Genius or joker?

For me, one of the advantages of coming back to art quite late in life is that I am blissfully ignorant of most contemporary artists’ work. You may wonder why that’s an advantage. I can look at modern artwork and rely on my own impressions rather than see work with the inherited view of the ‘establishment’.

For my Artist Date last week, I went to London’s Hayward Gallery to see an exhibit by Annette Messager, a French installation artist whose work was completely new to me.

My first impressions when encountering Messager’s work reminded me that old fairy story The Emperor’s New Clothes. Were we supposed to “ooh” and “ah” just because of who she is? This is a woman whose prize-winning installation art includes alternate columns of grubby soft toys and books. Now I know what to do with my clutter. I found myself wondering how hanging soft toys in patterns on the wall can be art.

And yet…

Her explorations of the gruesomeness of childhood are fascinating. Do you remember how as a small child you were fascinated by the difference between life and death? How you poked at that dead bird, wondering why it wasn’t moving? Or how you named your dolls and stuffed toys and were convinced they had their own intricate lives and personalities?

Perhaps it didn’t happen quite that way for you, but Messager explores those childhood boundaries in a way that was, in the end, totally compelling for me.

In one installation, she uses stuffed birds and animals, masked with knitted soft toy heads, mounted on high mirrored platforms, so the viewer is left confused, trying to get a glimpse beyond reflections of the ground and themselves. You can see it here and here.

I found her photographic work the most accessible. Huge (the two examples here were about six by four foot) black and white shots, covered with drawings like spidery graffiti, alternate with the repetitive hanging of tiny framed shots of close-up parts of the body, arranged in overall shapes.

In the latter, part of a series called Mes Vœux (My Vows) she makes an analogy with repetitive prayer. Seeing a series of images again and again draws you in, makes you look at both the individual images and the overall shape, switching from one to another.

The single most compelling image, to me, was the one below. Part of a larger installation called Articulés-Désarticulés (Articulated-Disarticulated) this weird, lifesize piece was (probably deliberately) reminiscent to me of Christian Pietà imagery.

Click on the images for a larger view

So to answer the question in my title, I think Messager is both. She is a deliberate joker, using black humour to make us look more closely at everyday items. And her genius lies in the same gift: she makes us look, she surprises us, she makes us think, she disorientates.