Annette Messager Quotes

Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.

[My work] includes something about death, and about love, because the photos always have something to do with death. The photograph is like taxidermy. It is like the animals I use. They are posed in order to appear to be alive, but they are dead. Their time has passed. The photos have to do with time and loss, and conclusion.

Mostly, I believe an artist doesn't create something, but is there to sort through, to show, to point out what already exists, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate it.... I didn't invent anything, I indicated.

At first, I felt proud when someone said 'Your work looks like a man did it.' Then I realized that was stupid

I have always believed that somehow the less we reveal the more the other desires to see.

I can see today that the same sort of issues lie behind taxidermy and photography. Taxidermy consists in preserving a bird in full flight... In the same way, photography halts and freezes motion and life.

Pornography is about images that are repeated, saturated. Images of the human body, not nature. What I find in pornography is precisely the repetition of the same: the clichés of pornography. There can be no real transgression, just an image that repeats itself.

I never take a picture of a face because a face is somebody, an arm is not recognizable as somebody. When you take a photograph of someone's face, it identifies it as somebody, but if you take just a fragment, it's everybody. It's not one person.

[Love] can be found in making little dresses for stuffed birds, or in a garden of tenderness like I have done - mixing writing, photography, and real spaces. There are all kinds of acts of love.