Girlhood and the Plastic Image

Two: Sharing Girlishness

two. Sharing Girlishness She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita1 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 defense. Do all that you can so that this character lives different stories and experiences. So that she can act as a sign, as a live logo. —Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, instructions for artists participating in No Ghost Just a Shell2 i. In 1999, French artists Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the rights to a character created by K Works, a Japanese company that produced figures used in comic books, cartoons, video games, and advertising. The image was of a girl with purple hair and a mournful expression, one of those cute, saucer-eyed anime figures dominating Japanese visual culture as it is exported to the West. Her name was Annlee (plate 6). Out of all the images in the K Works catalog, Annlee was chosen because she was inexpensive and minimal, without the complex characteristics given more pricey figures. According to the artists, her spare profile—her lack of heft—marked her for death in the worlds of anime and manga. As Annlee explains in one of Parreno’s contributions to the project, the animated video Anywhere out of the World (2000), “Some other characters had the possibility of becoming a hero. They had a long psychological description, a personal history, material to produce a narration . . . Designed to join any kind of story, but with no chance to survive any of them . . . Drop dead in a comic book.”3 The artists label their own practice as one of emancipation and equate commercial media with alienation and murder. 50 • girlhood and the plastic image Huyghe and Parreno shared the Annlee digital file with an international group of artists, each of whom created a work featuring the character. The resulting collection, No Ghost Just a Shell, includes more than twenty-five different pieces in several different media—from animated digital videos (the keystones of the project) to sculpture, painting, sound art, and graphic design. Annlee’s identity in this series is profoundly variable. She appears in 3-D and in 2-D; as a still image and as a moving animation; and as a graphic line drawing on video, on paper, and in neon light. She has different hair colors and outfits, is voiced by different people (sometimes within the same video), is multiplied and dispersed. Even her name has alternate spellings. She is identified as Annlee, Ann Lee, AnneLee, and Anlee (like Lena/ Lenna, the test image and Playboy centerfold I discuss in the previous chapter ). “Spell it however you want! It doesn’t matter,” she tells us in Anywhere out of the World.4 Annlee changed form as she traveled through the transnational network of exchange. A plastic image, she was appropriated, altered, and inserted into a dizzying array of artworks and narratives. For example, she stars in Huyghe’s One Million Kingdoms (2001), a short animation depicting her wandering amid a desolate lunar landscape (plate 7). This digital video combines text from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) with an image of our heroine reproduced as a glowing blue outline. In Rirkrit Tiravanija’seight-and-a-half-houranimated video GhostReaderC.H.(2002), Annlee is rendered as a blocky 3-D figure reading the entire text of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Annlee in Anzen Zone (2000) features cloned Annlees —looking similar to the one in Ghost Reader C.H., but with more refined contours—speaking in English and Japanese about an upcoming invasion. Joe Scanlan’s DIY, or How to Kill Yourself Anywhere in the World for under $399 (2002) presents Annlee as a black line drawing in a cheeky instruction manual illustrating how to build a coffin out of repurposed IKEA furniture. And for Smile Without a Cat (A Celebration of Annlee’s Vanishing ), a live event marking the end of the No Ghost Just a Shell collaboration, fireworks forming a blazing outline of Annlee’s face were set off at 2002’s Art Basel Miami Beach fair (plate 8). Despite the instability...