The reference to the body is a recurring and almost obsessive theme in Annette Messager's work. However, for the first time with Penetration (1993-1994) the artist investigates the inside of the body. / Anatomically descriptive and strangely symbolical the components of this hanging composition make up a huge portrait of the elements with which we are composed. With this thesis, I will demonstrate what is revealed is the body's structure: its content, its secrets, what is on the other side of the physical border and what soaks the flesh, the forces that bring us alive. / In addition, although the composition suggests a three-dimensional anatomical model, I will reveal it remains a distinctly visual and cerebral experience: a conceptualization of the body rather than the body's itself. Penetration stands for a view of ourselves that we know not from any real familiarity but from visual diagrams that have been derived from scientific research and consensus since, its separate elements and colors are taken from medical illustration. / Using artistic and historic examples, I will establish that even though the human body proposed by Messager is based on the anatomical model it is not a flattened representation reduced to an erudite enumeration but rather a three-dimensional model which can be experienced from within. / Messager stages the possibility of a face-to-face with the spectator. Inside Penetration the body recalls the very body materiality, a body where "dead" dangling internal organs "come to life" via the viewers' participation, via their penetration. The relationship of scale is upset and the spectators are invited to penetrate inside the body: to see things from up-close, to feel its elements, to touch its parts. / With Penetration Messager confronts the spectators with an intimate act as she directs them under (or rather) inside somebody's skin and forces them to confront their own sense of embodiment. Messager honours the physical body as our primary means of experiencing the world. I will ascertain that with her specific treatment of the body and without having to rely on modern technology, the artist offers an inquiry into the body as well as questions notions of embodiment. In other words, I will demonstrate Penetration exemplifies a complex set of negotiations between body and space: negotiations between the actual domain of the real body of the viewer and the three-dimensional (virtual) domain of the represented body and represented spaces. / In conclusion, I will propose that via the sense of touch Annette Messager produces a body where there is no escape between objective seeing and subjective feeling and where the human experience is formed and transformed.

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