A Smile Without a Cat (Celebration of AnnLee´s Vanishing), 2002. With Philippe Parreno

In 1999, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the rights to an anodyne schoolgirl from K-Works, one of the two Japanese companies specialized in the production of characters for Manga and animated films: they are factories that produce stories that serve as testing grounds for the characters, who are a cumulus of special powers and energies, weapons, recurrent phrases, physical attributes and physiological profiles, that is, traits that are to define not only a particular character´s personality, but also his possibility of fitting into the situations created by the writers and his eventual salvation. The Frenchmen´s acquisition was christened with the name AnnLee and the reasons she was selected were simple: Except for her melancholy face and her sadly bulging eyes, AnnLee lacked absolutely everything. She had no special attribute, no characteristic costume, or patented phrases, or weapons, or superpowers; she was conceived as just another extra, like a walk-on in a comic strip, which condemned her to non-survival, either by death or oblivion. Hence the first page of the well known project No Ghost Just A Shell was written. After that, Huyghe and Parreno contacted other artists to invite them to work in an organized manner with, on or from the character: González-Foerster, Gillick, Tiravanija, Pierre Joseph & Mehdi Belhaj-Kacem, François Curlet, Mélik Ohanian, Anna-Lèna Vaney, M/M Paris, Joe Scanlan, Lily Fleury, Richard Philips, Henri Barande and Angela Bulloch & Imke Wagener were some of them. They ceded the rights to and image of AnnLee for them to redesign her, provide her with a voice, some psychological capacities, one or several bodies, or a context in which to develop. The idea was not to create a new fiction, but to consider the character a sign that had been freed from copyright and that would henceforth be capable of expressing her own nature and reality, in short, to extend her narrativity. She became a contemporary fable of collective authorship, with ever increasing chapters, which ended with the legal transference of the rights to AnnLee herself, and the celebration of her removal from - the kingdom of representationâ€? as a sign with the launching of fireworks on Miami Beach, Florida, in December 2002. Huyghe and Parreno called this event A Smile Without A Cat because of the scene from Alice in Wonderland in which the Cheshire Cat´s smile remains after its disappearance. Undoubtedly, by buying her, the artists participated in the economy of copyright, but by making this purchasing act public and elaborating it in their works, they broke the art world´s silence.



Tihs post is a very good description of this work and was taken from the website of MUSAC:
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León

holy c**p

As much as possible given the time and space allotted. from Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen on Vimeo.

OK - I seriously do not know what to think about this...as someone who has worked behind the scenes in museums, (like about 1/3 of us in Sparkplug) I have seen 'the stacks' and know the beautiful collisions that can happen on those racks where items are put together solely based on available space-like a little Daumier painting ending up next to a big Bonnard, where proximity creates affinity. Dollars to donuts that's the kind of thing you'd have to travel through space and time to actually see hung up in a museum - unlikely matches happen, but rarely.

It also struck me that this show looks a lot like the proverbial mid-century SOHO painters loft (Alice Neel's is infamously described in my circle of education) where finished paintings line every available space not needed for walking or working. This kind of chaos is often where us 'art professionals' work - why not drive that point home to the pedestrian public?

Well frankly, because when I see it on 'tv' I realize how freaking insane it looks - how does clearness of message arise out of this horror vacui?

Well brother - it just does. Contemplate that.