Culture

"Casino", an exceptional piece of work, won this accolade at the Venice Biennale in June 2005, marking the international recognition of this French artist’s unusual work.

" I’m an invader", she had said to me one day in the Autumn of 2002, at her home and studio in Malakoff, near Paris, her lair in which her disembowelled cuddly toys sleep and lie in wait for her, along with her stuffed animals and the piles of fabric which form a major part of her sculptural world. So it is not by chance that Annette Messager has managed wonderfully to invade the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and colonise it with her inner monsters, making us share, for the time of a visit, for the time of a life, her childish fears turned adult.

For it is with a sumptuous red and black, sombre and blood-red opera-cum-spectacle that Annette Messager, the first woman artist invited to exhibit in the French Pavilion at the Giardini, has this year won the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale, which is being held from 12 June to 6 November 2005. Three acts, without words or music, but with a majestic set design, inspired by the character of Pinocchio, half-puppet, half-human. You quickly spot him in the first room, a wooden figurine with a long nose, sleeping on a little bolster, dragged along the ground through a forest of bolsters haunted by strange mechanisms and black masks. "We are all puppets," remarks the sculptress, "we manipulate and are manipulated."

Then you come to the big scene: in the main hall, like entering the belly of the whale, an immense wave of red fabric flows through the space, floats in the air and swoops slowly down to the floor, and under it you can make out white forms which breathe, which inflate like lungs, bodies swallowed, engulfed and, at the same time, revived.

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"I love this second stop on our journey," says writer Julia Kristeva in the catalogue published for the event. "To be reincarnated, to become a flesh and bone human, Pinocchio has to pass through the female womb. A journey into the centre of the uterus." It offers an opportunity to remember that Annette Messager has, since her early work in the 1970s, been a feminine artist rather than a feminist artist, that she is one of a generation of creative artists who have introduced the feminine into art. Her Venice Golden Lion certainly rewards the unique nature and importance of her work, supported very early on by the great Swiss exhibition curator Harald Szeemann and by Suzanne Pagé, director of the City of Paris Musée d’Art Moderne.

Represented in Paris and New York by the Paris gallery Marian Goodman, a stronghold for the international art market, and established as one of the most important artists of her generation by two retrospectives, in 1995, at the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York and at the City of Paris Musée d’Art Moderne, with this Golden Lion Annette Messager demonstrates that the low international profile of French artists is not inevitable and that with constant, solid and determined support, beginning with our own country, a great deal can be achieved.

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In Venice she offers the final stage of a shared journey: an immense trampoline of taut black threads in which shapeless cuddly toys with dislocated bodies leap into the air and tumble back down in a circus atmosphere, spot lit by fluorescent lighting. For in constructing this work of art made female with dusters embroidered or hooked onto pikes, dead and wrapped-up sparrows, bits of bodies photographed and arranged in the form of a circle or a pubis, Annette Messager is proclaiming, today more than ever, an expansion of her territory, an opening to the world, a moving away from the circumscribed spheres of personal life and of the woman herself to touch the human and living beings of every kind. "I believe that the more individual you are, the more you enter the universal," she remarks further. She has indeed presented a metaphor of the human body at the French Pavilion in Venice, renamed "Casino" for the occasion-"little house" in Italian-but above all a place for gambling, a word appropriate for both her work and the context of the Venice Biennale, an international competition in which each artist stakes their all. A collector of proverbs, she gave herself one to help her focus better as she threw herself into the venture: "Who loses wins." In the game of art and of life, Annette Messager knows how much success is a matter of modesty.