Around the 1960s, French artist Annette Messager began to move away from the idea of "great art." Using materials readily available around the house, her works acquired an air of familiarity and allowed her to use these often effeminated — and thus undervalued — materials to make social critiques.
A substantial overview of Messager's work since the 1970s, "The Messengers," is in Roppongi right now, showing at the Mori Art Museum till Nov. 3. In the works on show, yarn and soft-toys, or newspaper clippings, illustrations and black-and-white snapshot photography, are collaged or scrapbooked together into sculptural installations that appear as if they were part of a homemade museum or examples of do-it-yourself taxidermy. Like surrealist films or nonsense poems, the assemblages seldom make immediate sense, yet wind their way into memory and emotions.
In "Head — Glove," for example, Messager has inserted colored pencils into half-finger dark woolen gloves, layering hundreds of them on the wall in the shape of an ominous face. Soft and spiky, the gloves and pencils mix up an innocuous childishness with a sense of danger: The mittens have become sharpened claws; the fuzzy face is a toothless old man or a death's head. Any reconciliation of this contrast of materials used and representations made relies on the personal experience of each viewer, a consistent feature of Messager's work, giving it uncanny emotional impact.