Conversations | Premiere Artist Talk | Annette Messager Part1

So good morning everyone, it’s lovely to see so many of you up early and up for a talk at this point in the fair. I’ve only been director of Tate for two weeks so I’m very early in my tenure at this extraordinary institution and it’s a great honor for me to be speaking to Annette today. We have not met before organizing this event, so this morning was our first face-to-face meeting, but I have known Annette’s work as long as I have been looking at art.

So for me it is an extraordinary honor to be asked to do a conversation with you. But we were both saying that the beginning of any conversation, when it has to happen in front of a large crowd of people, can feel very awkward, so I wanted to start with the easiest possible question for Annette. But it’s also one that I wanted to ask myself, because I looked to your work, Annette, when I was a young woman, to find an artist role model. And you have been making work since the very early 1970s. So I wondered if you could begin by talking to us about what it felt like to be starting to make work and finding a place in the world in the early 1970s as a woman artist who has some very strong things to say?

Yes, for me, at the beginning of the seventies was not easy because art was very Minimal and Conceptual and I felt very different, opposite to this. I wanted to do photos, collage, embroidery, a lot of different things, and all my friends said to me: ‘No, no, Annette, you have to do always the same thing, always the same material.’ And I felt so different, and I wanted to show that we have, one person has, very different identities at the same time. So, I began to call myself ‘Annette Messager collector’, no, no, 'collector' for a woman is not so good, Anette Messager - not for this audience at Art Basel I don't have to say that... ‘Annette Messager artist’, ‘Annette Messager practical woman’, ‘trickster’, etc.

This piece, this one is a collection of proverbs. It’s embroidery, I tried to find a proverb about women, they were all ugly. But I didn’t show the proverbs, and I was very [as good as gold]. As nice as a still picture.

I wouldn’t move. Because, you know France is not America, and there are very strong traditions. It’s not, for example like Barbara Kruger when she [protests], but I wanted I wanted the work not to be so openly raw. and I wanted to use tradition and disrupt it. Because the first time this piece was exhibited, the people said ‘yes, it’s true, it’s true,’ but it’s very strange because there are maybe 200 embroideries, the number and the repetition and accumulation, it’s a part of my work for a lot of it. And the conditions in France in particular, when I look back at your work in the early 1970s, it felt quite hostile, but your first big show was in Germany?

Yes France is – was – a very ‘macho’ country, I say it 'was' but yeah my first show was in, it was very strange, in Munich in the Lenbachhaus at the beginning of the 1970s, and… it was more open in Germany. And in France, I just met her this morning, Suzanne Pagé supported me all the time. I did four personal shows at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris with her. And you saw her, you’re staying in a hotel with her at the moment. Yes. We had breakfast together.

That leads me to another question – from then to now, who have been your fellow travellers? Who are the artists and curators who have given you space and supported you? It’s difficult to speak about my influences because for me, for example, the films of Hitchcock were very important, with the close-ups And also literature, for example Marguerite Duras and Roland Barthes was very, very important for me. Especially the book Fragmentos de un discurso amoroso.

And many, many things. The first speech I did, an interview, was with Harald Szeemann just after Documenta, because he came just before his Documenta to see my work, and I was very very shy and I said to him I have to go and see my family outside of Paris because it was not time for me to show him my work. After that, he said no it would be too late for Documenta but it was impossible for me to be in the show like that, I was not prepared, with the artworld and things. And you have subsequently made a huge impact and have been prepared to put your work in and make very strong political and aesthetic statements, so how did your courage grow? If you want to do something, you do it. It was very simple.

Just tenacity. Yes, tenacity is a beautiful word, I think. The most beautiful word is desire.

If we don’t have desire, we die. And desire as a word tumbles down the wall in one of your recent exhibitions. So, is desire... I don't remember It’s a photograph I was looking at this morning. The word with a net? Yeah, yeah With a net: it’s something optimistic, desire, and the black net is pessimistic.

That tension, optimism-pessimism, laughter and horror, that for me, is your work. So talk to me about those oppositions fighting in your work. It’s not easy, Because I think life is like that. You are happy, you go into the street, you see something bad and you have... you know, it’s always a balance between pessimism and optimism for me. Life is a comedy-tragedy all the time. So, I am like that.

I was looking at the work in Tate’s collection that we have. The Pikes? Yes, The Pikes, and again for me, that was a very important work because it takes the woman’s broom and turns it into political protest. And I found that – I find that still – very powerful and inspirational.

So, talk to me about the relationship between the domestic and the political. You know, for my series – just before I did a series – My Vows, and this was a hanging with some ropes, a lot of fragments of the body, photography, it was no more men and women, it was mixed together. And I wanted to do something more aggressive and you know in France we have a lot of political demonstrations, and we had the French Revolution with the heads of people on pikes, not good, but… And so it’s like they are waiting, the pikes are waiting to go and protest. That was not your question, was it?