VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
Can you be fierce and nonconformist in art using stuffed animals as a tool?? Can. Annette Messager has been practicing militant feminism for many years with undervalued everyday objects and materials such as stuffed animals., gloves, pillows, lanas, fabrics or ropes, which perhaps explains why no museum or gallery has shown his work in our country for twenty years.. It is a work that draws on surrealism, art brut, popular culture and the children's world, that is not easily read, that navigates between the poetic and the political, and plays with ambiguity.
Many pieces are sexual in nature, but they can have many other readings. With a red sleeping bag he recreates the sex of a woman (Sleeping deepred), she denounces how poorly we know the inside of our body by wallpapering a little chapel with uteruses – which to her evoke bouquets of poisonous roses –, Following the actions of the Femen collective, he draws naked women's breasts with inscriptions like tattoos (sometimes with menstrual blood) where he denounces sexism, racism and homophobia in society, or claims with an intertwined meter the work of the seamstresses who in France are called little hands(little hands), a nickname that denotes a clear contempt for these women. It's always been like this, you already know, a “public man” is an important being, but a “public woman” refers to a prostitute.
The most spectacular installation is Motion-Emotionwhere objects hung from the ceiling (wigs, stuffed intestines, a gorilla...) They choreograph a grotesque dance to the sound of fans to refer to the fragility of the human being and the most enigmatic, Downwind(leeward or “often”), It consists of a black silk veil agitated by puffs of air that hides viscera, data, fetal forms, body fragments, stuffed animals and jewels in a particular underwater world. Another great work, The bans(The prohibitions, 2014), It reminds us that we are a society that is afraid of everything, that's why it prohibits everything: chewing gum, the sport, music, drive (if you are a woman), sex in the spa… In May 68 the motto was “forbidden to prohibit”, but today we are more afraid and we are less free than twenty years ago, reflectiona Messenger, that to their 75 combative years is convinced that we are going to get worse, It is already forbidden to grow old and from now on it will be until you die. S.M.
