Philippe Parreno – Pierre Huyghe

Galerie Air de Paris – Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris
Through July 24

There are two particular Japanese agencies in Tokyo and Kyoto that specialize in the production of Manga, a Japanese form of comics and cartoons. Manga represents a considerable industry: every day multitudes of stories are published and many animated cartoons are broadcast on television. The two agencies don’t write the stories, they simply create ready-to-use characters: the richer the character’s narrative potential, the more costly the copyright. The majority of these characters don’t have extensive "career possibilities"; they are instead destined to make only a modest guest appearance and then to disappear forever.

For the project No Ghost, just a shell, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe decided to acquire the copyright of an inexpensive female character and give her an ephemeral destiny. They adopted her, so to say, to bring the story to life, giving her a specific psychological dimension, personality, and way of pronunciation. To achieve this they made two extremely brief yet intense films in which the character, re-elaborated in 3D, becomes the protagonist of an "autobiographical" story.

In Parreno’s film, showing at the Galerie Air de Paris and entitled Anywhere Out of the World, the "girl" introduces herself in slow motion. "My name is Annlee! Annlee! You can spell it however you want. It doesn’t matter! I was bought for 46,000 yen […] Some other characters had the possibility of becoming a hero; They had a long psychological description, a personal history. They were really expensive when I was cheap ! Designed to join any kind of story, but with no chance to survive to any of them. I was bought, but strangely enough I do not belong to anybody. I belong to whom is ever able to fill me with any kind of imaginary material. Anywhere out of the world. I am an imaginary character. I am no ghost, just a shell" These are just some of her declarations.

At Marian Goodman you can see the second film, Two Minutes out of Time by Pierre Huyghe. Here Annlee continues her melancholy lamentation: "My name is Annlee; I have a common name. I was a frozen figure, your own obedient image. I was vivified not from a story with a plot, no…. I am prey to your imagination… and that is what I desire from you…. I am not here for your pleasure…. You are hear for mine!"

These two animated films are at the same time frigidly technological, immersed in a universe of fictitious virtuality, and agonizingly human. They achieve this duality by playing with disquieting questions relative to lack of identity, marginalization, solitude, and the relationship between art and life.

Other artists have supported the project, like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Douglas Gordon, who, in the future, will make films with Annlee when their time comes.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Cortney Price