Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Texts and words are of crucial importance to Annette Messager’s work for her “words are images”. And so words at once autonomous from parallel to and the sources of her visual creativity are woven throughout her production. She has looked directly at our diverse relationships to language in forms ranging from the early scrapbooks of the 1970s to the large sculpted words of the late 19gos and other including personal diaries letters calligraphy alphabets and primers. Messager works with the repeated drawn framed and sculpted word; newsprint collage and montage of texts and photographs; and handwritten texts. Plays on words and palindromes turn up in her exhibition titles and more recently in her children’s books. All of these uses of language stem as much from Dada and Surrealism as from the aesthetics of the banal and the everyday and they give rise to unclassifiable texts which fall somewhere between a literature of the news item of photo- essay and poetic maxims for personal use. Messager’s frequent recourse to copying down and to repetition then serves as a kind of exorcism: in those cases writing is something like sewing with a soothing function. The first section of Word for Word focuses on writing in Annette Messager’s artworks which are lavishly illustrated. The second includes numerous texts published in magazines or exhibition catalogues as well as unpublished notes on her work and personal reflections on art and life. (MP)