Feminist funfair from Annette Messager

It’s only when you get to the final symphonic installation in this exhibition — a mechanised whirr of skeletons, suspended body parts, flopping figures and farmyard animals all made as cuddly toys — that everything will click into place and you will think: "Ah, yes, it’s as if Selfridge’s Christmas windows have been designed by a class of traumatised schoolgirls."

By this point you will have seen the taxidermised birds sporting heads from soft toy animals (my favourite: a red elephant’s head on a hawk), the room of large, blow-up internal organs, which inflate and deflate like a breathing organism, the teddy bears impaled on coloured pencils and the photographs of children with their eyes scratched out. So you will already have had the thought: when she was a child, she must have pulled the limbs off her dolls.

Messager, 65 this year, is one of France’s most famous and most accessible artists. Best know for her arrangements of hand-made mutant teddy bears, this is her first retrospective in Britain, with work spanning her career since the Seventies. The themes are female identity, fantasy, sexuality and childhood. Hence the series of long-lens photographs of men’s safely trousered crotches, the drawings of sexual violence and the pretty dresses encased in glass cabinets. The works exude the atmosphere of dark, forgotten memories and are driven by the dynamic tension between vulnerability and cruelty.

It must be the Left-bank heritage of Lacan but for some reason French female artists excel at this kind of psychoanalytically reflective art: Messager is comfortably situated between the surrealist painter and sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the conceptual photographer, cataloguer and writer Sophie Calle. Yet the forms Messager’s art takes are much wilder. The early work includes ahead-of-their-time ensembles of appropriated photographs — such as Voluntary Torture (1962), an arrangement of images of women altering their faces with make-up, masks and surgery.

As the exhibition develops, Messager’s hugely innovative approach to artistic media becomes apparent. There are large wall pieces made out of wool unravelled from old jerseys, other dense works of tiny, framed photographs, hung from a forest of string, and mechanised installations with flowing red silk.

This is one exhibition which is likely to fascinate children, but the downside of the work is that there’s a bit too much imagination and a bit too little intellect at work. The presentation is mesmerising but the psychoanalytic content somewhat predictable. You may leave this exhibition thinking you have just visited a feminist funfair.

Still, whoever thought feminist art could be so much fun?

Annette Messager: The Messengers
The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX