Provenance:
Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1996

Lot Essay:
Along with its sinister contemporary companion the Guillotine, pikes and specifically aristocratic heads impaled on them, have macabrely become as emblematic of the French Revolution as the Marie Antoinette attribution “Let them eat cake.” According to Madame Tussaud’s account, in the days leading up to the storming of the Bastille the citizen resistance approached her uncle Philippe Mathé Curtius, the principal of the wax museum Salon de Cire for use of wax busts of the royals to employ figurative battle standards in the ensuing demonstrations to which he acquiesced. Following the successful overthrow of the ruling monarchy and the complicit nobility these manufactured figure heads became actualized atrocities, a perverse proclamation of victory and a deadly serious didactic against future tyranny or the support thereof. Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau, a noted orator and leading dissident voice of the critical mass, retroactively justified the practice as being the product of  “centuries of despotism which corrupted the people’s character and, ‘If the anger of the people is terrible it is the cold blood of despotism that is atrocious. Its systematic cruelties do more damage in a day than popular insurrections destroy in a year.” The pikes, in action and manifestation being necessary evils in vanquishing the greater hierarchically evil of the establishment.

In her Piques series, renowned French installation and conceptual artist Annette Messager distills and repurposes these historic revolutionary ideals with her own unique take on these gruesome trophies of rebellious triumph, as if the voice of a Menu Peuple nouveau in opposition to a contemporary set of systemic inequalities.  Ingeniously and appropriately coming full circle from the insightful prototypal protest props, the precursors and perhaps inspiration for the grizzly realization of the original effigies, Messager returns to surrogate speared heads to artfully ignite new fires for current causes of the common caste. Her rendition a pleasing contradiction, composed of pole mounted plush stuffed stockings, bright colored buttons and pencils, delicate diagrams and cartography, sensitively disarming in appearance yet disquieting in aggressive conceptual subtext. The nylon hose an especially charged material choice, dually the soft oft fetishized symbols of alluring feminine ornamentation, whether desired or required, the also resonate as the utilitarian low-tech face masking disguise of gunmen, criminal actors and freedom fighters alike. The drawn components are illustrative vignettes of strife and discord, emotive expressive mark making and maps delineating various fragmented sectors of control, subtler rest points that upon exploration still speak truth to power. Perhaps depending on the scale of concern and in turn the imagined uprising, the individual Piques works are presented in variously sized sculptural arsenal arrangements, syncopated rows of rods, leaning at a pitch against the installation wall, evoking memories of the 18th century the shocking source souvenirs displayed in a town square or castle courtyard. Piques, 1994 was included in an exhibition of Messager’s work at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris and has been in a single private collection since 1996. Larger examples from the series are held in international institutional collections including the Centre Pompidou, the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art.