Start

 

Started my project the other day.

Found an old bedsheet to use for fabric.

The transfer of the text was succesful so I was able to start stitiching it yesterday. Hopefully it will be succesful!

Annette Messager

A friend of mine shared with me the French artist Annette Messager. I am particularly interested in her sewn works as it relates to my own. Her portfolio is extensive ranging from sewing and knitting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. I have literally just learned about her work so my knowledge of her is very small. Her is an article from the telegraph magazine that I found quit useful:

Is Britain ready for Annette Messager? As a nation, we don't readily embrace French artists and thinkers, whom we like to stereotype as pretentious poseurs.  

So what chance does Messager, the 65-year-old contemporary artist, who is about to enjoy her first major retrospective in this country at the Hayward Gallery in London, have of winning the affection of Britain's art-going public?

She is no stranger to the enigmatic statement, uttered with typically Gallic sangfroid. "I am the peddler of chimeras," she told an interviewer back in 1989, "the peddler of simian dreams, Arachnean delirium."

Perhaps such wilful obscurity explains why she has exhibited so infrequently in this country (her solo show Telling Tales toured London and Bristol in 1992, but that's pretty much it), and why next to nothing has been written about her in the mainstream British press.

And yet Messager is probably the most important European contemporary artist you've never heard of.

She is taken seriously not only across the Channel, but around the world. In 1995, New York's Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of her work.

Ten years later, she became the first woman to represent France at the Venice Biennale ("It was an honour for art to have a woman at the French pavilion," she says), and won a Golden Lion for her sumptuous three-room installation based loosely on the story of Pinocchio (puppets and automata feature prominently in her work).

The exhibition coming to the Hayward has already been seen in Finland, Korea and Japan, as well as at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

When we meet in a café around the corner from the Hayward on London's South Bank, Messager comes across as modest, almost shy.

In tentative English spoken with a heavy French accent, she explains how her work has changed – "It is less about my identity, and more about the identity of the world" – before breaking off with a self-conscious shrug: "Mais… that's a little bit pretentious."

Born in 1943 in the small seaside town of Berck-sur-Mer in northern France, Messager grew up wanting to become a ballerina or a nun.

"I was a little bit mystical when I was younger," she says. "But my father, who was an architect, gave me a paintbrush and soon I was always doing painting."

In 1962, she enrolled at art school in Paris, but she spent most of her time at the movies, which have been a big influence on her work. "I am a fan of Hitchcock," she says. "I particularly like his use of close-ups."

After travelling in the mid-Sixties (she won a round-the-world airline ticket in a photography competition), she was swept up in the student riots that raged across Paris in 1968. "Everybody was saying that we should destroy the museums," she recalls, a mischievous glint flashing across her hazel eyes.

"There was a sense of new possibilities, of something new, for everybody, but especially for women. Previously, it had been very difficult to be a woman artist in France. Painting was a male occupation. To begin with, they ignored me. In a way, that wasn't so bad, because I could continue with my work and there was no pressure on me. Soon it was changing."

This awareness of the roles that French society prescribed for women permeated both the content and the form of her early work. In her ironic sampler My Collection of Proverbs (1974), for instance, Messager embroidered hundreds of misogynistic proverbs from all over the world in red, blue and green thread on white cloth.

Around this time, she made a lot of work that involved sewing and knitting – techniques that were inextricably associated with womanhood, and which had not previously been part of the province of high art.

"An artist must be brave," she tells me. "It's not worth working otherwise. You always have to break the rules a little bit.

"When I started out, I wanted to do many different things – drawing, photography, embroidery. And at that moment, the big thing was conceptual art, minimal art, which was the opposite of this. It was not me."

Another piece from the early Seventies, Voluntary Tortures, which will be shown at the Hayward, presents more than 50 clippings from newspapers and magazines in which women are pictured undergoing all sorts of grisly procedures to beautify themselves: smothering their bodies with depilatory lotions, applying suction pumps to their breasts, and squeezing their faces into menacing mechanical devices that look like medieval torture implements.

So is Messager a feminist? "I don't know what that word means," she says. "I am a woman. I am not against this kind of torture, I just show it."

In the Eighties, Messager entered a new phase as an artist. Whereas her earlier work had been intimate ("At the beginning," she recalls, "I was very shy"), slowly she began to construct installations that were less about her own identity, and more about the world around her.

In 1988, for the first time, she began to incorporate into her work stuffed toy animals and eerie taxidermy specimens of birds that she had bought at flea markets.

Over the next two decades, she presented these in an increasingly violent fashion: disembowelled, dismembered, impaled on pikes. She filled galleries with pelts and paws and suspended body parts, as though these creatures had been ripped to shreds in a toytown massacre.

These installations, several of which will be included in the Hayward retrospective, have a peculiar tone that is at once macabre and darkly funny, and is now seen as quintessentially her own.

"A lot of people say, 'Your work, oh it's so fun'," she says. "And others say, 'It's so dark, it's about death'. But it is both: it is funny and cruel at the same time. Life is like that. One moment, it's raining, and after that, there is sunshine.

"We are sad; then we are in dizzy spirits. We are in love. All the time, we are different."

She pauses, to order an espresso. "The only good thing about getting older is that you are more free. You don't care about people, about what they think, what art should be, must be; you don't care about fashion and art. And maybe, as a result, you are more yourself.

"The older I am, the more I want to play. Art shouldn't be fashionable at all. If just a few people can be moved or touched by an exhibition, that's already not so bad, that's fine."

Does this mean that her work can be difficult, that it appeals only to a minority? "What is contemporary is always difficult," she says. "The Impressionists were difficult."

Maybe that accounts for why she has shown so rarely in Britain?

"I don't know – you'll have to ask the English. In general, though, I like English culture, because it's so different. I love Blake, because he mixed drawings and writing together.

"The English are very bizarre," she concludes with a puckish grin, "and I like that."

 

 

• 'Annette Messager: The Messengers' is at the Hayward, London SE1 (0871 663 2519), from March 4

Ma collection de proverbes is one of these collections that Annette Messager has compiled over a long period of time and that consists of a series of “misogynist” proverbs. The artist has laboriously embroidered them on pieces of white fabric, revealing them in an incisive and ironic perspective. mfc-michèle didier gathers the proverbs for the very first time.
Set consisting of 15 pieces of embroidered fabric

Artist-collector and handywoman, Annette Messager has made nearly sixty “collection albums” between 1972 and 1974. Inspired by words, writings and images, the artist has created her albums from an accumulation of texts, photographs, notes and miscellaneous items, cautiously collected and sorted. Sometimes carefully glued in notebooks, sometimes gathered in bulk folders, Annette Messager’s albums all have a title, handwritten by the artist.

The albums are organized according to various themes, such as love life, encounters or domestic life and resemble sometimes a diary, a photo album or a recipe book. Les hommes que j’aime, Ma vie illustrée or Mon livre de cuisine are a few examples. Annette Messager assembles common, everyday items to create a work that is subtly both poetic and feminist.

Although the use of the personal pronoun suggests that the albums are autobiographical, they are works of fiction. They reveal the ironic fantasy life of a young woman embodying the archetype of the 60's housewife. This woman is not Annette Messager.

Nick Cave

Here is some work by the performance artist Nick Cave. These works are part of a large body of work called 'Soundsuits.'

This artist as well some of the last few posts I have put up, were all found in a book I got from the library called 'Doppelganger, Images of the Human Being.'

 

Untitled, Soundsuit 2009.
Knit material, wire, twigs
 

 

 

'Untitled. Soundsuit, 2009'
Found knit material, buttons, metal armature, and found vintage abacus.

 

Soundsuit, 2009.
Found, vintage, and knit material with hot pads, beaded appliques,
metal armature, noisemakers, and found metal toys.

 

 

 

 

 

Gregor Gaida

Gregor Gaida is a unique Polish artist that lives and works in Bremen, Germany and admits to be crazy about the smell of the wood! It comes of no surprise that he uses wood (often combined with aluminium, polyester and acrylic resin) in a very personal way, converting it to a strong narrative element that leaves the spectator open mouthed.




Attaboys

 

 

Estelle Hanania and Phyllis Galembo

Photographer Estelle Hanania

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photographer Phyllis Galembo

Phyllis Galembo's fascination with costume began as a child, when she would go trick-or-treating near her home in Long Island, New York, often alone, dressed in a variety of ensembles made by her mother.

'I still remember the bric-a-brac that she used to fashion my outfits,' Galembo says. 'This is where my lifelong obsession began. I collected Hallowe'en costumes for over 15 years.'

After studying photography and printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, in the 1970s she began photographing subjects wearing festival costumes. 'I have a lot of pictures of my friends as upside-down Easter baskets,' she says.

Then, in 1985, she travelled to Nigeria to photograph priests and priestesses with their traditional costumes and ceremonial objects. 'I was fascinated by the idea of ritual clothes that had spiritual, transforming power. I followed the story to Haiti, where the priests and priestesses of voodoo are believed to transform via their clothing into magical beings. Once I discovered the Jacmel Kanaval [Haiti's pre-Lenten festival], I felt I had found my metier in the masquerade.'
 - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/8067153/Behind-the-masks-the-photographs-of-Phyllis-Galembo.html
 

Kimiko Yoshida

Artist Kimiko Yoshida was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1963 and left her home country, as a result of feeling the oppression against women. She now lives in Europe and has since 1995. The prolific artist has been transforming herself into various representations of herself and others in several series of self portraits (painting herself and then photographing it) since she began her career. She has turned herself into famous painters, Brides from all over the world, Blown glass letters and symbols and much much more. Over 330 different self-portraits in the last decade.
http://ifitshipitshere.blogspot.ie/2010/02/artist-kimiko-yoshida-and-her-stunning.html

http://www.kimiko.fr/

 

STATEMENT by Kimiko Yoshida, 2009

Since I fled my homeland to escape the mortifying servitude and humiliating fate of Japanese women, I amplified, through my art, a feminist stance of protest against contemporary cliches of seduction, against voluntary servitude of women, against “identity” defined by appurtenances and “communities”, against the stereotypes of “gender” and the determinism of heredity.

Art is above all the experience of transformation. Transformation is, it seems to me, the ultimate value of the work. Art for me has become a space of shifting metamorphosis. My Self-portraits, or what go by that name, are only the place and the formula of the mutation. The only raison d’être of art is to transform what art alone can transform. All that’s not me, that’s what interests me. To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters.

The representation of myself as a fiction mixing my Asian culture in references to Western art history is yearning for monochromy as a metaphor of effacement and disappearance, a mark of virtuality and intangibility, a symbol of infiniteness. The monochrome is a pure figure of duration wherein all imagery and all narrative are dissolved. Here, before the infinite colour, the gaze is exposed to the infiniteness of Time. This paradoxical representation is presented each time like an impossibility, a powerlessness, and a precariousness. It is this effect of incompleteness which gives the idea of a rigorous unrepresentable, unlocatable space, the idea of a space beyond the image where representation exceeds the space of representation.

My Self-portraits represent the attempt to render representation possible by seizing it at the point where what is present is the invisible absence at the heart of the image, that absence that the image makes a point of honour of making visible. The state of invisibility isn’t the point where I put myself on display, it is the point that I put on display. The state of invisibility I put on display is connected with the radical demand of art.

By giving the immaterial (the immaterial as the unnamed) an image in a series of portraits, the work of art represents what is invisible in a figure, its immateriality, before figuring itself as a figure of disappearance.

Stacey Page

Some interesting work by Stacey Page. I have seen other artists stitch onto photographs before, usually there more geometrical shapes. She is almost playing dress-up with her subjects.

"It is a resurrection, perhaps allowing a little fame to a discarded identity.”
- Stacey Page

'Melanie'

 

'Marcine'
-2011, 6 x 8.5 inches

'Todd'
 - 2011, 3.125 x 4.375 inches

'Lori'