Life is cheap: 46,000 yen to be exact. That’s how much Pierre Huyghe and Phillipe Parreno paid for Annlee, a Japanese Manga with large eyes and flowing hair. The pair of French artists purchased the image file and copyright to Annlee in 1999, and have since ‘loaned’ her to friends including François Curlet, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Pierre Joseph, Melik Ohanian, Joe Scanlan, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The assignment, as suggested by Parreno, was to ‘work with her, in a real story, translate her capabilities into psychological traits, lend her a character, a text, a denunciation, and address to the Court a trial in her defence…’
Annlee came cheap because she was simple.
Manga characters are priced according to their complexity: background,
abilities, psychological profile. Annlee was the wallpaper, an extra,
destined to live no more than a few pages in a comic book or frames in a
film. Since being liberated by Huyghe and Parreno she has seen the world –
London (ICA), Venice (Biennale), and New York (Guggenheim). Just at the
moment, in a show called No Ghost Just a Shell at the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art (also showing concurrently at the Institute of Visual Culture,
Cambridge), she is having her last hurrah before being consigned to a
carefully orchestrated digital death.
Annlee’s broad, and free, distribution is part of a wider interest in
collaboration common to both Huyghe and Parreno. Their focus on practice
rather than product is refreshingly down to earth in today’s efficient,
brand-name art world. ‘Efficiency is a problem,’ says Huyghe, ‘something
that is easily transmitted, easily consumed. We don’t want simplicity. We
like accidents. Life is all about accidents, about error, about failure,
about doubts, about something blurry. If something is efficient, it has a
logotype, it is autonomous. Whereas we are more interested in something that
is not autonomous, something more porous, that can spread or extend in
another way. Something that can appear here, dissolve, and reappear
somewhere else, like in a topological system. In the case of Annlee, you buy
a drawing, but in the end you have a community built around an image.’
The works themselves are varied, sometimes heavy-handed; not hard to imagine when the starting point is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with deep thoughts about her own identity. Parreno’s incarnation is a marvel of Manga method-acting. Liam Gillick has chosen the masters-of-the-universe-meets-secret-garden approach (especially effective is the electric current behind her empty eyes). Joe Scanlan has decided to fight product with product, designing an IKEA coffin for the ‘discontinued’ Annlee. In One Million Kingdoms, Pierre Huyghe has dispensed with the shell altogether – Annlee is a mere neon outline walking through a lunar landscape. She does not speak herself, but mountains grow around her according to the modulations in the voice of the narrator – a digitally re-mastered Neil Armstrong reciting, among other things, Jules Verne.
All these voices in the same body. One is reminded of the Osama Bin Laden audiotape the US government is working so hard to authenticate. Why all these attempts at authenticity? Are the words any less true, or any more threatening, because they come from one particular man?
The SFMOMA show is a great opportunity to
see the Annlee works together; the only trouble is that the works were never
particularly intended to be shown that way. The Annlee project is as much a
liberation from the traditional notion of an exhibition (fixed time, fixed
place) as from the traditional notion of product (buy, sell).
What will be most remarkable about the SFMOMA show is its end. After the
exhibition, Annlee will be ‘terminated’. Artists will no longer be permitted
to create works using her as a model. Huyghe and Parreno have hired a
digital hit man, otherwise known as an intellectual property lawyer. The
resulting contract will liberate Annlee from circulation, both economic and
artistic.
The joy of digital death is that nothing is final. Will Annlee live again on
pirated discs and underground film posters? Perhaps. Would Huyghe and
Parreno prosecute? I think not.
No Ghost Just a Shell was at the Kunsthalle
Zurich, 24 August –
27 October 2002; and continues at the Institute of Visual Culture,
Cambridge, until 26 January and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until
16 March 2003.
Elizabeth Bard is the Digital & Media Editor for contemporary