Annette Messager: Word for Word

by Messager, Annette

• ISBN13: 9781933045351
• ISBN10: 1933045353
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-12-16
• Publisher: Les Presses Du Reel

Summary

Texts and words are of crucial importance to Annette Messager's work--for her, "words are images." And so words--at once autonomous from, parallel to, and the sources of her visual creativity--are woven throughout her production. She has looked directly at our diverse relationships to language in forms ranging from the early scrapbooks of the 1970s to the large sculpted words of the late 1990s, and others including personal diaries, letters, calligraphy, alphabets and primers. She works with the repeated, drawn, framed and sculpted word; newsprint, collage and montage of texts and photographs; and handwritten texts. Plays on words and palindromes turn up in her exhibition titles and, more recently, in her children's books. All of these uses of language stem as much from Dada and Surrealism as from the aesthetics of the banal and the everyday, and they give rise to unclassifiable texts, which call somewhere between a literature of the news item or photo-essay and poetic maxims for personal use. Messager's frequent recourse to copying down and to repetition then serves as a kind of exorcism: in those cases, writing is something like sewing, with a soothing function. The first section of Word for Wordfocuses on writing in Annette Messager's artworks. The second includes numerous texts published in magazines or catalogues, as well as unpublished notes on her work and personal reflections on art and life. All of her interviews from 1974 to the present are also included.

Table of Contents

Foreword	8	(1)
Marie-Laure Bernadac
Writing: A User's Manual	9	(13)
Marie-Laure Bernadac
Annette Messager Artist
The Boarders	22	(10)
Annette Messager Collector Collection Albums, 1971--73
The Marriage of Miss Annette Messager	32	(6)
Children with Their Eyes Scratched Out/My Child's Drawings	38	(6)
Everything about My Child	44	(14)
My Needlework	58	(4)
The Approaches	62	(4)
The Men I Love	66	(6)
The Men I Don't Love	72	(6)
The Men I Love, The Men I Don't Love	78	(4)
My Cookbook	82	(6)
My Daily Expenses over the Course of a Month	88	(6)
My Handwritten Envelopes	94	(6)
Collection to Find My Best Signature	100	(4)
Means of Protection	104	(4)
Annette Messager over 9 Months	108	(2)
Terms Used for Women	110	(4)
Job Applications	114	(4)
My Evidence Snapshots	118	(2)
My Illustrated Life	120	(6)
My Knitting Manual	126	(6)
My Collection of Good Mushrooms and Deadly Mushrooms	132	(4)
Instruments and Material for Changing and Protecting My Face	136	(4)
Handbook of Everyday Magic during the Month of May 1973	140	(10)
Collection of Philosophical Exercises	150	(4)
Next Week	154	(4)
My Idol Claude Francois	158	(8)
The Books that Make Me Tremble	166	(2)
My Mailings	168	(6)
My Comics	174	(6)
Annette Messager Trickster
Annette Messager Tinkerer
Annette Messager Practical Woman
The Wonderful Adventure of the First 2 Years of Life	180	(4)
My Hand Games	184	(8)
My Practical Life	192	(24)
My Do-It-Yourself Projects	216	(8)
When I Do Work like Men Do	224	(10)
My Collection of Proverbs	234	(6)
Anatomical Sentences	240	(4)
Letter Forms and Texts
My Illuminations	244	(4)
Omens	248	(2)
Summer Tales	250	(4)
Words--Drawings Drawings of Words
List of Words	254	(2)
You/My Trophies	256	(10)
My Handiworks	266	(14)
My Little Effigies	280	(6)
Lines of the Hand	286	(2)
My Vows	288	(6)
History of Dresses	294	(8)
Mommy	302	(4)
Cartographies
The Garden of Tenderness	306	(4)
Witches' Circles	310	(2)
My Map of the Country of Tenderness	312	(1)
The Garden of Tenderness and Cruelty	313	(1)
Annette Messager's Road Map	314	(3)
Annette Messager's Digestive Romance	317	(1)
Digestive Dishtowel	318	(2)
Maps of France	320	(2)
Sewn Words
Dependence--Independence	322	(4)
Pleasure Displeasure	326	(2)
Protection	328	(1)
Rumor	329	(1)
Ciineeemaa	330	(2)
Art Rat	332	(2)
Vanitas	334	(1)
Strike Picket	335	(1)
Doubt	336	(2)
Computer Writings
Happy	338	(2)
Utopia	340	(2)
I am Forgetting too Much	342	(1)
Christian	343	(3)
Tick-Tock	346	(2)
Casino	348	(6)
Artist's Notes 1971--2005
Texts 1971--2005	354	(26)
Diverse Notes 2000-05	380	(4)
Interviews 1974--2005
Harald Szeemann, 1974	384	(3)
Aline Dallie, 1975	387	(2)
Keto von Waberer, 1981	389	(2)
Suzanne Page, 1984	391	(3)
Bernard Marcade, 1984	394	(3)
Bernard Marcade, 1989	397	(10)
Robert Storr, 1995	407	(9)
Jean-Louis Froment, 1996	416	(3)
Denis Angus, 1996	419	(3)
Annick Colonna-Cesari, 1998	422	(4)
Claude Closky, 2001	426	(2)
Jerome Clement, 2002	428	(7)
Marie-Laure Bernadac, 2002	435	(4)
Elisabeth Lebovici, 2004	439	(3)
Suzanne Page and Beatrice Parent, 2005	442	(5)
Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2005	447	(3)
Frederic Bonnet, 2005	450	(5)
Appendix
Exhibitions	455	(3)
Bibliography	458	(1)
Filmography	459	(1)
Acknowledgements	460