To my Very own Singular Desire: Talk with Annette Messager

Artist Talk with Annette Messager, Rachel Dedman and Marie Muracciole.

The various terrorist attacks carried out in 2015 have inspired numerous efforts to demonstrate a refusal to yield to strategies of fear. In this spirit, the newspaper Le Monde published a supplement on the 26th March 2016, entitled Résister / Exister / Riposter (Resist / Exist / Retaliate). Working within the tradition of newspaper cartoons, Annette Messager contributed to this publication by submitting a drawing of a member of Femen showing a bust of a woman, bare-breasted, carrying an inscription on her body: ‘JE SUIS MON PROPRE PROPHÈTE’ (I am my own prophet). The drawing was to be the first of a series that she continued to add to over the course of 2016. “It must be done very quickly. I dip the paper into water. The ink spreads. There is a huge element of chance as the ink trickles and drips. I take the paper out and I wait for it to dry before going back to it. I then decide if I keep the drawing or not.” The drawings represent an artistic practice that Annette Messager has regularly utilised alongside other materials, and one that she has praised repeatedly for its simplicity of execution. It seems that it was only after 2005 that she discovered it as an autonomous method of graphic expression. In the same way in which she developed her other types of works, she often combines these drawings with words. Femen was one instance through which Messager continued to explore her methods, combining body with text, giving a body to the text and thus giving the words a distinctly feminine identity. Annette Messager’s embroidery series Ma Collection de Proverbes (shown at Beirut Art Center as part of Unravelled exhibition)presents an earlier yet ongoing moment in her practice of challenging the ‘totalitarian genre’ of painting but also the repressive genre of embroidery, in order to show what cannot be seen or cannot be announced either through unintelligible vocabulary or ultimately exclusively misogynist rhetoric embedded in the everyday speech.

This talk aims to draw parallels between those two aspects of Messager’s work focused on breaking the idealized or fantasmatic determinism that objectifies the female body, and underlining the refusal of the female body to be enslaved to the established order of genres and the dichotomy or nature and culture.

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