Annette Messager Reviewed by Elli Park

From March to June 2008, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea has hosted Annette Messager, a female artist’s exhibition, which we visited in June. In general, Messager’s works were very expressive. She mainly showed her feminist views using human bodies and parts of bodies. Born in 1943 in France, she decided to become an artist because she felt offended that only men were role model artists in the past. From 1962 to 1966, she attended Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and created surreal sculptures. Then from 1964, she started to travel around Asia, where she took great photos in Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Cambodia, India, and Israel. Later on, she traveled to more countries, eventually visiting the United States, too. To show that women are important and can be role models too, she viewed all aspects of life through a feminist lens and portrayed them in her artworks. She also portrayed her childhood a lot in her works, such as Children with Their Eyes Scratched Out, which is a part of her album collections created from 1971 to 1974. The work shows photos of babies with scribbles on their eyes, which imply that Messager had a bad childhood and that as a child, she was blinded by her father, who was an amateur painter and her boyfriend, Christian Boltanski, that men are the leading artists of the world. An example that shows her feminist views is Voluntary Tortures created in 1972, also a part of Messager’s album collections. This work shows pictures of women going through various treatments, even painful ones, to become beautiful. It implies the standard of beautiful women in society and that every woman strives to become the standard. Through this work, she wanted to show the corrupted side of society, how women give up their own uniqueness and beauty to become the standard and become just like other women. Another installation artist similar to Annette Messager is Eleanor Antin, who was born in 1935 in New York. Like Messager, Antin also worked with human bodies and explored the feminist concerns in society. In her Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, she shows her naked body when she went on a diet for a month. It shows how women want to be thin, as the media portrays ideal women to be thin and tiny. This shows that the media and society are corrupted, as not all women can be stick-thin and every woman has a different body structure. Another example of Antin’s works, The Eight Temptations, shows Antin posing to resist the temptations of junk food during her diet. Again, this implies the corrupted society and media, as women do anything to become skinny.

Annette Messager’s show in general was very interesting and unique. It had works that had thought and meaning behind them; they were not just works to please the viewers’ eyes. It was also very different from other artists’ shows, as Messager showed her beliefs strongly and did not follow nor copy other typical artists. I want to give my praise and respect to Messager’s bravery of showing her beliefs and views explicitly because she could have received many criticisms from viewers, created controversial issues, and also could have failed as an artist. But she took her chances and showed her extreme views about women and issues surrounding women, and became one of France’s leading artists with a big influence on the viewers around the world. Another thing that impressed me was the unity of Messager’s works. As many would know, she uses many different media for her works, sometimes in just one work. She utilizes random materials including photographs, embroidery, knitted things, everyday household objects, and stuffed animals, and yet manages to use these unrelated materials to create works that somehow unify and flow. Though her works aren’t the most aesthetic and pleasing to the eye in the world, I do not think that is one of her set-backs and weakness because she implies thought and meaning behind her work, which equalizes the outside appearances of her work. One weakness of her works is size and space. It is understandable that since she is an installation artist, she has works that are enormously large, but because some of her most famous works are very large, it can have a different view and thus portray a different meaning than what Messager intends to portray depending on how the work is displayed. If the gallery in which Messager’s works are displayed in is very small and not very spacious, her works would not be as successful as they can be if they are displayed in a much bigger gallery. But I think National Museum of Contemporary Art did a great job in displaying Messager’s works, clearly portraying the meanings that Messager intended to imply. Overall, it was a great experience for me to see Messager’s works, as it was my first time actually seeing an installation artist’s works in real life. (Though some moving parts of her works scared me from time to time)