For a long time, Annette Messager did things with dead sparrows. She scratched out the eyes on photographs of small children, and she took other photographs of men's crotches, and much worse besides. But she's over all that now. Growing up, she had dreams of becoming a ballerina or a nun, but became an artist instead.
The black carpet of her installation Inflated-Deflated, now at the Hayward Gallery in London, is a wheezing, heaving mass of inflatable body parts and fanciful creatures. A jellyfish-cum-pouffe keeps rising from the floor like a deranged soufflé, then collapsing, dejectedly. A penis erects itself, then goes all droopy and sad. Next to it, a blow-up louse gets puffed up, then squashed like a bug. Pfffft.
Inflated-Deflated is pathetic, in the best sense. It runs on hot air, and all its elements are made from sewn and painted parachute fabric. It also comes as a bit of light relief after those disturbing photographs.
It was tough being a woman artist in France in the 1970s, and Messager adopted extreme measures to save herself from invisibility. She parodied the woman artist, women's work and women's preoccupations. She had her dead sparrows, some wearing crocheted little bonnets and knitted capes, lain out in rows in vitrines, as though in retirement homes. Other sparrows - the disobedient ones, presumably - were banged-up in a separate vitrine. Messager attempted to reanimate yet more of these sorry little bundles of feathers and bone with wind-up clockwork motors. "I was winding them up to make them jump," she has said. "There was a kind of pathos about it."
Here, there are some drawings of Messager, glimpsed in a sort of Sadean romp. Originally drawn in blue biro on a tiny, furtive scale, these "Horrifying Adventures of Annette Messager Trickster" have been photographed and blown up for all to see. Annette Messager Trickster is just one of the artist's personalities. There is also the Tinkerer Handywoman and the Practical Woman. Once, Messager wrote out her signature in dozens and dozens of styles, looking for her best one. She has arranged this graphol-ogist's nightmare beside innocent-looking, coloured pencil drawings of castles. My Collection of Castles, the title reads, proudly.
There is nothing innocent anywhere in Messager's work, nor has there ever been. More stuff can be spied through the holes in the walls of a "secret room". Things you cannot look at properly become all the more intriguing. Here comes a big red wave. In 2005, Messager won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Casino, a rumbustious, inventive and gloriously theatrical interpretation of the Pinocchio story, all done with computer-assisted pneumatic servos, seas of billowing red silk, and a cast of undersea creatures and weird dangly bat-like forms. One element, a grinning skeleton with a scythe-like nose, now lurks behind the Hayward's back staircase. Part of Casino was restaged at the Liverpool Biennial last year, and yet another has come to the Hayward. I miss seeing the whole thing again, though the section here, which takes place in the crimson gloom of the belly of a whale, is genuinely magical and mysterious.
The darker side of childhood is accommodated in "articulated-disarticulated", a 2001-2 tableau based on mad cow disease, which ravaged France as well as the UK. A cuddly big brown cow is endlessly dragged around the floor on its belly, while a rag-bag cast of witless giant soft toys hump, twitch, jolt and spasm in a circus of jarring movements. These abject marionettes bounce up and down on cords, with Messager their puppet-master. Something like a human being twirls disjointedly on a trapeze above our heads.
Messager's work can be obvious as well as secretive and strange. Like a child, she can go on a bit, and at times this show gets fractious and overwrought. She shares her theatricality, and her preoccupation with the play and fantasies of childhood, with artists as different as Mike Kelley and Susan Hiller. The wonderfully dirty and sadistic animations of Nathalie Djurberg tap the same source. But at best Messager's work is as accessible as it is sinister; as monstrous as it is funny. Children will love all the soft toy abuse, the inflatable creatures and magic seas. Now, behave.
