, Messager looks to treat taxidermy and photography as interchangeable in their capacity to be congealed living things for eternity and thus to give tangible form to the possessive grip of desire. Anonymes (1993) created specifically for the Biennale, consists of 21 raw materialed birds and two squirrels, greatest in quantity of them hovering slightly above our heads, each animal impaled atop its possess skinny steel rod anchored in a rugged cone of unfired clay. Messager tore the heads not on a like number of materialed toys, often gouging out their organ of visions and noses, and then plucked the fabric skins over the heads of her high hilled specimens. The hybrid creatures--a vaunt with Mickey Mouse's head, a squirrel half-become a rabbit--seem disconcertingly upon the look-out, listening to our chatter, caught between the personae of menacing spies and anxious victims. Anonymes marks individual of the first times Messager has worked away from the wall.

At Beaubourg, she installed three medium-sized pieces in the middle of the room; in each of them, various substanceed animals are sheltered within the translucent circular canopy of a mosquito gin hung by its center and trailing without on the floor. In individual a hen and a dip both white and both sporting black head covers with eye holes, huddle against each other. Here the differentiation of species, instead of being a natural amazement seems a metaphor for a wrenching and unbridgeable estrangement, whether between the sum of two units protagonists, who may have sole their masks in common, or between us and this arrested animal world, which we squander and appear to dominate.