Mes badges

For several years now, Annette Messager has been sketching, writing words, transferring photographies, or drawing on little paper disks that she later puts in her badge making machine… Most of them are attached to black strings hanging on the walls or to different objects during her exhibitions, others are on kept in boxes.

This artist’s book reproduces a selection of Annette Messager’s pins, especially those of the installation “Et range ta chambre” [“And Tidy your Bedroom”] (Marian Goodman Gallery, 2009). Smooth women’s faces, enigmatic and colored figures, childish monsters and abstract drawings, all in a single file on black strings or isolated on a page. A large selection of objects the artist reinterpreted, covered with these original pins, are also included in the book.

Its original format, which includes several leaflets, defines it as a playful and surprising object, much like the artist’s work. 

“There is a little bit of everything I love on my pins: photos, body parts, little porn drawings, my signature ‘A. Messager’, always, drawings which are somewhat tantric, or that shiny paper covering the little chocolates served with coffee... And these are things we put on our bodies, clothes, purses, that we bring along wherever we go; a cheap thing, of popular art. Making original drawings is in contradiction with what this object is... and I like being in contradiction!”

Annette Messager, Le Journal des Arts, October 2, 2009