Sampling the globe

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Daniel Birnbaum

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Michel Majerus, who died in a plane crash in his native Luxembourg in 2002, may well have agreed. Certainly his huge canvases, which have always impressed me, convey a similar sense of razing the differences between high and low, original and reproduction, historical and brand new. His massive works--some almost thirty feet wide--display fragments from the history of painting and imagemaking in its entirety, from Rubens and Watteau to Warhol and Disney. It's all there at once--glaring, overwhelming, and hideous. But what dominates his paintings are not traces from old or new masters but slivers from newspaper ads, comic strips, video games, and manga characters, all reproduced in lurid acrylic. Is this an updated form of Pop or a new take on appropriation? Probably both--and something more as well. His work conveys a radical sense of presence and a complete lack of sentimentality. It's ugly, it's spectacular, it's superficial, but there's no reason to moralize or indulge in melancholic reflection on the loss of authenticity. Majerus never mourned the death of painting but instead celebrated the abundance of imagery both accumulated over centuries of artmaking and generated today by the media. The temporality of his work is that of a floating, all-encompassing Now, analogous perhaps to that of the World Wide Web. Devoid of all intimacy and ultimately of subjectivity as such, his images bear no essential link to a psychological interiority but, rather, but seem to float freely along the conduits of visual information, where the hierarchies that keep entertainment and high culture apart have long been abandoned and where manga characters inhabit pieces of abstract art. It's all there at once, in a presence rich and hospitable--yet totally flat.

A very flat Asian entity who enjoyed a quite special, if short-lived, visibility in the art world of late was Annlee, an anonymous manga character bought a few years ago by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe for the sum of forty-six thousand yen from a Japanese agency. "We looked for a character and we found this one," says Parreno. "A character without a name, a two-dimensional image ... A character without a biography and without qualities." The wish of European intellectuals to free themselves from the old weight of history, subjectivity, and unbearable meaning has its tradition of projections toward the East, Roland Barthes's fictitious "Japan," an empire of signs devoid of Western innerness, being only one prominent instance. Is the story of Annlee a further chapter in this history? In a sense, it's all an act of liberation. Says Huyghe, "We wanted to free a character from the fiction market." The series of artworks and exhibition that followed provided the liberated sign with a rich personal history--perhaps several. The whole project, "No Ghost Just a Shell," 1999-2002, was finally summarized in a book project. Also, through a rather complicated contractual operation, the legal rights to use Annlee were handed over to the character herself (is it a she?), which provides the sign with an unusual autonomy. Thus, Annlee has received not only personal history but also, I fancy, a kind of depth. Has she become a subject? Certainly the commodity is talking back to us. In Huyghe's video Two Minutes Out of Time, 2000, Annlee claims, "See, I'm not here for your amusement. You are here for mine!" She can even become a bit threatening, as in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's video from the same year, Annlee in Anzen Zone: "There will be no safety zone / You will disappear into your screen." What kind of an apocalyptic discourse is this? The moment the flat sign gains some kind of reflexivity and, yes, depth, she seems to prophesy the final disappearance of any sphere of autonomy and freedom, emotional or otherwise: "I might only be a digital creature / But believe me / I know what I'm talking about / I'm not crazy / And don't say I didn't warn you. I warned every one of you / There will be no safety zone ..."