Our messenger.

Is there not still something held in reserve within the silence of female history; an energy, morphology, growth or blossoming still to come from the female realm? Such a flowering keeps the future open. The world remains uncertain in the fact of this strange advent.

- Luce Irigaray, Sexual Difference

The most clever and compelling aspects of Annette Messager's art practice can be encapsulated in the two following anecdotes. The first is a story of origins. On the day of Messager's baptism during World War II, most of her town, the small rural seaside community of Berck, France, was destroyed by bombs dropped by the English. As Messager recounts, "Had the townspeople not been in church attending my baptism, many of them would've been killed that day. I saved a lot of people!"(1) The second story is about her own non-religious salvation and transfiguration. Early in her career, Messager received a comment about her work that made a lasting impression. She was told her work was good "because it could have been done by a man."(2) The artist interpreted this remark to also mean that no one would have known that a woman made it. From that point on, Messager resolved to make work that looked like it was created by a woman, and at the same time to question the proper look, place and repercussions of so-called women's work. Messager's powerful body of work, informed as it is by willful and witty plays on hierarchy and femininity, also surrealistically incorporates her early sense of self as messenger and angel.

Before continuing to discuss Messager's work and her various methodologies, it must be noted that this retrospective exhibition of Messager's production is one of the most important cultural and artistic events to take place within the United States for quite some time. It was conceived and curated by Sheryl Conkelton, then Associate Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (now Senior Curator at Seattle's Henry Art Gallery) and Carol S. Eliel, Associate Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at LACMA. The exhibition's significance as an event resides in its institutional context as well as the artistic and cultural power of the work. The curators' efforts involved no small intervention into the institutional and political powers of the museum establishment, especially considering the gender and media limitations they imposed. Messager's art crosses boundaries between the "proper" interpretation of women artists, and her mixture of photography with painting, drawing and other media also challenges strict museum department divisions. To complicate matters, Messager eschews the label of photographer. Furthermore, she refuses hierarchical judgments between high and low art, preferring to liken her work to the hybrid acts of rummaging and mending. Consider, too, that the only other time the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Twentieth-Century Art Department initiated a retrospective of a woman artist was the exhibition of Helen Frankenthaler's work in 1990. Messager has been widely exhibited in Europe, but before this exhibition was largely unknown in this country. Conkelton and Eliel produced a majestic exhibition that represents the richness and depth of Messager's work from 19711995, as well as a much-needed catalog. Conkelton's essay, aptly titled "Annette Messager's Carnival of Dread and Desire," focuses on the conceptual and theoretical implications of the work, while Eliel's essay, "'Nourishment You Take,' Annette Messager, Influence, and the Subversion of Images," weaves a fascinating tale of the artist's strategic rummaging through cultural, historical and artistic sources.

Messager's early project, My Collection of Proverbs (1974), demonstrates the artist's strategic decontextualization of cultural heresay, in this case traditional French folk sayings whose misogyny and violence are usually naturalized and made kitsch through their placement on everyday objects such as ashtrays, wine pots or napkins. Some of these are: "A woman is like an egg; she is better when beaten"; "Women are wise except when they begin to think"; "A wife is a slave, but a mistress is a queen"; "If chaste, then not chased"; and "If woman were good, God would have had one." The brilliance of appropriating these supposed cliches is not only that the artist has isolated them from their usual contexts and has brought them into her work as her property, but that such analysis takes place through a woman's craft as well as her intellect. Messager has embroidered each saying with thread onto patches of cream-colored fabric. Through her act of domesticating the patriarchal hate of women in the sayings and their repetitions, Messager turns the cliches inside out and displays the violence they fabricate in the fabric of everyday life.

At the Los Angeles installation, My Collection of Proverbs was placed immediately after The Boarders at Rest (1971-72), in which dozens of taxidermied birds dressed in wool outfits are awkwardly displayed in a vitrine. Messager found each of these birds dead, decided to preserve them and to knit and crochet diminutive coverings for them that variously resemble capes, swaddling blankets and straightjackets. The installation insinuates questions that bear on the hierarchy that art-world judgments pronounce, questions that relate to the formation of collections, value, gender and context. For example, Is this the work of a caring mother, a pathological sadist, an ornithologist or an artist? The exhibition's curators were under pressure by the internal legislators at LACMA to resort to definite naming and to remind visitors that this is harmless work done by an artist. This is evidenced through a huge placard in the installation that warned people they might find the work offensive. The legal battle over animal rights notwithstanding, I was tempted to take this announcement and place it in the installation of Messager's My Collection of Proverbs, in harmony with the artist in her work to ironically denaturalize the offensive misogyny of the proverbs.

My Works (1987), or the project's more monumentalized meaning in French as Mes Ouvrages, brings together in wonderful and idiosyncratic ways the childlike and threatening use of objects from The Boarders at Rest and the threaded words in My Collection of Proverbs. Messager encircles small stuffed animals and photographs of isolated body parts with the repetition and stringing together of particularly resonant words, such as "promesse" (promise), "defense" (protection), "confiance" (trust), "hesitation," "tolerance" and "reconciliation." Removed from their everyday narrative context, placed on the wall in the manner of calligraphic poems and arranged in non-illustrative relation to the enigmatic objects, these words become incantations to opaque psychic spaces. In the installation at LACMA, this work was installed in a narrow hallway and was mirrored by an installation of sharp, menacing colored pencils on the opposite wall whose arrangement echoed the placement of words and objects in My Works. If a visitor was unlucky enough to lean against the wall or accidentally brush against it, s/he would receive sharp wounds. This arrangement only emphasized the tense, enigmatic traces of this psychic space made public.

If My Works obliquely suggests the terrain of maps and tattoos, My Trophies (1986-88), literally maps inscriptions onto photographs of isolated body parts. Whether blown up large or reproduced in diminutive size, these photographic body tableaux appear as talismans for indeterminate journeys. In fact, Messager was very much taken with an earlier story of travel and love, the seventeenth-century novel Clelie written by Madeleine de Scudery.(3) A marvelous and enigmatic map appeared in the second volume of this 10-volume work. Actually designed by the author, this "Map of Tenderness" appeared in the novel as the heroine's creation, given in jest to one of her suitors who desperately desired to travel the heroine's course "from new amity to tender." The heroine in the story as well as the author were both self-sufficient women of their day, graced in the ways of aristocracy for women yet living fairly liberated lives for their times. Clelie's "Map of Tenderness" had towns and villages inscribed over the shape of a woman's internal organs. The named regions include The Lake of Indifference, The River of Inclination, Sincerity, Sensitivity, Great Heart, Respect and Tenderness. As Clelie joked with her suitors, she doubted any of them would be able to follow her map's course to conquer her heart. Messager's body maps include both male and female parts. As trophies, they stand in as anti-monumental victories to yet unknown and unconquerable territories. In their isolation of photographed body parts, stilled sensuality, emblems of promise and markers of sorrow, Messager's My Trophies resonate with the power of Beat artist Wallace Berman's majestic Verifax collages from the 1960s.

The frenzied phantasmagoria of photographs in Messager's "My Vows" series (1988-91), also exhibits parallels with the Beat's sometimes misunderstood, utopian notions about sexuality. Both projects reverberate with concerns that reject the display of male and female bodies as debased pornography in favor of the sublime possibilities of wonder and curiosity. "My Vows" exhibit curiosity in the most fundamental meaning of the word "curious," designed as the installations are to excite attention and innocently confuse. The viewers are positioned, indeed, as curious lookers in front of these evocative and mute monuments to stilled action, waiting and potential action. A voluptuous breast beckons, an open mouth with tongue asserts, a hand awaits. The vows offered by Messager through these photographic hangings are voiced not to God or some other deity, but stand as promises of differentiated human relations and sexualities that disrupt the borders of gendered identities. In alignment with French feminist Luce Irigaray's call to heed a blossoming of new morphologies, Messager challenges the viewer to uncover the secret bodies, strangers and selves that are usually taken for granted. It is precisely between the surfaces of skin and bodies that burgeoning forms of reconciliation and new respect for differences can begin.

Messager's varied projects give new meaning to feminist art as a process of respecting art and domestic labor - neither of which, she maintains, can be separated from the hubris of everyday life. As differentiated from some aspects of American feminism that attempt to revalue women's art through a universalizing celebration of women in general, Messager's art works its eclectic magic through games of subterfuge and subtlety. Her wondrous objects produce critical reflections about culturally constructed notions of women as well as utopian projections on how to refigure gendered human relations. Messager's largely photographic work dis-figures human bodies in order to remember them. Her solemn and witty vows ("voeux") and works ("ouvrages") bear witness to the violence and promises of sexual difference, as well as the sacred beauty and monotony of the events in everyday life.

NOTES

1. Quoted in Kristine McKenna, "A Private World of Women: Annette Messager makes art about women's rituals, the secrets they develop in a world of male privilege. Just don't calf her a feminist." L.A. Times (11 June 1995).

2. Quoted in Carol S. Eliel, "'Nourishment You Take,' Annette Messager, Influence, and the Subversion of Images," in Annette Messager, exhibition catalog, (New York and Los Angeles: The Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1995), p. 54.

3. This work was first published in 1654-1661 in Paris by Augustin Courbe. For a discussion of the feminist implications of the Map of Tenderness today, see Andrea Liss and Karen Atkinson, Remapping Tales of Desire: writing across the abyss, (Santa Monica: Side Street Press, 1992).

ANDREA LISS is a Los Angeles-based contemporary art historian and cultural theorist. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at California State University, San Marcos.