No Ghost just a Shell

Pierre Huyghe took a prefabricated character, named Ann-Lee, from a sales catalogue for makers of manga films. Instead of giving her a real role in a story, he presents her in this installation as an empty shell, a character without psychology that appeals to artists to blow life into her with their imagination. Parreno and Gonzalez-Foerster added their own Ann Lee interpretations to this. Pierre Huyghe (1962) is one of several artists who made installations and films as partial ‘identical’ remakes or in reference to often well known films in the late 90s. Remake (1995) re-made Hitchcock’s Rear Window, while Les Incivils (1995) re-works aspects of Pasolini’ s Uccellacci e Uccellini. Other film installations include Film Made Without Images (1995), which screens only the subtitles of a feature-length film, Blanche Neige/Lucie, its title a reference to the French woman who dubbed a song for Disney’s Snow White, and The Third Memory (2000) which relates to Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. No Ghost, Just a Shell is one of several collaborations between Huyghe, Phillipe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.