LIMINAL LIFE: ANNETTE MESSAGER
The artist speaks with Alisa carroll about phantoms, the refugee crisis, and her upcoming exhibition at marian goodman paris
Cultured 05.22.2019
There is a French phrase, passe-muraille, meaning to pass through the walls. Emerging in projections and shadows, Annette Messager’s new solo exhibition at Marian Goodman Paris raises the specter of life in the in-between. An evolution of her ever-innovative material language and a haunting exploration of her themes of spiritual and bodily dislocation, the works in the exhibition range from a carbonized installation of life suspended to sleeping bags and coats empty but for the hands gesturing from them. The show also includes Messager’s first video work: silent footage of a woman projected onto the walls, it is both human and supernatural. Messager’s own name connotes a liminal state, messager quite literally means messenger, and in this body of work she communicates between worlds.
In the main gallery, the show opens with Sleeping Songs, thirteen works constructed of sleeping bags, duvets and winter coats. Throughout her career, Messager has transformed the materials of her everyday environment, and here she adapts into human forms household elements that evoke both shelter and displacement. From Birth, in which one down jacket emerges from another, to Seule (Lonely), an empty coat with hands clasped, a selection of works can be seen to chronicle the life cycle from youth to old age. The latter, however, situated at the intersection of wall and floor, could also speak to borders and isolation, and sleeping bags, of course, can’t help but wrenchingly call to mind the refugee and migrant crisis. Messager previously addressed the issue in Dessus Dessous (Below), her 2015-2016 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Calais, France. Over roughly that same period, the vicinity of Calais was home to the Jungle, a refugee and migrant camp whose deplorable living conditions drew international attention. “I saw many people in the station, in the street, waiting, in the night, as they tried to go through,” she says. On view is a work from that show, 3 Pantins PQ (3 Puppets PQ) (2015), three fabric figures with toilet paper extending from their bodies, beings reduced to bare necessities.
Speaking again to children lost, Innocents, help (2017) is an homage to Massacre of the Innocents, Poussin’s depiction of the New Testament story of Herod. Crafted of black and red netting, fabric, wire and resin—materials of viscidity and capture—faces, hands, and hearts are hung up within it. Nets are an ongoing medium for Messager; in the past she has woven words into these webs—seductive words, like Desir, Chance, and Secret—but this new declaration is a distress call.
In the lower gallery, the 17th-century vaulted stone space houses another troubled civilization, Petite Babylone (2019), a new installation and literal underworld in which hundreds of black-wrapped body parts, abstract shapes and stuffed animals are gathered. The work continues the exploration Messager began with Continents Noirs / Black Continents (2010-2012), in which she suspended carbonized cityscapes from the ceiling, and La chambre des légends (2019), an installation of blackened geometric objects shown in Messager’s exhibition at the Institut Giacometti earlier this year. Petite Babylone, the phrase poignantly holding a small being within its words, references the 2011 tsunami in Fukushima, Japan, when, as Messager notes, dogs and other animals were unable to escape the subsequent nuclear catastrophe, and remained, wandering the island. In the dusky room, a single light at the center of this host of animals casts shadows that move along the walls, ghosts that are both menacing and darkly comical, a recurring duality in Messager’s work.
Babylon is, of course, a mythic city of language and scattering, but one of the etymologies of its name is a Sumerian term meaning “Gate of God,” connoting a womb as well as a physical place. In another subterranean space, Messager’s first-ever video work, a two-channel installation, creates this sense of a chamber: The room has been painted pitch-black, and in the void materializes the silent image of a woman, pregnant. Her body is bifurcated—one wall depicts her belly and breasts; another, her hands and mane of hair. Messager was originally moved to create the footage after viewing an exhibition of Japanese art including images of women who had returned as ghosts to haunt their husbands; titled Perdu dans les limbes (Lost in limbos), this divided projection of a woman is, too, an apparition, passe-muraille.
The phantoms of this exhibition are not just figments of the artist’s imagination. “I think the older I am, I have a lot of phantoms around me,” says Messager, “because I am older and I have lost a lot of people— friends, family. They are with me.” A powerful exploration of life on both sides of the veil, Messager’s exhibition can perhaps also be seen, as the tragedy of the refugee and migrant crisis continues to unfold, as a reminder to allow people to pass through the walls.
IN THE MAKING
White oak, gold leaf, and glass wait on studio tables, and tools and machines are still. When the makers arrive, they will fire the furnace, or pick up the chisel or gilder’s knife, and apply heat and pressure to their purpose: the transformation of wood into the wing pattern of a moth, paper into a radiant background, or glass into a tidal curve. For two decades, Geoffrey De Sousa and Erik Hughes’s calling has been the discovery, support, and advocacy of this craftsmanship. Since founding the San Francisco showroom De Sousa Hughes in 1999, they have sought out the master artisans of their day; the woodworkers, glassblowers, hand printers, bronze casters, textile weavers, and ceramicists who are breathing new life into ancient processes. Lured by the Devil Damask of Timorous Beasties or Caste’s Hesper lights, they have crossed America and Europe to seek out studios defining the next generation of craftsmanship and interior object.
To mark the 20th anniversary of De Sousa Hughes, Geoffrey and Erik chose to pay homage to these makers. In this book are stories of and conversations with 35 of the creators they represent, including Stephen Antonson, Michael McEwen, Liz Galbraith, Ty Best, Christopher Farr, and Erin McGuiness. In these pages, they share the hugely varied stories of their origins, apprenticeships, struggles, and successes, all unified by risk, rigor, sweat, passion, and practice. Notes glassblower John Pomp about his chosen profession, “It’s a little dangerous — it’s fire and broken glass — and if you want glass to be consistent, you make hundreds to achieve the muscle memory. You work with one side of your body for eight hours a day, for twenty-some years.” These decades and iterations culminate in an extraordinary intelligence of body and mind that defines their identities as makers. In the words of master woodworker Bob Robinson of Troscan,“We are what we do every day.”
Erik and Geoffrey’s lives are rooted in this creative process. They, too, have spent thousands of hours at studios and in workshops, engaged in conversations with designers and artisans about the texture of a finish, the pitch of a chair, or the cast of a fixture. Geoffrey notes, “The joy of this immersion is truly understanding the soul and function of their work.” This ongoing engagement is driven by the ethos of made-to-order. Uniquely tailored to specific projects, each light or chair or drape is customized to the specifications of the interior designer. Thus Geoffrey and Erik’s other core collaboration is with the makers of spaces: interior designers and architects. In working with the trade to continually adapt their collections, Erik says, “We’re constantly evolving, and we have the opportunity to create pieces that will one day have the provenance of having been created for these extraordinary projects.” The commission might be scaling an Altura table to a Big Sur home or dyeing a Rosemary Hallgarten rug a Pacific shade of blue. Before the maker mixes pigments or picks up the saw, craft starts with this dialogue.
And though they would never claim the title, Geoffrey and Erik are themselves makers. They have devoted their time and materials to crafting a space, a mindset, and a community to, as they describe their mission, “inspire, create, and satisfy the soul of design.” The showroom is itself an installation: From thousands of colors and textures and forms, they must make 45 collections speak together in a narrative that is always evolving as new pieces and collections are discovered. As seen in the photos that begin and end this book, theirs is an urbane, quiet, and cohesive space.
So how to honor two decades? Geoffrey and Erik chose to channel their passion for artisanship into an object that is itself beautifully crafted. You now hold it in your hands. In this book, carefully selected papers, meticulous embossing, typography, photographs, and stories are bound together in the hope that you may be inspired and transformed by craft just as they have. It’s an object to celebrate history — and the future — both forever in the making.
IN THE MAKING: CHRISTOPHER FARR
“Has the Day Invaded the Night? Has the Night Invaded the Day?” Louise Bourgeois posed this question about interwoven states in her diary in 1995. Fourteen years later, her musing was spun into her first and only rug design. It was Christopher Farr and Matthew Bourne who picked up the thread, their collaboration with Bourgeois one of many poetic projects undertaken since founding their company in London in 1988. Farr and Bourne launched Christopher Farr with the purpose of reestablishing the contemporary rug as fine art, and since then have worked with painters, sculptors, textile artists, and designers of fashion, furniture, and interiors — Sarah Morris, Jorge Pardo, Commune, Ilse Crawford, John Pawson, and Timorous Beasties among them — to explore the fifth wall.
For Farr, the obsession began in 1984 in Western Anatolia, Turkey, where he encountered firsthand a process of rug weaving virtually unchanged for hundreds of years, and was inspired to ask himself if he could successfully create a new sensibility with ancient techniques. Four years later, he and Bourne opened their first gallery, in Primrose Hill, North London, with a collection of Farr’s own designs.
“The big difference is that Chris and Matt were the first people who were doing rugs with contemporary artists, but producing them like they were antiques,” says Erik Hughes. “There was an incredible brush to the hand of the wool — they were working in northern Turkey and were hand-dyeing and hand-spinning yarns.” Farr, who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, approached each piece like a canvas. Adds Hughes, “Traditionally, the higher the knots per square inch, the finer the rug. Chris wanted the yarns to be loosely hand-spun to get slightly different thicknesses, ups and downs. It was like layering paint.”
The studio went on to partnerships with artists, museums, and galleries; the first, Brave New Rugs in 1991, was a break- through exhibition showcasing the work of students at the Royal College of Art. Rugs from the Omega Workshops, exhibited at Somerset House in 2012, featured a limited-edition collection based on rugs designed by the Omega Workshops, an early 20th-century applied-arts studio founded by Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell of the Bloomsbury Group. Most recently, in January 2019, Farr debuted Tomorrow’s Tigers, a series of commissioned, limited-edition rugs by Anish Kapoor, Maya Lin, Kiki Smith, and other contemporary artists presented at Sotheby’s London.
In 2000, Farr, Bourne, and designer Michal Silver launched Cloth, a textile line and medium for new collections and an exploration of archival work by iconic designers like Raoul Dufy, Michael Szell, and Barron & Larcher. The studio maintains a close working relationship with artisan weavers, as well as with a small print house on the outskirts of London. In 2018, Cloth began a new phase of its decade-long collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, producing two patterns by Anni Albers — Temple and Orchestra — to coincide with a major survey of the artist’s work at the Tate Modern and with the centennial of the Bauhaus, where she was a student.
“Text” and “textile” have a shared etymology in texere, Latin for “woven.” Like Louise Bourgeois, Albers saw weaving as a language, and in the over thirty years since Farr and Bourne founded their studio, through collections, exhibitions, and collaborations, they have likewise never stopped asking questions, have never let go of the thread.
IN THE MAKING: ROSEMARY HALLGARTEN
“The traces of her encampment are not wholly obliterated even now.” - The Mu’allaqah of Imru al-Qais, sixth-century Arabic poet
A mother and daughter lay their blanket at the foot of a crumbling Lebanese ruin. Finding themselves in Beirut, the two women picnic amid ancient stones on the weekends or scour the beaches for Roman beads and mosaics. The mother, Gloria Dale, would work with a local jeweler to transform their finds into necklaces. The daughter, Rosemary, followed suit, knitting bracelets with silver filament.
When they returned to London in the late 1970s, British jewelers like David Watkins and Caroline Broadhead and ceramicists like Janice Tchalenko were pushing the boundaries with modern materials and designs. Gloria and Rosemary went to the weekly openings and events. “My mother thought nothing of wearing an architectural necklace that looked like a thin felt coat hanger to a party,” says Hallgarten. There was, however, another layer of history before London, before Lebanon, that Hallgarten unearthed only later.
“I dabbled in jewelry all my life, inspired by the world my mother showed me,” she says. “But it wasn’t until I moved to the U.S. and started searching for a softer, more colorful and textural material to work with that I found out about my mother’s history of making rugs.”
Hallgarten learned that her mother had moved to Italy in the late 1950s with eight words of Italian and the goal of making hand-hooked art pieces for the floor. There, while staying with a principessa in a castle in the medieval hilltop town of Sermoneta, Dale worked with a local priest to set up an old church as a workroom for underprivileged women. (It was forbidden for women to work with men at the time.) “She worked with Gio Ponti, Anni Albers, and Milton Avery, among others, to interpret their art as rugs,” says Hallgarten. A 1954 letter from Albers to the young weaver is now among the Gloria Dale papers in the Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art, along with correspondence, photographs, and ephemera.
When Hallgarten decided to pursue rug making, her mother gave her the metal hooking needle she herself had used. “She also gave me the name of her old wool-yarn source,” says Hallgarten, “Paternayan, a Persian company, which was still in business. I managed to source background material from them.” Hallgarten challenged herself to make six small rugs, and soon after that met Geoffrey De Sousa and Erik Hughes. Working with Hallgarten from the very beginning, they mentored her over the course of a year in what was needed to produce a collection. “My first commissions followed. I established the studio and trained three women to make our hand-hooked rugs,” says Hallgarten.
She went on to work with artisans in Peru, building up a group of rug and fabric weavers that she has seen grow and evolve over the years, and who carry out the dyeing, knotting, weaving, and embroidery. “I still work with my original artisans,” says Hallgarten. “The tradition of textiles is so rich and meaningful in Peru, handed down from the Inca, and I think it is critical to support it and keep it alive.”
De Sousa Hughes and Hallgarten continue to collaborate, maintaining their commitment to the artisanal ecosystem. “In this increasingly machine- and technology-led age, there will always be an audience thirsty for what is real,” says Hallgarten. “One who can see and feel the difference between a rug or a fabric conceived and produced on a machine versus one that comes from authentic ancient traditions, made by a hand that has generations of craft history in its blood.”
Though she now has many collections, Hallgarten is still connected to her roots. “When I was making rugs myself, what I loved best was starting with an idea for a new design and then seeing it take onits own life, like a character in a book, and become something else. Often mistakes or experiments take you in a direction you weren’t expecting, and you produce something great,” she says. “I love succumbing to that lack of control in craft, which is often hard to do in life.” The traces of her mother remain, not in ruins, but alive, in her hands.