It was particular pleasure to revisit many of Annette Messager’s early works in the retrospective, ‘Annette Messager: The Messengers’, at the Mori Art Museum. This touring exhibition opened at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in June 2007 and travelled to Finland and Korea before arriving in Tokyo in August 2008. Although the scale of the Pompidou exhibition had to be modified for the Mori Art Museum, this version of the retrospective offered a very well balanced survey of Messager’s work since the 1970s.
It is striking how many of Messager’s early works resonate with contemporary artistic concerns, including the current fixation on archives, voyeurism and the child. In this exhibition, several of her early works are presented in a closed room that can only be accessed by peering through holes cut into the walls. Piled on the floor in The Secret Room of the Collector is an archive of boxes, albums, framed pictures and papers that Messager developed during the early 1970s. The Marriage of Miss Annette Messager (1971) is the first amongst the fifty-six albums of magazines and newspaper cuttings that she made between 1970 and 1973. This one hundred and eight page book contains photographs of brides cut from newspaper wedding announcements, but in the captions Messager substitutes her own name for the women’s names to transform herself into every bride.
Messager describes herself as a trickster and a tinkerer. She plays deftly with words, objects and images—collecting, twisting and stitching them into all sorts of shapes. ‘My name’s Messager but I have no message’ is one of her better known expressions. Even in her text based works, the meaning remains open, fluid and multi-layered. My Collection of