The National CollegeArt and Writing
The Word as Image and Object: An Exploration Into the Work of Annette Messager
Clarissa Beattie
For many artists, writing provides a crucial medium through which their voice can be heard and they can find expression. Artists accomplished in one particular medium have often found solace and inspiration in ventures into the worlds of other media, often going to the point where the media merge. Frequently, the texts that one finds in these works are intensely personal, taken from journals, letters, and diaries. In Annette Messager's case, the texts are from lists of collected words that have particular resonance for her. Messager's most complex work is that involving text and image, where photographs of noses, genitals, mouths, and objects such as soft toys and dead birds are combined with framed texts, which provide a verbal commentary on the images. Messager, a French multimedia artist, uses this combination of text and image as a medium through which she can express her voice and simultaneously incorporate a level of intimacy into the art. It is a means of selfclarification, an integration of the fragments of her experience through words and images. It appears that the texts she uses are as important as the images, if not a more significant element in her work.
The number of artists using image and text combinations over the last thirty years has become larger and more prevalent. Michael Auping, writing in Your Oldest Fears are the Worst Ones, states that there was a profound psychologising of art during the 1970s and 1980s, where there was an 'impassioned attempt by artists in Europe and America to reinvest art with a new humanism, using basic forms of symbolism, allegory, figuration and language' (Auping, 1992, p.11). For that reason the purpose of this discussion is to focus solely on the work of Annette Messager, an artist for whom both media are of equal importance. Messager both observes the laws of the photographic image and takes into account the peculiarities of the written word. The mixture of reality, memory, and fantasy - what Freud called psychical reality - is made up not only of images, but also of words. Very often, the physical qualities of written language are as important in understanding what it has to say as the linguistic content. Perhaps it is this binary quality that makes it an effective medium through which artists may express themselves. Language has an ability to evoke an image as likewise, images may be converted to verbal concepts. (Weiermair, Hapkemeyer eds., 1996, p. 34).
This analysis of Messager's work examines her use of text not as language, but as image and object. It discusses how the physical and aesthetic qualities of written language can decipher meaning. Can the verbal content of the texts be considered secondary to their visual content? Being an image, writing also participates in the developmental functions underscored by psychoanalytic theory. Lacan's theory on the 'mirror-stage', where 'images serve a crucial role in preparing the child for language acquisition' (Drucker, 1998, p. 61), is important for Messager, since she often uses her texts as image rather than to communicate any particular message. Simply, this means that a child gains a sense of its own wholeness as a person, a body, and a psychic unit by seeing its mirrored image. 'The imago of the mirror stage provides for a form of identification through self-representation as image' Drucker, 1998, p. 57). This has relevance to the written word if one considers that any hand-made mark, written or painted, which appears to be an image of the self, can guarantee identity. Writing is a bodily gesture, whether it takes the form of scribbles, symbols or standard text. Writing is not only a form of communication in verbal terms, but also a form of mark making and therefore a form of image. It 'manifests itself with the phenomenal presence of the imago and yet performs the signifying operations of the logos' (ibid.).
Taking this into account, it may also be said that Messager's texts, hand-written as they are - which is important if writing is to act in the way defined by Lacan - provide both an image of her own identity and allow the viewer to see themselves and relate the words to their own experience. This ensures that the interpretation of the image constantly changes.
The Word as Image in Les lignes de la main
Messager uses text as a manipulable entity, with no distinction between image and word. In the series Les lignes de la main, Messager uses repetition to take the text from the realm of the verbal into that of the visual and to rob the words of their meaning, reducing them to mere patterns. 'If you write the word "promise" or "protection" and you repeat it incessantly, it ends up as a kind of litany or mantra' (Romano, 1991, p. 102). One does not see a wall full of text; instead, one sees a total image. This image consists of photographs and drawing supported or embellished by a block of abstract pattern and colour, which resembles knitting or even wallpaper.
In this series, Messager has drawn lines on photographs of the palms of hands. These lines form illustrations of cobwebs, a mill over a roaring mountain brook and small snowmen, among other things. This forces the viewer to try to decipher the connection between these images and the words beneath them - bonheur (happiness), peine (grief), retour (return), and angoisse (anguish). The repeated texts in this piece are open-ended, and have no clear beginning or sense of direction, creating an impression of inevitability. There is no majuscule, and the text ends with no resolution. However, while some work that presents text in the same manner, tends to be quite frustrating, Messager's has a unique harmony, since the main objective is not to read but to look. Messager does not use any pronouns in her texts either, so there are no marks of identification of the author. This allows the viewers to experience the work through their own articulation, and to identify with the work.
Perhaps it is the obvious physical effort involved in writing the texts on the wall that touches the viewer's mental state. The sense of the labour involved tells us that this text must be significant. The reiteration of words may read as a desire continually to assert a sentiment and to reinforce it. However, it can also have the opposite effect, and serve to cancel and debase the sentiment, as though the artist is losing her belief in it and what it represents.
When one considers the images and objects combined with the texts, it seems that the latter is the main objective. This is illustrated in Mes petites effigies, where Messager displays plush toys across a wall, each with a black and white photograph around its neck, supported by a pedestal of text. Their appearance is that of victims of torture. Soft toys may seem congruent with sentiments like tenderness, but accessorised with photographs of body parts, the association with tenderness is subverted and it suggests something altogether darker.
The Word as Object in Dépendance/Indépendance
An important feature of Messager's work is the manner in which she turns words into objects, as in Dépendance/Indépendance. This large heart-shaped installation evokes the writing of Marquis de Sade and Genet, where obscene words are so fetishised that they become the objects to which they refer. Messager is greatly influenced by the work of Genet. She envies his palette of roses, shit, tinsel, and bluebirds bleeding dark blood, saying that she would love to have that 'visual, novelistic writing, at once beautiful and raw' (Jones, 1997, p.107). She finds his prose to be the perfect blurring of the visual and the verbal, which she herself has accomplished in Dépendance/ Indépendance. Words that were previously written on the walls are now soft sculptures hanging from the ceiling, letter by letter in a bid to spell them out and reinforce their effect. The letters do not touch the other objects hanging beside them, forcing the viewer to penetrate the work and bring the isolated elements in contact with one another. Messager explains, the words were 'sewn and hung [...] and their meanings registered only after one had attended to their surfaces, which were dappled with flowers and stars, butterflies and lamé' (Jones, 1997, p.107).
In Dépendance/Indépendance, the texts are placed in a shadowy and dense area in the rear of the space and are part of the 'rain of objects' (Jones, 1997, p. 107). All the words made and hung in the space spell out kinds of human feelings, such as 'contempt', 'prudence', 'envy', 'anger', and 'doubt'. These words relate to the more ugly and more vulnerable aspects of human behaviour. Their juxtaposition inside a giant heart with hanging limbs, body organs, and corpses of birds may be an effort to reinforce the words, intensify the viewer's discomfort, and make the viewers aware of their own condition. Are the viewers to recognise themselves - their own bodies and their own behaviour, or are they on a journey into the intimacies of the artist?
However, one must still consider the relevance of the words in relation to the manner and the material with which they are presented. How does the word 'jealousy' relate to its soft sculptural form? The transformation of words into soft sculptural objects ensures that the viewer will remember the sentiments. One can touch the words, and have contact with what is intangible. The dense forest of words and objects bombards the spectator and ensures that they see the texts as object before they recognise them as language. Presented in the same manner as the other hanging objects, there is a realisation that emotions, sentiments and human nature, which are often difficult to pinpoint, are as physical as Messager's hanging pink foetus. The words also have movement in this piece - they can swing back and forth and oscillate. Messager explains that 'all these acrobatics make me think of the body with its rhythms, heartbeat, circulation, contractions' (Froment, 1997, p. 71).
There tends to be a frustration in the language of abstract painting or even painting in general, when the world around us is so full of narrative. The use of text is not a deviation from the visual arts, as one may think. It is not that the artist is attempting to be a poet or a writer. Rather, work that contains texts pays just as much attention to properties such as colour, form, composition, and material as any traditional painting does. Undoubtedly, therefore, writing is a visual medium.
WRITING EMBODIES LANGUAGE IN A VARIETY OF DISTINCTIVE FORMS [...] THE CHISELLED LINE OF THE ROMAN MAJUSCULES, THEWORRIED HAND OF A REMADE WILL, THE BUREAUCRATIC REGULARITY OF A CUNEIFORM ACCOUNT, THE SOPHISTICATED INVENTIONS OF A RENAISSANCE TYPE DESIGNER, THE LEAST MARK OF A TENTATIVE WITNESS AND THE BOLD SWEEP OF AN AUTHORITATIVE PEN. (Drucker, 1998, p. 57)
There is no human urge more fundamental than that of mark making - just as no activity characterises human culture more distinctly than that of language. The combination of image and text is of central importance 'to overstep and to blur genre boundaries, mixtures of "high" and 'low"' (Weiermair; Hapkemeyer eds., 1996, preface).
Text and image are two completely different systems - they cannot be read together as there is always a difference in the way both are perceived. The viewer looks at the text and looks at the image, but never all at once. This is not to say that the two devices work against each other. Instead, they complement each other by calling attention to each other's limitations so that the viewer is never entirely locked into either the image or the text. When language and mark making are combined, they create many implications within the same work. These implications can only be interpreted fully when one engages with the reflexive action of both media, and considers how each influences the way the other is read.
Bibliography
AUPING, Michael, Your Oldest Fears are the Worst Ones, New York: Universe Publishing, 1992.
CONKELTON, Sheryl, 'Annette Messager's Carnival of Dread and Desire', Annette Messager, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995.
DRUCKER, Johanna, Figuring the Word (Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics), New York: Granary Books, 1998.
FROMENT, Jean - Louis, 'A conversation between Annette Messager and Jean- Louis Froment', in the catalogue Penetrations that accompanied the exhibition Dépendance/Indépendence, translated by Warren Niesluchowski, New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1997.
GALLOP, Jane, Reading Lacan, London: Cornell University Press, 1985.
JONES, Kirsten M., 'Annette Messager - Gagosian Gallery', Artforum International, vol. 35, May, 1997, p. 107.
ROMANO, Gianni, 'Talk Dirt - Interview with Annette Messager', Flash Art, vol. xxiv - no. 159, summer, 1991, p. 102.
WEIERMAIR, Peter (ed.), Photo text text photo - The Synthesis of Photography and Text in Contemporary Art, Frankfurt: MUSIEON, 1996.
