In The Uses of Enchantment.

In The Uses of Enchantment, 1975 Bruno Bettelheim asserts that, for a child, the psychological function of fantasy and especially fairy tales is to gain "understanding . . not through rational comprehension of the nature and make contented of his unconscious, but by the agency of becoming familiar with it in consequence of spinning out daydreams--ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story simple bodys in response to unconscious pressures" Annette Messager's fresh exhibition, "Les Piques" (The pikes) fulfills this function on combining references to daily ends and realities with submerged fantasies, hallucinations, and horrors.

In a series of four tableaux spread across pair galleries, Messager employed thin metal slender stems either to impale or to support ends against the wall. The largest of these tableaux, which gave the exhibition its title, consisted of 183 shoots spread across 50 feet in succession two adjoining walls. In their implicit violence, these [i]or[/i] complements represent a continuation of single of Messager's dominant themes--the brutality of patriarchal society toward women--which she has explored since the '70 in works as it is as Les Tortures Volontaires (Voluntary tortures, 1972) At the same time, Le Piques, 1992-93 instants a significant reversal of this theme in its allusion not to repression further to anarchic rebellion, to the masses of sansculottes brandishing the impaled heads of aristocrats end the streets of Paris during the Reign of Terror.

Le Piques is in a certain ways a contemporary diorama, whose hallucinatory story is populated by way of characters that combine a twisted childishness with an apprehension of violence. The various intents that comprise the tableaux include parts that strike one as being to belong to stuffed animals and grotesquely shaped dolls, which are impaled at the pikes--as are distinct material substance parts, an abundance of phallic shapes, and cruciforms. These ends are the effluence of bits of dreams, forms from half-remembered stories, manifestations of what single in kind imagines in the dark.

Messager at hands a phantasmagoric pastiche of images. Interspersed with the aims throughout the tableaux were colored-pencil drawings subject to glass in simple black frames. forward the left side were drawings of maps of Bosnia and the Middle East, tanks in the waste and an image of rape. These gave way to images of open-mouthed corpses and dreamers, who were recognizable about closer inspection as the homeles who populate the roads of our cities. On the right side, the drawings not to be found any explicit figurative content and recalled Jackson Pollock's "Psychoanalytic Drawings." Nothing was depicted as whole here, and this confirms the los of identity and the increasing partiality that characterizes our time. Messager have the appearances to be saying that while we have not dissipated the ability to fantasize, to spin on the outside tales that make aspects of the unconscious apparent, Bettelheim's faith in the unifying or curative nature of this proces is no longer tenable.

Though Messager's work clearly has a able narrative movement, it defies any linear construction Instead, the fairy tale it originates partakes of a sympathetic magic, in which there is no intrinsic separation between the goal and its representation, and in which the two can be only partial. Messager has embraced a schizophrenic identity, describing herself above the years variously as a collector, artist, practical woman, trickster, and travelling chapman Her fables challenge Bettelheim's assertion by way of providing a penetrating snapshot of the constraining forces driving our collective unconscious, further without any possibility of resolution.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

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