Annette Messager: Motion/ Emotion

Overview

Over the past year, the MCA has hosted a number of powerhouse women. We've had Yoko Ono, Tabaimo and now Annette Messager. Spanning four decades, this major retrospective is a text-heavy universe bouncing between playful and sinister. Messager is a difficult artist to categorise and deliberately so. She pushes against categorisation, skating between the peripheral and the mainstream art world.

Motion/Emotion is a conglomeration of different things. There are threads of French conceptualism and a touch of surrealism. There are homages paid to both Outsider Art and kinetic sculpture. But mostly, there's a preoccupation with the body — from the protective layering of clothing to internal organs. Messager also unravels gender codes, breaking down binaries and turning man and woman into a jumble of ubiquitous body parts.

The combination of childlike innocence and morbidity can be seen in works such as The Gloves-Grimace, consisting of individual gloves hanging from the gallery walls. The fingertips are pierced by brightly coloured pencils. Plucked from the primary school pencil case, these sharp tools turn the gloves into claws. Perhaps punning on the idea of little monsters, this is an example of how Messager’s human fragments can become animalistic.

The large-scale installations are where the kinetic aspects of her practice are in full swing. The show-stealer is perhaps Casino, which won Messager the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. This Pinocchio-inspired installation features dangling marionettes, a little city of lights, and waves of sumptuous red silk that gradually ripple and build to a billowing climax. It’s like being the wooden puppet inside the whale’s mouth. But it also feels like a cavernous womb, communicating notions of rebirth and becoming human.

Another wonderful work resembles a gothic toy town or something Tim Burton might dream up. It’s full of conical shapes and motorised movement. A projection of Giacometti’s man paces around the room and fabric globes gently inhale and exhale. In fact, many of Messager’s kinetic works appear to be guided by the pattern of human breath, making them feel like sleeping creatures. The lack of colour here is also quite significant. More recently, Messager’s practice has undergone a kind of blackening, as if signalling a depressing or dangerous state of affairs.

There’s a lot of pleasure to be had here. Both enchanting and demonic, Messager’s practice is broadly appealing. She reclaims devalued arts such as embroidery and ‘women’s work’ as well as Outsider Art, which she admires for its timelessness and simplicity of media. Parts of her practice resonate with the likes of Cindy Sherman and Francis Picabia. However, Messager casts a wide net in terms of theme and media; she is always looking for new boundaries to test and new tools to work with.