Anna Tolstova about the exhibition "Fictions, Temptations, Manipulations" by Annette Messager

From the well-known German formula “3K - Kinder, Kueche, Kirche”, the church lost its relevance with the advent of Marx and Nietzsche, and the kitchen - with the advent of semi-finished products, electric stoves and other household amenities. The burden of a modern woman remains children, whom, as Kharms allegedly said, are cruel to persecute, but something must be done with them. Feminist Annette Messager has found control over children and those who grow up from them: she tells her viewers terrible, terrible fairy tales. Horror stories.

Bats, long-haired witches, toothy scissors, winged penises and other creatures of an oral-genital appearance, cut out from black and white photographs of various parts of the human body, flutter along the walls of her rooms - there is something vaguely pornographic in this coven. She has a passion for dismemberment and corpses, at least in the form of stuffed birds and animals. Bodies, male and female, cut into pieces: eyes, mouths, ears, palms, feet and other organs in photographs, hidden in glass boxes like those in which butterflies are kept, and hung individually or in whole bunches, but certainly connected into one organism with threads. She puts children's and girl's dresses in the same coffin boxes - it seems as if this collection was compiled by some Bluebeard. She also guts stuffed animals: the skins of pink bunnies and yellow bear cubs hang like hunting trophies. She sews and knits soft toys herself, but no one wants to play with these rag arms, legs and limbs hanging from the ceiling like carcasses in a slaughterhouse. Much from the children's world attracts her. The badges still have the same hairy pubes and bared teeth familiar from the “dismembered” photographs. Colored pencils sticking out in all directions like sharp arrows. Balloons - they turn into giant plastic balloons or silk bubbles that suddenly begin to inflate on their own. Her installations are caught in a web of woolen threads, in them something is always unexpectedly falling or moving, broken mirrors, nets, stuffed animals - everything is like in a nightmare. It seems as if we were at a crime scene, a sadomasochistic club, or where some exotic witchcraft ritual was being performed. Overall, Annette Messager is a bad girl. And she was like that for all 40 years of her exhibition life.

"3 guns with badges", 2007. Fabric, badges with black and white photographs, ropes

In 1966, she was kicked out of the Paris School of Applied Arts because she was a truant. She disappeared into museums and cinema, believing that this was more useful than boring lectures. Traveled a lot: India, Ceylon, Nepal, Cambodia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, USA. She must not have even remembered her professors when she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. The French pavilion with its installation Casino - an eerie and mesmerizing study in crimson tones, a total installation or, rather, a performance with shadows, masks and billowing streams of bloody tissue - was then recognized as the best.

In the early 1970s, she was among the most desperate feminists. She exhibited photographs of a woman with a beard: a woman’s face was drawn on the bottom of her own stomach, and the beard was guess what. She collected a collection of sayings: if a woman were kind by nature, God would have a wife, everything is from God except a woman, etc. She collected cute girlish faces from glossy magazines - she painted wrinkles on their fresh lips and cheeks, and on snow-white smiles - chips. She collected family photographs and blacked out the little ones’ eyes in them. This series caused a storm of indignation: it would have ridiculed male chauvinism and the standards of beauty imposed by this chauvinism, but it immediately encroached on the most sacred thing - motherhood. Sewing, knitting, children's toys and home comfort - 1968 gave birth to a whole generation of artists who rebelled against female slavery, and the rebellion was ruthless and merciless. However, Annette Messager had another personal motive - her husband, Christian Boltanski.

"Under the Wind", 2004. Black silk, objects

She was given a limited choice: to be the caring wife of a famous artist, to become his assistant, or to engage in her own creativity, in which everyone who was not too lazy would look for a reflection of the art of the great husband. So at first she tried to be so radically different from him that she was like all the feminists at once. The real thing, which revealed deep connections with surrealism, came a little later. Complexes and suppressed desires were released. “Being an artist means constantly healing your wounds and reopening them again and again,” she explained. Photography was interpreted as evidence, and an affinity was discovered between it and taxidermy: both turned out to be a way of preserving the memory of the living in dead shells. Annette Messager has discovered a theatrical gift of an almost medieval, square nature - her installations look like distant relatives of a street booth or a paradise. In the end, the bearded women with whom she performed during her feminist youth were shown in the circus. She always had a gift for mixing the high and the low, the learned and the wild: conceptualism and astrology, Freudianism and alchemy, the art of the mentally ill and baroque emblematics. As a saying from her collection went, women are taught by nature, and men by books.

Of course, she and Christian Boltanski have something in common: he also uses old clothes and photographs in his columbarium installations dedicated to the Holocaust. But the colors that the Impressionists painted with were the same, yet we can immediately distinguish Sisley from Renoir. There is hardly any need to prove that Annette Messager and Christian Boltanski are two completely different artists. By the way, he did not receive the Golden Lion.

Cultural Foundation "Ekaterina", from June 25 to August 15

Horror stories of feminism

Horror stories of feminism