ANNETTE MESSAGER
French
Annette Messager escapes easy categorization as
both a photographer and a contemporary artist.
Her works, which first appeared in the early 1970s,
are as ambiguous as the titles she gives them—Col-
lectionneuse (The Collector), Artiste (The Artist),
Femme pratique(Practical Woman),Truqueuse(The
Special Effects Artist), Colporteuse (The Pedlar),
Paradeuse (The Exhibitionist), and Gardeus (The
Herder), just to name the most important ones. Her
works vary from simple illustrated books to large,
complex installations made with soft toy animals and
knitted objects, with body parts made of colorful
fabric, and with shells, plastic bags, mirrors, and
stuffed animals. Within this rich array of materials
and techniques, photography and as well as ‘‘found’’
photographs play a decisive role.
AnnetteMessagerwasbornin1943inthesmall
town of Berck in northern France. After winning a
photography competition sponsored by Kodak and
the prize of traveling through Asia, she began study-
ing art at the Ecole des Arts De ́coratifs in Paris—a
conscious decision against the option of the conser-
vative Acade ́mie des Beaux-Arts. She traveled in a
circle of like-minded young artists; among them were
Christian Boltanski (with whom she has shared a
long relationship), Jean Le Gac, and Paul-Armand
Gette. In the atmosphere of revolt in May of 1968,
she rejected ‘‘high art’’ and sought to connect art
with life as practiced at the time by the Fluxus group
and its French members Ben Vautier and Robert
Filliou, by the Italian Arte Povera group, and by
Joseph Beuys, the Belgian conceptual artist Marcel
Broodthaers, Gilbert & George, and many others.
Media considered unartistic strongly appealed to
her; her seemingly banal themes—informed by post-
structuralist philosophy that assigned virtually as
much importance to context as to object—loaded
such media with significant cultural meaning.
Messager viewed her turn to the everyday, to the
low in quality, and to the second class—including
photography, which in the 1960s was still not recog-
nized as an art form on the same level as painting or
sculpture—as analogous to her marginal position
as a woman in the world of art and in society-at-
large; she pursued subversion through affirmation.
In the 1970s, she created dozens of what have been
termed album collections, into which went hand-
crafts and palaver about beauty and universal
dreams of love and happiness. To examine the roll
of mass media in defining models, Messager used a
great many images of women, including profes-
sional models, from newspapers, magazines, and
especially from women’s magazines. She cut out
these photographs and glued them into inexpensive
paper booklets, manipulating them through place-
ment and drawing upon them to create an ostensive
revolt against female norms, including crossing out
the eyes of babies.
In her role as Frau Everywoman, Annette Messa-
ger incorporates the taboo, the cruel, and the
uncanny into her work. Based in content and aes-
thetic form on the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, the
seriesLes feuilletons(1978) is a large format work
made of cut-outs of color photographs with char-
coal sketches. Her sexual fantasies, especially under-
lying desires for women in glossy magazines, run
free inLes effroyables aventures d’Annette Messager
truqueuse(1975)—a work in which the photographs
are based on sketches. This work represents a sec-
ond variant of her artistic practice utilizing photo-
graphy, one that plays with the idea of the medium’s
truthful representation of reality. A third variation
is found in her drawings based on photographs.Le
bonheur illustre ́(1975/76), a series of 180 color pencil
drawings, was created from travel industry bro-
chures; like the German painter Gerhard Richter,
she used photos as ‘‘models’’; and like Sigmar Polke,
another leading German painter, she was fascinated
by popular culture.
With her photo albums bringing together an
inventory of everyday, domestic artifacts, Messager
widened her survey of visual cliche ́s and collective
fictions and connected photography with an increas-
ingly wide range of media. Inspired by European
and non-European folk art, popular forms including
advertising, Surrealism, and the contemporary trend
of mixing genres, Messager developed a hybrid form
symbolic of what she perceived as the patchwork
culture of the late twentieth century and appropriate
to the multiple modes of female existence. Central to
her photography, which was always black and
white, was the human body or parts of the body.MESSAGER, ANNETTE