Christian Boltanski & Annette Messager – Le Voyage de Noces, 1975

Venue

Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon (macLyon)

Lyon

1944, Paris, France — 2021, Paris, France
Born in 1943, Berck-sur-Mer, France
Lives and works in Paris, France

The works of Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager weave together personal and universal narratives — sometimes humorous, sometimes serious — and representations of the self — sometimes real, sometimes fictitious. Their respective works, informed by notions of originality and subjectivity, develop “individual mythologies”.

The couple’s first joint work, Le Voyage de Noces (“ The Honeymoon”), produced during a ritual visit to Venice in 1975, consists of twenty-one drawings by Annette Messager and eighty-six photographs by Christian Boltanski. Although they portray private and personal experiences, these snapshots of joy and happiness nonetheless reference standard images and cultural archetypes. By playing on the stereotypes of Venice, the city of lovers, their pictures lay bare the clichéd aspects of the traditional honeymoon — from the marriage bed to St Mark’s Basilica. This work is a new kind of reportage, presented in the form of a four-handed mosaic, questioning the commonplace assumptions about love relationships.