Conversations | Premiere Artist Talk | Annette Messager Part2

No, but carry on! Now I can say it's different. Of course, I am older and I don’t have to find my identity, but I am a citizen, and it’s so awful what you see now in the world, and you have in England, Brexit etc. So, I ask myself a lot of questions about the place today of the artist. I don’t like political art, but I think always art is political.

But today, for example, of course you know the painting of Nicolas Poussin, The Massacre of the Innocents, and unfortunately it clearly could be made today, this painting. And they asked me to do… Monsieur Rosenberg from the Louvre, the Musée Picasso. Because Picasso did Guernica, it was very influenced by Poussin, by this painting. And also Bacon.

Because it's very strange, Bacon was young, he was living, this painting is in Chantilly, I’ve never been there, and Bacon was living there to learn French, maybe with a lover, and he saw this painting and he didn’t know… he was not sure to be an artist, and when he saw this painting, he did his first painting, the cry. Because this painting is the first cry and also the woman, it’s like a white mask, the mother. And you know, especially in England it’s the same, you know, it’s exactly… what the terrorists did some weeks ago. So I think it will be, it will change for the artist today, the place of the artist. I think we live in times that are very divided, and I’m wondering myself how the artist finds a space when so much of the world is in vicious opposition.

Yeah, but except for Picasso, nobody today would know of Guernica, if Picasso didn’t do this painting, it’s incredible. So when, in your recent show in London, there is work that makes reference to other feminist actions, so you see the Femen and, so are you making visible, is that an important issue for you? - I saw Suzanne Pagé.

She distracted you. Yes, she distracts me a lot. No, because the Femen, the body and the breast, for me, they show a new feminist. The women today, they are free, they are beautiful... And so they want to show her, very happy, they contest a lot, and it’s some kind of… they are insolent. Yes, that’s brilliant.

I was thinking of the word exuberant. They refuse to be confined. My daughter is just 18, and her generation seems to me to refuse easy positions: men, women, straight, gay. She goes ‘why are you talking about these old things?’ And that becomes political, they are exceeding the positions that we were allowed to have. So how do you feel, as an artist who has been making work for more than 40 years? How do you position yourself in relation to these new generations of women and men?

I do not position myself at all. No, I’m free, I want to do what I want. I am looking at a lot – I love newspapers, and paper and to look.

Also today my work is changing a lot with the internet because you have so much information. For example I did a piece, I was in an airport and I saw a lot of prohibitions, everywhere, back in Paris, I saw prohibitions of course in the museum, of course here you have… all is prohibited today. So, I was looking at the panel on the internet, and you have so much prohibition in all the world, so I did a piece – maybe you saw it in London, this piece, Les interdictions. And so I’m looking a lot, for example I did a piece, Crash Tests, because everything is fake in a crash test. The cars are destroyed, it’s not humans, it’s robots inside. So, I did a piece maybe two or three years ago like that.

So for me, the information in the street, in the newspapers, from the computer, for me at the beginning I did work with some kind of materials, very simple materials, that you have at home: paper, photography, fabrics, and also you have all the magazines and the newspapers coming at home, and now you have the internet and all this information, fake and - It’s the stuff of daily life, but coming now from all over the world, all sorts of sources. It’s awful for art, because you want to see the work of an artist, You have to put in the name and you see the painting, but it’s not the reality. But sometimes, especially at Tate, it’s so well done, so you can see all the show on your computer.

But it’s not the same, of course. I like to think that seeing it on the computer – this is what I hope – only encourages stepping into the building, because on the computer it doesn’t hit you in the stomach or the heart so much. And I think actually we are seeing a time where people are wanting, again, to gather, to come together to see things. Yes, for example the e-Book, it’s not doing so well now, they buy less and less. People prefer real books.

Yes, but you’re right that we might sit on the aeroplane reading our Kindle, but actually people are also returning to beautifully designed books with lovely covers as objects that are full of desire for them. So we’re living between the digital and the tactile, I think. So with that, I have a question that I always like to ask an artist that I haven’t been able to spend time with, and I think it’s a very good question for you because you take on different identities. On a normal morning, what does Annette Messager do? What do you do first in the morning?

Smoke a cigarette. Perfect. So cigarette, then what happens?

I am going to the café outside. Coffee or tea? Café Espresso and a newspaper Le Parisien. It’s not a good newspaper, but we have, you know, it’s a very little, it’s outside of Paris in the suburbs and it’s very, very funny because there are a lot of Arabic people there, and it’s Ramadan today, now, and there is Italian, African, it’s a little café with… …the world sitting there. Yes, yes. And we speak about the news and sometimes it’s difficult about politics in France with the election and… There’s some political debate over coffee?

Because the place where I am living is still communist, it’s very rare today. Unusual. Yes, yes.

So, after the coffee and discussion, do you go to the studio? Yes, yes. So, in the studio, how long, what do you do? That’s a secret.

I smoke another cigarette, and then I will not tell you. Because I don’t know, you know, I dance with my things, and I take something, and I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. I don’t want to tell – that’s different. Indeed.

So, we’ve had both, two things then that I think are very important for your work: is the secret, at the end of the little film you made for Tate you said it was a secret how old you were. Me, no? I don’t remember. It was a mistake.

But secrets and laughter, I would say. But if we don’t have humor, then life is awful. I, laughter is… Because we know where we are going, all of us. For me, when I was 18, Hélène Cixous’ book The Laugh of the Medusa was translated into English. It is still a terrible thing for me that my school didn’t teach me French, so I was never able to read it in French.

But still, the power of that book and the power of laughter as a revolutionary act was very, very influential for me. And so I wanted to ask you about mischief, and laughter in your work. Because to me they feel important things. Serious things. Yes, of course, because as you say, as I said life is a comedy and a tragedy and we are together in the same time; we are happy, we are not happy, and I don’t know, I’m happy to do my work. I can say I am happy to be an artist, and if I will be not an artist I would be an awful person, and I don’t know what I would have become.

Life is difficult for everybody and especially today, you know with all the… in the street, and we are afraid all the time. We are afraid to take the subway. We are afraid just to walk, and to look at the sun and at the flowers - could arrive something So it’s more and more an opposition between laughter and tears. This is our daily life. So it’s in my work, of course, I don’t know. And over the decades, do you feel there has been a fundamental shift, then?

Maybe in 2000, I began to work with mechanical objects and with the computer, and so it was important because maybe the older I am… I want to move, I want to walk, I want to dance, I want to… maybe that’s a consequence. And when I began to work with some movement, some little puppets in fabric. And to, it was for Documenta... I didn’t know anything about computers and motors and so on, and the first piece was with 40 motors, it was crazy to begin with 40 motors and computers. But at the same time it was a story about mad cow [disease], do you remember it?

Yes, I do. And so I did some cows, for example we said mad cows, you have to say ‘mad beef’, but you know. Why do we say mad cow instead of mad beef? I completely agree, very strange. I bought a little sculpture of Rodin’s, an awful sculpture, of The Thinker, to do something. And the word in French, la penseuse, doesn’t exist.

Le penseur in feminine. The male thinker, La penseuse doesn’t exist. No female thinkers, only male thinkers. That is a weight of language to be fighting against, as a woman artist. And, with Suzanne Pagé we did a show at Venice at the Biennale, Casino, about Pinocchio. It's a little boy, a little puppet, that I like a lot.

I was remembering that, because it was an extraordinary installation, and obviously won the Golden Lion. And then in this year’s Venice, there is another Pinocchio story by the artist Rachel Maclean, and interestingly her Pinocchio is picking up on things that you have just been talking about. About fake news and the lies that we tell, and so the figure of Pinocchio is serving you and then It serves the artist, because Pinocchio is an artist. He didn’t want to go to school, he didn’t want to work, he didn’t want to be in an office. He wants to be free, and to discover the world.

And for this it was some kind of journey, the life of Pinocchio. And at the Biennale, it was like giving birth he was eaten by a whale, and he met there his father and his father was very poor. You know, because his father was a craftsman and in fact, he was a sculptor, his father, so that resonated – Pinocchio just in wood. And his father says: ‘I am so well here, because the whale eats books, fish, I have all inside.’ I never had in my life, but after that, after two or three days Pinocchio says 'we cannot stay here, we have to...' and it was after that that they left and it’s like a birth.

Out of the belly of the whale. And for the father of Pinocchio, Geppetto, so the sculpture becomes human. So for artists, this is fantastic. And it’s love that makes him human.

So it’s back to desire. And he has no mother, he always tries to find his mother. So you don’t have to answer this question if it’s an area you are not interested in, but you have just talked about fathers and mothers and births and psychoanalysis. How important is psychoanalysis for your...? I don’t want to say, I don’t want to know that. It’s just, it’s there.

Yes, yes. That's fine. Because I think it’s easy, because a lot of people ask me, a psychoanalyst wrote a text on me, but she didn’t give me the text, she said: ‘no, no, you are not to read that.’ It is another point of view.

One of the other things that I didn’t want us to talk about, but we are sort of talking about nevertheless, is the issue of being a woman. So we were laughing when we were talking on the telephone, there’s been a lot of comment about the fact that I am the first ‘woman’ director of Tate, and you are always a ‘woman’ artist. Congratulations. Thank you, and congratulations to you. When can we stop talking about being a ‘woman’ something?

It’s 2017. Never, never. I believe.

I think we have to have a new campaign about it, making it the new normal. Maybe with your daughter. Yes.

By the time we get there. I feel like I have been waiting a very long time already. But fighting is good too. Important. Yes, and I feel that you and me, in my position, I am all the time saying: ‘I’m just a director, I’m Maria,’ and I’m also saying at the same time, it’s really important now that it’s a woman and I want both things.

But you have to work the double, I am sure. Yep, I think, but that’s why the trickster, the handywoman, well that's where all of those personas are so important. Yes, thank you.

And you refuse to be one identity. Yes. My name is Messager, so a lot of messages. Yes, and that can be interpreted in many ways. Yeah Yeah So I don’t want to ask you about the other women artists that you see as influential on you.

Tell me about - Eva Hesse was very important for me. She is a very, very great artist. Because in the same time her work is minimalist and also sentimental, and she combined this together and with the materials… and for me, she died very, very young, but her work was very, very important.

It’s still important. Yep And artists from other disciplines – writers, makers? Marguerite Duras, of course, Virginia Woolf.

And I also wondered, I always think about Surrealism in relation to your work. You are situated alongside but not part of, many other art movements, and how do you feel about that relationship? You know at the beginning in the 1970s I was framed with people like Robert Filliou, it was more Dadaist than Surrealism, and the Surrealism in France was a little bit too heavy, you know, and André Breton, you know, the father, the god, we wanted to destroy it.

But I love a book, it was very important the book, Nadja, he wrote, with photography and this photography is nothing, you know – the street in Paris, very simple, very normal photography. And it was an important book for me because all the text and photos together, to mix them together. Because, in fact I wanted to be a writer but I cannot write because you have to stay on the table and a chair and I have to move all of the time and so, maybe I just take some words.

I love words, I love rumor, incantations and also the visuals of the words. I love words. And to me, the words in your work are objects to wrestle with. Yeah, and also the titles are important. If I have no title for a piece, there’s something wrong. But sometimes I have the title before.

What can I do with this? It’s like you, I have an answer but I have no question. But that’s very useful, sometimes.

Yes, to fix it. To start where you wish to end is a good process. Yes So for me, that starts to unlock some of the secrets that happen in the studio.

Little secrets, yes. So, you are making work as actively in 2017 as you were in 1974. That’s a very long time, 45, more, years.

What has time taught you? Nothing. It’s always new: a new situation, a new day, new news. I said I am working, but it was the first command I have had in my life, about The Massacre of the Innocents, by Poussin.

Because, unfortunately it’s so from today, from actuality, and so I say yes, OK, I will try to do something. But four months ago I didn’t know I will try to do a piece from The Massacre of the Innocents, by Poussin. And for me, it’s strange, because I did some work with the actor and cinematographer, and things like that, but to begin with another artist like Poussin, I was so afraid, but it was urgent to do it. My good friend Hans Ulrich Obrist says ‘urgent’ is one of the most important words.

Maybe. So, which Annette is coming out of that urgency? In 2017, which version, which persona is at the forefront?

Annette Messager, the smoker. Because I smoke more and more when I see the news. But that is a quite difficult position, in England, in America now, it’s almost impossible to smoke anywhere. You can always find somewhere. Here in Switzerland, it’s much easier. And in France, obviously.

We must always create the space for the artists to be able to smoke. No, no, they have to go with the other persons, not to be separate. It’s not good to be separate.

Right Here, at the art fair, we are a little bit outside of the world, in another world. So, you were talking about this before we came on to the stage. How does the artist feel in the art fair? Very bad.

No, no, it’s not the place of the artist to see merchandise like this. Of course they are very interesting things, but it’s hard to see them as products for sale. But increasingly, the art fairs want to make sure that the artist is present, that’s why you’re here this morning. Ah, yes.

So does that feel awkward? Yes, it is awkward. But I think you have an audience which is here for you, perhaps more than for the fair.

Thank you very much. Thank you I think at this point, it’s our cue to turn to the audience because we have a lovely crowd of people who have been really keen to hear from you. So I would like us now to be able to take some questions from them.

Is that OK with you? So can I turn to you as an audience and we have about half an hour where we can take questions from you and we can decide whether we need translation or not but can you put up your hand if you’d like to ask a question, and wait for the microphone so that we can hear you properly and then we’ll take answers as they come. So who would like to go first? Over here and tell us who you are I’m from London, Hello. Annette, I’ve been following your work, I also have a very early work of yours, so I’m totally thrilled to be listening to what you have to say, thank you for coming. What I wanted to understand is you’ve mentioned Poussin, you’ve mentioned Picasso, you’ve mentioned Dadaism, you also mention that you don’t particularly like coming here, look at art as merchandise, but I wondered if you have particular artists now that you follow as a fellow artist?

And if you interact with these younger artists in your life today? We were speaking about the difficulty at the beginning to be, and always to be a woman artist, but for example in France the two artists important in the artworld are Tatiana Trouvé, Camille Henrot, it's women, so it’s changing a lot. And I, of course, am not going a lot to the galleries except my gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, but I see shows in museum etc. And I was a teacher for a long time and I worked with young artists they are artists and assistants so we spoke a lot together. So I can see five years ago these young people were not engaged in politics, they don’t care about that.

Today, it’s completely different. They vote, so it’s changing, the relation between art and life and the political. Today it is changing.

And Annette, could you say a little bit more about the role of the artist as teacher in your own life? I don’t know, but I know I try to transmit my enthusiasm. When I was little girl, I was a devout Catholic, and now I have no more religion, I am completely atheist but my religion is art. It’s stupid but it’s like that. I don’t understand, for example, when I see a painting of Paul Klee with three colours, I find that fantastic.

I don’t understand religion and I don’t understand what is art. Maybe it’s emotion, that’s all. So, I try to transmit that emotion. Well I don’t know what my role is as a teacher really, I don’t think I have any role, but maybe convey desire and enthusiasm to my pupils. You know, when I was a little girl I was brought up very Catholic and I believed in all that silly things they had, and stupid mysticism.

Well now as an adult I have become an atheist, I'm completely atheist now but it's just like art is maybe like in religion, it's to do with feelings and not with understanding. Religion, I never understood anything about religion and when I see art like a Paul Klee painting, I see these three colours, I just see something, I don’t understand it but I feel it and maybe that’s what art is all about, What is art all about? Maybe just feelings, and that’s what I’m trying to pass on to my students. Another question here at the front? Hello, I'm a Swiss artist living in France and a big fan of your work and your personality and you just said before something about terrorism, and that now the place of the artist will change with terrorism.

Can you tell us more about that, do you think it will change in content, in position, in what way it will it change now? Oh, I don’t think it will change, but it’s a question. For example Matisse, his daughter was resistant during the war and she was arrested. The day she was arrested, he painted a bouquet of flowers. So it’s maybe an answer: maybe to do art more, to be more happy, funny, happy to be alive, or the opposite.

You know, I don’t know today how it will change or not change. I’m sure it will be something different today, for everybody, in life, in daily life and for the artist too. The day that I left Manchester, where I have been for 11 years, there was the bomb at the Ariana Grande concert. A concert full of really young people and I have been struck that the whole city has done exactly as you are suggesting, that there has been a response which is about optimism.

So Ariana came back and staged a huge concert to refuse to accept the fear. And at the same time there has been grieving across the city and the laying of flowers and silence. And I’ve been humbled, I think, by the capacity for both. And I think that they are the times that we’re in. Yes, yes, but it’s beautiful to hear acts like that, because the most important thing is life, our life.

And it refuses one opposition, one thing opposed to the other. It says it is possible to be both. I am born near Calais, and very important when I was young girl, I saw the sculpture, Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais and I was shocked by this sculpture and I am always shocked by this sculpture and so they asked me to do a show there in Calais and as you know it was, and it's still complicated for the migrants to go to England and I was in two places, in two different museums in Calais and I didn’t know if I would do it or not, and I say I have to do it because for people, not for the migrants, but maybe for one migrant, but for people in this town it’s so awful, they have to see art and hear art and it was the most complicated show for me to do, more complicated than in London. One feels very much humbled when one sees this because I, as an artist, I am a privileged person and it was very hard to see a city in such distress as Calais On the contrary, that’s why I thought I had to do it. Yes, many of my colleagues in arts organizations in the UK also felt they had to go. So there was theater groups and visual artists and dancers who went to make work in the Jungle, in the camps there.