Annette Messager

I walked into the groundfloor exhibition at the Hayward and one of the first things i read in the introductory note was... "I like working on the grotesque, on buffoonery, on the flip side, the nonsense of our life (does it have any sense, for that matter?), everything that runs counter to heroism." And so, right there and then, i began to fall in love with Annette Messager. even before i saw the wall filled with framed pieces of paper each with her signature on, signed in a different way, like the myriad versions of herself and how she both is and wants to be seen (and becomes disassociated from). even before i saw the fairytale princess dresses laid out in open caskets, like the morbidly entrancing deaths of favourite incarnations. even before i saw the stuffed cockerels, ferrets, and birds standing on mirrors suspended from the ceiling with their heads replaced with the heads of stuffed cartoon toys - a light diversion for popes in papal palaces, apparently. it's true, i do have a penchant for fairytale Gothic, but this was more than i could have hoped for; enchanted Gothic fairytale porn with a fabulously passionate feminist agenda... as she says, "I like to tell stories. i like cliches. children's stories are monstrous. psychoanalytically, our entire society if encapsulated in fairytales. i've always been interested in them and they are often one of my points of departure". Amen to that, i say. she goes on to say "for me it's a 'natural' gesture to rip bodies apart, cut them up... i always perceive the body in fragments". and so you have a whole room filled with giant body parts made from parachute-like material - cocks and kidneys and tongues and syphilitic diseases, which have air pumped into them and which inflate and collapse - almost breathing in a sinister, hypnotic way. next door a half-human, half bird hangs from the rafters. its remote body parts are attached by string and manipulated by an invisible puppeteer and made to dance terrifyingly. upstairs old clothes are used to create half cow-half half-child like forms that are penned in an insane asylum, their movements controlled by a machine that sets them on permanent repeat in a sickening, unbearable, claustrophobic mental cage. they are nightmarish, theatrical, monstrous and frightening, but completely mesmeric and incredibly powerful and often funny. they physically and mentally take you over and stop your breath. they shock, appall, but at the same time amaze. a grande dame of the french art world Messager was the first woman to represent France at the Venice Biennale, and the first woman to be awarded the Lion d'or. the feminine and feminism of the pieces come through strongly... roles as mother, lover etc play a huge part in the retrospective - shifting with politics from the 1960s through to today, but it all seems relevant. Catholicism, pornography, fantasty, torture, humour, death, disease, love are all woven together with the rough stitches of Frankenstein's monster, but it's a gloriously Gothic monster that i loved.