Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Sylvia Gutierrez reviews Annette Messager


French visual artist, Annette Messager, is mainly know for her installation oeuvre as she utilizes a number of different mediums such as dead animals, stuffed toys, puppets, prints, various textiles (generally veil), drawings and most importantly, photographs. Nevertheless, photography became the focus of her body of work in 1961 when she won a Kodak international photography competition. Since then, Messager molds photography into her body of work in very unique formats, as in most cases, she creates a cohesive duality between her photographs and her installations as seen with Mes Voeux (My Vows) in 1991. Messager suspended from strings hundreds of framed photographs of individual body parts, fragmenting the human body and having the viewer consider each piece on its own alongside the unified body of work; a theme which appears repeatedly throughout her work. The body parts in the photographs range from male to female, old to young, attractive to unsightly. When placing them in that isolated format, the viewer is made to question and consider why certain body parts were placed here or there. Society has accustomed us to make associations to certain body parts to have sexual or psychological connotations, yet Messager is here to break those associations through her collages.
In a like manner, Messager utilizes the aesthetic of collaging to explore issues relating to the body, identity, sexuality and femininity. Investigating in depth what it means to be a woman and the myths, stigmas and standards of beauty that surround that role. In another of Messager’s body of work called Mes Jalousies (My Jealousies) in (1972), she looked at plastic surgery as something that society has now found a necessity or requirement for women to be seen as beautiful. In Mes Jalousies, she presents a series of portraits of young, beautiful women in which she has then taken it upon herself to scribble in black ink to create wrinkles, crows’ feet, blemishes on their faces, causing them to appear cross-eyed, as well as blacking out individual teeth all for the purpose of prematurely aged them and contradicting that standard or beauty placed upon women.



Mes Voeux (My Vows)
1991
closeup: Mes Voeux (My Vows) 1991

Mes Jalousies (My Jealousies)
1972

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