Bathroom Tales: Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice

Expressions of
Feminity: Domestic
Space, Voice, Carnival
and the Body

Helen Frankenthaler's Resistant Stain

Constant Carnival
Culture

Constant Carnival Culture

This paper considers the artwork of Annette Messager and it's connection to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of carnival.

© 2000 by Nikki Renee Anderson

The artwork of Annette Messager portrays a carnival atmosphere that celebrates and questions existing social constructs and offers opportunity for renewal. The work of Messager relates to philosophies of carnival and in this paper I will be examining the work of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. I am comparing selected works of Messager’s to specific ideas within carnival including: diffusion of hierarchy, use of satire or laughter to question existing social constructs and affect change, creation of a unique world that is totally separate from official culture and grotesque realism. As Lent begins, carnival comes to an end and so all people must return to their every day world. Annette Messager’s work on the contrary, never returns to official time. Each time a viewer returns to her work, she/he steps into a segment of carnival time. This approach is Messager’s most powerful tool in affecting social change. First I will give a brief description of Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophies of carnival and then I will describe the work of Annette Messager.

Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher who had a marginal status within soviet society because of his involvement in a circle of philosophers. In the late 1920's, he felt the threat of the Stalin era soviet government and counteracted that by becoming part of a cultural revolution. The cultural group to which Bakhtin belonged questioned existing social systems and diffused power structures. Bakhtin’s involvement in this circle has been said to have influenced his interpretation of Rabelais’ writing and carnival culture. (Lachmann)

In the text, Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin uses the writings of Rabelais to analyze folk culture during the Middle Ages. Bakhtin begins by stating that Rabelais’ literary style does not conform to typical sixteenth century style and cannot coexist with authority. With that statement, Bakhtin is beginning the process of breaking down hierarchy. Bakhtin asks readers to leave behind set expectations about literature and begin to redefine artistic expectation by exploring folk humor, which is found during periods of carnival.

Carnival was originally a celebration in folk culture of the changing of the seasons, which was an agricultural celebration about the land and people. (Conkelton) The celebration of Carnival comes to an end as lent begins. People of the Middle Ages existed within two worlds, one, which was official, and the other non-official, which was filled with entertainment and laughter. Carnival brought the total disruption of society and temporarily suspended the existing hierarchies of church and state. As the power structures broke down, a new type of communication developed among people who could not usually unite as a community. There is a strong feeling of freedom and all people are involved with the renewal of the society. During this celebration of transformation, there is a chance for rebirth and change within the culture’s social systems and constructs.

Transformation in Carnival often comes from the humor of tricksters and entertainers. Pageants and banquets are important in carnival and often mock official events by enacting rituals such as electing a king and queen for the event for the sake of humor. Laughter in carnival diffuses authority that exists within non-carnival times and it gives people a chance to withdraw from the rules of their everyday life. Through the process of laughter, people can begin to envision a more Utopian world and voice their perspectives. (Lachmann) People not only laugh at others but also at themselves. People can begin to challenge and reevaluate the systems of the society. Bakhtin notes that laughter is an area in Rabelais’ writing that is unexplored by most critics and he feels that it is essential to understand folk humor in order to comprehend Rabelais’ message. He also makes a strong divide between folk humor and modern parody. Modern Parody has a strong sense of negation of something where as folk humor goes beyond that by reviving and renewing. Bakhtin also defines folk humor as festive, universal to all people and triumphant and mocking.

The material bodily principle or grotesque realism is another element of Carnival and it is derived from carnivalesque laughter. All things come to an equal level; what is ideal is lowered to an earthly level, which he claims is universal for all people. The themes that are accentuated in the material bodily principle are growth, abundance and fertility. Rabelais’ images of the human body are of eating, drinking, defecating and participating in sexual life. According to Bakhtin, the body becomes a stage for people express their eccentricities. (Lachmann)

Annette Messager embodies many philosophies of carnival in her art. Her work takes viewers into a festive and strange world where typical rules of art and life are ignored. Much of her work uses satire to criticize the social construct of femininity. She breaks down artistic and social barriers through her process of creating work. Bakhtin describes the relationship of art and life in Carnival, "Because of their obvious sensuous character and their strong element of play, carnival images closely resemble certain artistic forms, namely the spectacle…It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play."(7) In this description, Bakhtin characterizes the essence of Carnival and also Annette Messager’s work.

Messager grew up in Berck-Ser-Mer, which is a village in France that was largely destroyed during the second World War. I am going to look to Messager’s experiences growing up as a preface to my exploration of her interests and tendencies as an artist. As a child, she played in the surreal landscape of a town that was turned completely upside-down by bombing from the war. Her father was an architect and often took her to visit monuments and cathedrals. Also, as a child, she was very interested in Catholicism with all of it’s pageantry and ornamentation. All of these different aspects of her experiences as a child would eventually reappear in her interests as an artist. (Bradford) The landscape she grew up in, her interest in ornamentation and pageantry, and the uniqueness of the monuments she visited as a child all added to the imagery in work, especially the carnivalesque elements. Through her own interpretation, she is interested in altering social constructs that she experienced in contemporary culture. In his essay, "Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture", Renate Lachmann discusses myth in Carnival. He explains that Bakhtin argues that in carnival, myth is created through ambivalent humor, which denies death. By denying death, carnival inverts official institutions and creates a mythical place where people can exist in a more utopian or unofficial culture. Lachmann reiterates that this mythical time is a permanent alternative to official culture, but ultimately, everything returns to its previous state. Messager creates a mythical place and carnival world with her work but she never returns to official culture, her artwork remains a place of carnival always. This is how Messager influences changes in official culture. Each time a viewer returns to her work, she or he returns to carnival culture. Her individual mythology and her survival as an individual against the system become powerful themes she employs to influence change.

As an art student in Paris at the French academy, the Ecole Des Beaux Arts, Messager trained in a traditional and formally academic way. She constantly competed to join an art world that principally welcomed men. She grew tired of the system in her school and the system of the art world in Paris and joined a group of other students to break the pedagogical traditions. She became part of an intellectual revolution of the late 1960’s called Mai ‘68, which included other artists such as Christian Boltanski, Gina Pane, Sarkis, and Jean Le Gac. This revolution greatly expanded the boundaries for artists and questioned the hierarchies of artistic media and tradition. Also, the revolution influenced competitions such as the Paris Biennale to be judged by an international committee rather than national committees since they followed a much more open process of selecting artists and were much less hierarchical than French art committees. Much of the artwork that came out of the movement was political in tone and dealt with ideas about individual mythologies. (Bradford) This revolution shaped Messager’s approach to art making and pointed her in the direction of Carnival. Mai ’68 is similar to the revolution that Bakhtin participated in the Russia in the 1920’s.

One way in which Messager questioned social hierarchies was through her unique and open use of art materials. Her materials included paint, found objects, metal, photos, colored pencils, embroidery, crayons, toys, books, and stuffed animals. One clear example is her piece Boarders at Rest (1971-72) in which she has taken many dead birds and knitted small sweaters and outfits for them to wear. She uses simple techniques that she has said even "a child could do." Furthermore, the act of caring for these dead birds ironically point Messager’s maternal instinct. As a girl, Messager’s family assumed that she would be a typical upper class domestic woman. They were certain that she would marry and raise a family. (Bradford) By knitting these little sweaters which are useless and awkward, she subtly subverts her family’s expectations for her identity. This piece references the ways that she rethinks hierarchical positions within society. She also treats these dead birds in a way that is ritualistic. This act of using dead animals and then mocking rituals that a mother might have with her children relates to ideas about pollution that Mary Douglas writes about in her book Purity and Danger. Messager breaks boundaries that viewers have about life and death. The birds are beautiful and vulnerable and while dead. Our culture tends to find dead animals repulsive and "dangerous" yet she changes them into art objects. She subverts the commercial art system by using dead birds instead of more common art materials. By showing the birds and selling them as art, she seems to be mocking the hierarchies within the commercial notion of art.

Messager’s relationship to hierarchy in her work is very similar to Bakhtin’s interpretation of Rabelais’ writings of carnival. "This temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank created during carnival time creates a special type of communication impossible in everyday life."(10) Her suspension of hierarchy allows her to communicate with the viewer about the construction of femininity, use of art processes and materials, taboos about life and death, and hierarchies within the art world.

Messager also challenges hierarchy with the wide variety of art movements that influences her and that she references in her art. By pulling from all of these different forms, she creates anarchy and does not give more power to any one way of working. Some of the movements that she draws from are Surrealism, Symbolism, Fluxism and the art of the insane, and she often these different art movements to subvert ideologies she opposes. For example, she has a strong connection to the surrealists, but they have a negative perception of women. "Ironically, the Surrealists are also among the most misogynous of artists, perceiving women as objects of desire to be treated as fetishes in service of the creative male. For Messager, the Surrealists were thus models to be exalted and subverted, artists who had an enormous influence, both positive and negative, in shaping her work. (Eilel, 54)

A final way in which Messager challenges hierarchy is through her creation of different categories of artwork. In the beginning of her career she created two different personae, "Annette Messager, Artiste" and "Annette Messager, Collectionuese." The work that was produced as "Artiste" was made in her studio and the work created as "Collectionuese" was in her bedroom. By these categories, she challenged the ways in which the art world separated art from life. She also challenged the viewer to look at the categories that they created in their own lives. As she continued on in her career, she developed more personalities including, "femme pratique" or practical woman, "teuse" or peddler, and "truqueuse" or trickster. She created an ironic hierarchy in her personality to challenge societal rules. This method of change contrasts with Bakhtin’s approach in some ways because he was interested in the complete suspension of hierarchy. Her use of irony, however, links directly to his interest in folk humor.

Messager relates to Carnival by using satire and humor in a similar way, and she uses humor in a way that mocks societal power relationships that she experiences. Through satire she questions authority and traditional roles of women. In "Annette Messager, Collectionuese", she creates a series of photo albums which deal with different rites of passage, such as marriage, pregnancy and beauty rituals. The first album entitled The Marriage of Miss Annette Messager comprises representations of brides. Using pictures of brides she found in magazines, she replaced their faces with her own face. Cutting photos from magazines resembles the child's play she may have carried out as a young girl. It seems as though her mocking style represents her own feelings and ideas as much as those of society. Another album, entitled Children with Their Eyes Scratched Out (1971-72) is a baby book, which contains photos of babies with their eyes scribbled out with a ballpoint pen. The act of scribbling resembles the marks a child would make and can also be interpreted as acting out aggression she may have about these rites of passage. Through hiding the eyes she maybe trying to shelter the baby from seeing the realities it will face in the world. The photo albums reflect a need to have those rites of passage and participate in the proper way of being socialized, and yet they also subvert artistic and social practices. (Conkelton)

Her photo albums relate to Mary Douglas’s ideas about boundaries, rituals and danger. Mary Douglas says that cultures enact rites of passage in order to make change less dangerous. Messager mocks the rites of passage that she must participate in, and, by doing this she puts herself in a liminal state which is between fantasy and reality. This liminal state is dangerous, but can be a place of great change. Messager thus challenges society to rewrite the rules it has set up for women. In Bakhtin’s analysis, folk humor is so important to Carnival because it renews society. Because Messager exists within this liminal state, she is on the edge of a renewal and is constantly directing her viewers in that direction.

Messager uses the principles of grotesque realism in her use of the body in her work. Voluntary Tortures (1972) is a piece, which groups of photos of women participating with beauty rituals, such as facial masks, skin peels, plastic surgery and liposuction. Messager brings an ideal image of beauty down to an earthly level and criticizes the rituals women go through in order to conform to that image of beauty. She seems to be mocking the eccentric nature of women’s beauty rituals by presenting them in humorous light. Instead of presenting the stereotypical image of women, she is presenting a more grotesque and human image.

Another work functioning within the ideas of grotesque realism is My Vows (1988-89). Messager hangs photos of body parts from strings on the wall in dense shapes. The photos overlap each other and contain images of men and women both young and old. This mix of bodies allows for viewers to let go of any stereotypes about physical bodies and begin to imagine new bodies. These photos reference society’s construction of both femininity and masculinity in the way in that they are presented. The dense overlapping disconnects the parts from the bodies and together they make up a new universal body. Also, the strings are impermanent and create a fluid nature in her construction of the new body. The disconnected body parts are both beautiful and grotesque, and they are both attractive and repelling. Messager approaches the image of the body from a universal perspective by including many different kind of images, and her fluid construction allows the viewer a freedom to envision a new body.

In the work Penetration (1993-94), Messager hangs from strings stuffed, disconnected internal organs such as the heart and the brain. The densely hung organs appear similar to the photos in My Vows. The brightly colored organs resemble a cartoon version of the interior of the body, which denies the ideal logic of the body and portrays the body in wild image. The tone of the piece is in line with philosophies of Carnival, and Messager denies any idealism in the systems of the body. Because the organs are stuffed, they become like dolls or pillows, and they allow viewers to psychologically connect with their own interior.

Messager’s work is constantly represents an alternative world to affect social change. Every time a viewer returns to her work, they step into her carnival time. For Messager, carnival time becomes her official time. In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas discusses boundaries that culture creates including boundaries of time, life and death. She also discusses ideas about pollution and violating boundaries. Eliminating pollution seems essential for survival in most societies, which therefore creates a fear of violating boundaries. Breaking rules about time, life and death present threats to the status quo. When cultural boundaries are violated people are thrown into a liminal state. A liminal state is a time that is dangerous but also very creative and allows for change to happen. Bakhtin follows cultural rules and boundaries with his theories on Carnival in that he follows the pattern of life and death. Although carnival is an escape for official culture, there is always a return. Messager violates boundaries of time with her work by never returning to official time. This violation of time gives her work power to create change.

Bakhtin does not address Carnival from a gendered perspective. In fact, some have even called him a misogynist. But I believe that he is still worthwhile for feminists to use because of his approach to diffusing hierarchies and creating changes within an oppressive system. The critic Clive Thomson makes this statement about Bakhtin, "In spite of his male bias, misogyny, and silence to the question of gender, Bakhtin is useful in at least two ways to the feminist project…Bakhtin’s works are seen as the source-not of a specific methodology-but as a theoretical and philosophical basis which can be exploited in order to deconstruct a whole series of patriarchal myths: the Cartesian notion of the autonomous self, the mimetic function of novelistic language,the typical Sausseurean binary categories." (158) Furthermore, Messager does not consider herself a feminist, "She dismisses the idea that her art is political, but she is preoccupied by relationships of power and their perpetuation through a culture’s imagery."(Conkelton, 9) She is firm about calling herself an individual and her survival, as an individual is important. Messager alters social constructs through her own interpretations as an artist and exists in a time out of official time as an individualized woman.

Annette Messager’s artwork presents carnivalesque escape from the realities of daily life, societal rules and oppressive power. Messager uses her individual experiences as her guide to challenge hierarchies and systems of power. Her use of satire mocks systems that she wants to change and communicates to viewers new ways of thinking. Her work is fluid and gives freedom to viewers in envisioning change. Most importantly, for Messager, carnival becomes a constant time rather than just a secondary time. Her work never makes a shift back into official time and it becomes powerful and changing.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bradford, Thomasine Haynes, The Relations of American and French Feminism as Seen in the Art of Annette Messager. New York: The State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000.

Conkelton, Sheryl, "Annette Messager’s Carnival of Dread and Desire," in Annette Messager, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995.

Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

Eliel, Carol S., "Nourishment You Take, Annette Messager, Influence, and the Subversion of Images," in Annette Messager, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995.

Lachmann, Renate, "Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture," in Occasional Papers, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.

Thomson, Clive, "Mikhail Bakhtin and Contemporary Anglo-American Feminist Theory," in Critical Studies, Vol. 1 No. 2, The Bakhtin Circle Today, Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, ed., Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, B.V., 1989.