No Ghost Just A Shell

Phiplippe Parreno and Pierre Hyughes went to Japan and bought the copyrights to AnnLee, a manga character. She was cheap; the price of a manga figure relates to the complexity of their character traits and how well they can adapt to a storyline and "survive" in the long term. Since AnnLee had no particular traits to begin with, she was destined to be scrapped. The two artists saved her life and set her to work. She was offered free of charge to artists who wished to use her for their own stories. "No Ghost Just A Shell drains her of her soul and makes her a vessel. She also raises interesting questions about the artmaking process; the "same" image appears again and again, but it begins to show some difference. Is her shell really always the same? What is the role of the people who operate it? Are they subjective? How does identity come into being for characters in cinema and art? She is the Mickey Mouse of today, a commercial unit, a shell meant to be inhabited by others. 


She has been saved by culture in order to be exploited by it, and she has been invented by culture in order to fuel it. That great symbol of fuel, the Shell Oil trademark, an arbitrary sign, replaces the word “shell,” itself an arbitrary sign, in M/M’s poster for the show. Arbitrary, perhaps, but essential to remember: I mean, wasn’t our desire for oil part of what got us into this mess? And wasn’t controlling others in order to save them part of it, too? It’s hard to know, and it’s hard to say.


This entire post was more or less directly quoted from the conclusion of this article:
http://linedandunlined.com/2004/09/15/the-problem-with-posters/ 

which I found by Google Imaging the topic after I read this document, which looks like an artist statement:
http://www.mmparis.com/noghost.html
Some notes by Philippe Pareno:
http://www.airdeparis.com/pann.htm

I want to write down this link too. Archive.
http://www.stretcher.org/archives/r3_a/2003_02_10_r3_archive.php

There's a No Ghost Just A Shell T-shirt. I'd like to have one.