As you enter Annette Messager’s touring retrospective ‘The Messengers’ (in French: ‘Les Messagers’), the first thing to meet – or rather, rush up to and introduce itself, with a firm yet clammy grip, to – your eye is a cartoon bat pasted onto the opposite wall of the ante-room. Its eyes are two breasts; its black, paint-bespattered wings spread six feet across in naïve, drastic triangles. Next to it, some brethren: avian gremlins who confer on a miserable black branch. The opposite corner is crammed with photographs of biro drawings of women, apparently reproducing scenes from pornography.
Hideous configurations of clothes, toys and rubbish adorn the walls and floors of the Hayward’s lower level, which contains half the floor-space of the whole exhibition. Early on, you are invited to peer through a series of horizontal slots into a sealed white room containing an artful arrangement of boxes and scrapbooks, which lie open as though prepared for a museum. These are elements of Annette Messager’s artistic life, advertised as bits of personal documentary introduced into the art show, half-hidden in the enclosed space. In short, a bald cliché. Messager, apparently conscious of this, counterbalances it with some rather more exciting work on the walls of the sealed space: Voluntary Tortures, a wall-full of black-and-white photos of women undergoing beauty treatments. Side by side, they look like travesties. It’s a funny, if rather sour, joke.
Around the corner, the playful Approaches documents the approach of three mens’ crotches at the eye-level of a sitting woman, through a short series of black-and-white photos. Hidden in an alcove, the Pensionnaires (‘Boarders’) series sees Messager knitting utterly inappropriate garments for, in La Repos… (‘The Rest…’) , 75 sparrows (or facsimile sparrows made out of feathers and wire). Each bit of knitwork unfailingly binds its wearer’s wings. Next to it, La Punition… (‘The Puinishment…’) sees nine birds bound pronely onto metal stands with plastic wire.
These pieces give an impression of adolescent angst extruded rather awkwardly into a ‘proper’ subject. Laying out the birds in plaintive ranks may pay them a certain ceremonial respect, but one senses a sarcastic smile as the Pensionnaires are installed. The ghoulish grin that Messager invites is depthless and undesirable, because it seems to mock nurture without seeking to understand.
On the next wall, the grubby skins and limbs of soft toy carcasses hang like cuts of meat in a butcher’s shop. On the next wall, large close-up pictures of body parts are illustrated with oriental drawings, what look like figures out of Blake, and roving, henna-like patterns. A few heads on sticks and heaps of mouldy toys later, what may be the most nightmarish scene in the whole thing: a roomful of inflatable body parts made from stitched silk, each one sporadically inflated by an automatic pump. They threaten to come loose, in order to overwhelm and assimilate you. Sour grey light spills on them out of a fixture. Behind you there is what can only be described as an altar of rubbish bags. The experience is exhilaratingly unpleasant.
Upstairs, Messager has a broader canvas to work with, and the effects at first are proportionally more powerful. Dividing the same amount of space into just three sections, she creates a monstrous kind of museum. The infernal Casino is a fifteen-minute show in which a silken crimson cloth,which seems to flow from a bloody portal at the back of the room, ruffles like seawater over a series of will’o-the-wisp lights. The silk is a blubbery entity that seems stupid, vulnerable, and indifferent.
Next door, stuffed animals hang on platforms above head-height. The bottom of each platform is a mirror. Each creature has had its head replaced with that of a soft toy. Some will enjoy this piece’s overtones of the traditional mutilation of dolls by children who want to badge – or even precipitate – their maturity. For those (the majority, I fear) who won’t, it is hard to sympathise with Messager, who by now seems bent on appealing to her audience’s nastiest proclivities.
In the last room, machines push about fabric mannequins and stuffed limbs from cables strung in the rafters. An inert, semi-animal shape is dragged around the floor. A figure hangs at the end of an indifferent rope. Gawp you must.
Annette Messager: The Messengers is at the Hayward Gallery until 25 May
