Sugar and Spice

Annette Messager, self-described 'Messenger' wanders through life under a variety of guises. One moment a Practical Woman, the next a Collector, a Pedlar, a Trickster, Messager is a shifty, capricious subject, rootless as a nomad. Collection pour Trouver ma Meilleure Signature (1972) is an adolescent quest to fix her name, her identity, in graphic form. 2,000 pages later, and she's found no definitive autograph, though a favourite emerges: a puffed-up phallus, formed from the initials A.M., the perfect logo for her future masterpieces.

Paris in the early 70s, giddy still from the effects of youthful revolution. Annette Messager lives in a tiny apartment and divides her time neatly between bedroom and living room. Every so often, she forages the outside world - for images, for objects, for pictures and words - and returns with her spoils to the bedroom, the Collector's domain. The living room is reserved for the Artist. After two years, Messager has made 56 collections, diligently bound in albums, designed to be hand-held for solitary viewing. Each one exhaustively documents its subject. She indulges girlish preoccupations: Les hommes que j'aime; Les hommes que je n'aime pas - 'I don't like his thick eyebrows or his honest expression'. She marshalls her facts: Mes Informations sur les Voitures. She examines the 'feminine': Ma Collection de Proverbs, embroidered on hankies - 'If woman were good, God would have one'. She toys with darker desires: Mes Approches - men's crotches stalked down on telephoto lens; Mes Dessins Secrets - graphic fantasies of sodomy and violation.

The labour involved in Messager's endless inventories pastiches the rhythm of a domestic life: repetitive, unremitting and seemingly purposeless. Yet her Collections are sublimely purposeful. They are impelled by desire - the desire to own an object, an image, a thought, a word - the desire to 'possess what I am possessed by'1. She conquers her powerlessness, like a child, by fantasising her supremacy over what she has wrested from others. Desire - as all philosophers since Plato have told us - is lack, a void in the subject that is filled by the acquisition of an object. Messager's encyclopedic Collections affirm her right to desire, the very basis of subjectivity, at the same time recognising the insatiability of this desire. 'Collecting means protecting oneself, it is a way of fighting off death... but the larger it gets the more incomplete it becomes.'

At this time, Messager opens up her house to her Pensionnaires, her boarders, a motley collection of dead sparrows. She lavishes them with attention. She garbs them lovingly in hand-knitted garments and bootees, and lays them down to rest. She grafts clockwork mechanisms to their frail bodies so they can go for walks. And she punishes them when they are naughty by pinioning them to metal racks. The morbidity of her devotion to these dried-up birds evokes the suffocating possessiveness, the 'sweet sadism', of a child towards its chosen love-objects. In death she can effect absolute possession, can indulge both her sadistic and her sentimental needs. It is a perplexing pornography, this recording of an indecent obsession.

In 1976, Annette Messager becomes an Artist. She starts to draw beautiful pictures of beautiful things. Sunsets, beaches, flowers, cruise liners, fast cars, exotic people, exotic places; all delicately realised in technicolour crayon. These are the things we want, the stuff of tourist brochures and glossy advertising. In Bonheur Illustré, Messager finds beauty. It resides in the counterfeit emotion and the second-hand experience. It reminds her of her honeymoon in Venice where she had photographed the sunset, with her fake husband at her side. She had glanced at him with real affection, real pleasure, delighted to be happily married.

She turns her attentions to other desires. She wants to understand the attractions of the body. Photography, like taxidermy, captures that which was alive, freezes it as a symbol of pleasure, eroticizes it forever. Messager understands photography's historical investment in sick bodies, exotic bodies, erotic bodies. As a pedlar of clichés, she likes the notion of the femme-cliché, the hysteric, but also the 'snapped' or photographed woman. Salpêtrière, Charcot's 'living pathological museum' has particular resonance for her. It is peopled by women who are consumed with the guilt of their repressed desires, their bodies contorting into extreme, frozen poses, to be captured on film by Charcot, the auteur-voyeur2. Now Messager is the author. She enlists models, male and female and photographs every private detail of their bodies. 'During that half an hour they are mine... they become my objects, my things.' She reduces them to mute signs of her own desires, she dismembers their bodies into fragments, she possesses them - and yet she feels guilt in this act of possession. So she offers up the fruits of her sexual curiosity - little black and white photographs of big toes, knees, buttocks, breasts, penises, so many hirsute, pendulous and gaping body parts - in a dense, circular constellation and calls it Mes Voeux, 'My Wishes' but also 'My Vows' or 'My Prayers'. Hanging from household string (the Collector's favourite prize), layer upon layer, these carnal details recall votive objects offered up to the divine, as invocation or thanks. She understands the power of the fetish - that bodily fragment which becomes the object of a sexual, or a religious, fixation - as a repository of both pleasure and anxiety. She uses it to reawaken conflicting feelings: 'What I like doing is to make the viewer feel slightly ashamed of himself, to make him feel like a voyeur caught in the act, to give him the impression that he is uncovering some terrible secret whereas more often than not, what he sees is paltry images of himself'. In Mes Ouvrages the body is imagined in an even more disconnected state. Photographs of body parts are affixed sparingly to the wall and joined by skeins of handwritten words - 'tremble', 'promesse', 'audace', 'tentation', 'attente' - words which belong to the language of enraptured love. The body is the one thing we indubitably possess and yet we have little visual experience of it. In illness, and in love, we draw closer, but even here it is perceived in a fragmented way: the part that hurts, the vague close-up seen in the act of passion. Like the psychotic who experiences his body as a collection of separate - sometimes threatening - entities, Messager sees the partial body as a more truthful and vivid representation.

It's 1986, and Annette Messager Pedlar (Colporteuse) has been hard at work for four years. She's been hawking strange monsters for a while - her Chimères - but now she sees a new opportunity. Why, she wonders are there no 'love pictures' to rival romantic films and romantic fictions? She remembers an image from childhood, the Carte du Tendre, an allegorical map of love devised by the cultivated women of France's literary salons to refine the crudity of 17th century sexual mores3. These amorous cartographies chart the sweet destinations and the cruel contingencies of the romantic journey - past Boughs of Indiscretion, via Lakes of Indifference, to the Sea of Intimacy. Messager grafts this geography of love onto human flesh. In Mes Trophées 1986-88, feet, knees, tongues, eyelids, soles, and genitals are delicately inscribed with exquisite drawings of idyllic landscapes, fantastic bestiaries and fairytale figures. Each part of anatomy suggests, through its natural wrinkles and gradients, an imaginative adventure. She imagines the body as a romantic text, just as a palmist reads the vagaries of love from the skin of a hand. But the hysteric (whose body similarly speaks her desire) is never far away.4 In Les Lignes de la Main (1989), the sweet images of Mes Trophées conjoin with lengthy reams of repeated words, a 'scriptio continua', laboriously and painfully handwritten on the wall beneath each image. A weary litany of the words of love - Rencontre, Promesse, Attente - scrawled with Sadeian regularity until their value is lost. And we remember that 'trophies' narrate victory, but only through the representation of death, the image of the victim.

Messager makes Effigies from discarded, stuffed toys. Piled in corners like the relics of some long-forgotten affection, or pinioned to the wall and bearing placards of body parts in the manner of condemned men, these are not ciphers of childish innocence. They are human likenesses on which to fictively inflict pain, punishment-in-lieu for escaping possession.

Annette Messager is a double-edged dealer in death and desire. In her hands, sexuality is lyrical and diabolical by turns. The chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love bite. The gentle charm of La Femme et la Jeune Fille (1975) is only moments from the violent pornography of Les Effroyable Aventures d'Annette Messager Truqueuse (1975).5 Her work oscillates between sensuality and repulsion, innocence and experience, lightness and depth, drama and derision. She is a self-confessed Liar, a messenger of 'false premonitions and doubtful loves'. She plays with knowing what she wants and this play, ultimately, gives expression to the uncertainties which haunt us all.

1. Interview with Bernard Marcadé, in 'Annette Messager: Comédie Tragédie 1971 -1989' Pub. Musée de Grenoble 1989. All subsequent quotations from the same interview.

2. Messager later read Georges Didi-Huberman's 'Invention de l'hystérie, Charcot et l'iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière' (1982) in which he analyses how the doctor 'invented' hysteria by getting his patients to literally act for the camera.

3. The first and most famous 'Map of Tenderness' or 'Map of the Tender Regions' was published by Madeleine Scudéry in her 1654 novel Clelie. The précieuses - the erudite female literati - were lampooned by Molière in Les Précieuses Ridicules (1659).

4. And who, Messager points out, was also written on. Her skin became so sensitive that words or drawings could be inscribed on it. In the institution, nurses would sometimes write the doctor's name on the back of the patient.

5. 'The Horrible Adventures of Annette Messager, Trickster'

'Annette Messager: Telling Tales' is an exhibition initiated by Arnolfini in association with Cornerhouse. It can be seen at Cornerhouse 9 May - 30 August, Camden Arts Centre 17 July - 30 August and the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 27 October - 18 December 1992.