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.
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| Mes Voeux (My Vows) 1991 |
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| closeup: Mes Voeux (My Vows) 1991 |
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| Mes Jalousies (My Jealousies) 1972 |
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