This is the sign held by the polar bear from the Museum of Hunting and Nature – or rather its effigy, stuffed. It was placed in his hands by Annette Messager (born in 1943), whose installations, sculptures, textile works and drawings, occupy the museum from the ground floor to the second floor. Obviously, this artist who never stops exploring the animal figure is more of a gatherer than a hunter.
Here, the animals – multicolored stuffed animals – take their revenge by wandering among the ruins of a destroyed city – Paris – which we recognize by its monuments. There, they escape from piles of books of which they are the heroes, Fables from Aesop to Animal Farm by George Orwell, through the books of Colette. Elsewhere, a rabbit brandishes a gun, while a spider wearing small shoes slips between the legs of a deer.
With poetry and humor, the winner of the Golden Lion of the 2005 Venice Biennale challenges, through her emblematic or new works, the collections of this museum nestled in the heart of Paris to reveal what animals say about us, who are sometimes ugly as lice, who howl with wolves, who have a hard time carrying out certain tasks and we sometimes find ourselves the turkey of the joke.
Laughter mixes with melancholy, tenderness with cruelty. It is in fact a quartered stuffed rabbit, whose open belly reveals multicolored insides, also stuffed, which opens the route. Instruments – scissors, hammer or pliers – surround it. Is this a scientific experiment carried out by men on a sacrificed beast? A surgical operation? Or a joyful cesarean section, releasing soft and living forms? Here we are caught in a strange feeling, mixing sweetness and pain. And it is perhaps the stuffed squirrel, trapped and yet mischievous and provocative, which gives us the end of the story, when it seems to whisper to us through the cracks of a net that “such is caught who thought he caught”.
