AnnLee: Dial M for Murder
1.3 MB PDF file

$10 each

or FREE with any other purchase

Roll Back the Stone:
AnnLee Interviews Joe Scanlan

AnnLee is performed here by Kristel Van Audenaeren, a Ph.D candidate in Art History at the University of Ghent, Belgium. Her dissertation topic is the use of the same sign by various artists in the No Ghost Just a Shell project. This Q and A was conducted as part of her research.

AnnLee: My first question concerns myself. How and when did you first hear of me?

Joe Scanlan: I was in the middle of designing a book for Imschoot when Pierre Huyghe called and asked if I could use you. The book for Inschoot was going to be a how-to manual, with many technical diagrams. It just so happened that he called while I was sitting with the designer, Miko McGinty, drawing a human figure, a 'generic' person who would appear from time to time in the book to turn something over or drive a screw. It was just like Hollywood. At the very moment we realized that we needed someone, you walked through the door. So we said: you're hired.

AL: You have participated in the past with the other artists who used me in No Ghost Just A Shell. When did you first meet them? How do you stay in touch?

JS: Actually I hadn't done that much with these artists. I was in group shows with some of them, and I wrote a television script for Pierre's show at Le Consortium in 1997. Pierre is the only one who I have kept in touch with. I have never met Philippe or Liam.

AL: You have made a very dramatic scene for me. Was it a logical part of the story for you, or was it intentionally planned that you would give instructions for me to make my "Last Call?"

JS: It was a case of very fortunate type casting. I was writing a story about the beauty and tragedy of standardized products and their global distribution, and the ways that this standardization might get warped through individual subjectivity. You were the perfect actor for this story, because you are also a standardized product who gets transformed through individual subjectivity. It was my idea that you should prepare for your own funeral. This would be your ultimate strategic success, since no one can become a truly global icon unless they kill their 'self' and become pure image, pure memory, pure exchange value. Pierre is in the process of doing that to himself at the moment, which I think is very interesting and appropriate for him to do.

AL: Did you receive instructions from either Parreno, Huyghe or someone else (I know that Douglas Gordon was involved from the start but decided not to participate finally) - or perhaps Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster?

JS: No. Pierre only said that I could do whatever I wanted with you and that he needed the finished version by a certain date.

AL: Was I emailed to you? Or was I sent via post? Did you receive the schematics?

JS: I received a CD-ROM via fedex. You were neatly tucked inside a transparent purple plastic jewel case, wrapped in bubble wrap.

AL: Your work looks out of the ordinary in the project. Did you have to make any compromises to participate?

JS: No, not at all. My project looks out of the ordinary because I was the only artist who thought that, even though you were a digital file, your existence should have physical consequences.

AL: You seem to be occupied in your art with "consuming." How did you see this in regard to No Ghost, Just a Shell?

JS: Consumption, whether of food or images or 20th century design, is a fact that no amount of virtual technology can eliminate. I like consumption because it is essential, but also because it destroys things. It creates a tension that I think is lacking in most art and institutions. In English we have a saying, 'You can't have your cake and eat it too.' Right now I would say there is too much cake in art but not enough eating. And when I say eating I don't mean being presented with food as art, like Spoerri or Matta-Clark or Tiravanija. I mean being presented with a fairly long-term consumable object like a sneaker or a chair or a house and having to decide whether it should be preserved or destroyed. So I guess my thinking has as much to do with duration as consumption - or rather, the pressure that duration puts on these kinds of objects.

AL: You have something Duchampian in your art, but you seem to reflect further on it than Duchamp because you look at the functionality of an object. The object is only temporarily separated from the realm of the real world. Was I temporarily separated and was I no longer functional?

JS: That's a good question; I'm not sure. I think you are in a suspended state, like an astronaut. In my book in particular, I would say that your function IS this suspended state, of turning screws and flipping boards and making your last call but never really having to die. Or maybe you only have to die or your function has to change when someone actually performs the book and builds their own coffin with your guidance. You are a lemming that consumers follow.

AL: You seem to design objects with other people (or sometimes even "consumers") in mind, other people who might use these objects. Did you immediately think that I could use a coffin made out of IKEA material?

JS: Yes. You and IKEA were a match made in heaven, two peas in a pod. You were destined for each other.

AL: Did you make the coffin for the Van Abbemuseum yourself?

JS: No, the preparators at the museum bought the manual, went shopping at IKEA, and then followed your instructions.

AL: Something I have read in an interview with Elisabeth Wetterwald on your website that seems intriguing to me is: "I believe that a compelling object has the ability to determine it's own fate, whether the artist intervenes or not.' In the interview you talked about "Catalyst," your artificial tears product, in this context, but am I also a compelling object? Or did I stop being an object when I become a story told by many narrators?

JS: I would say you are a compelling object that is living many lives simultaneously. That's what makes you so compelling! You are a vague, slightly sad character - and also a digital file - and that greatly effects your fate. Those traits influence anyone who engages you and partially dictates how you might be used or interpreted.

AL: Did you have to give up your (intellectual or copyright) rights on your DIY and Last Call concept? I mean, was that part of the deal? In order to give me my own rights, did you have to give up your rights as an artist on a product of your creation in order to 'free' another creation? Or do you see it as a much more poetic situation in which every artist remains the owner of his or her conception of me?

JS: I pretty much surrendered my idea of you to your consumers. There were 2,000 copies of my book printed, which is by far the largest and most widely distributed example of you. And that's not counting the possibility of the book being bootlegged. Anyone who has access to the information in the book is free to go to IKEA and, based on that information, make their own DIY coffin, which is basically a sculpture of mine. So at this point, I have no idea how many of 'my' sculptures are out there complicating the originality of the one I made, or how many copies of "you" are out there, complicating the originality of the 2,000 books I printed.

AL: What do you think about the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, they bought No Ghost Just A Shell as one piece of artwork, with your work being part of a bigger picture. What do

DEATH AND CAPITALISM: BARBARA KRUGER and THE COUNTESS CASTIGLIONE
by Donelle Woolford

It is both an impressive achievement and an overdue banality that women artists currently are enjoying unprecedented levels of success. From Amy Sillman to Rachel Harrison, Kara Walker to Roni Horn, todays woman artists are much less burdened by the stereotypes that constrained Anni Albers, Lee Krasner or Louise Bourgeois. Indeed, for todays women artists, feminine stereotypes are more often an opportunity to be exploited than a mantel to be shed, to the extent that the qualifier "woman" no longer limits our appreciation of their art. This enlightened development has increased interest in those women whose pioneering works have helped to make it possible, and major exhibitions of the work of Valie Export, Anna Goncharova, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley and Martha Rosler occurred in one year alone, a modest precedent for the contentious success of WACK! at MOCA this spring. Now Barbara Kruger, best known for her politically charged red and black photo montages, and the Countess de Castiglione, a politically ambitious noblewoman who made elaborate photo portraits of herself, can be added to the list.

At first glance, it would seem more reasonable to align Castigliones highly theatrical self portraits with the work of Cindy Sherman -- the contemporary artist whose fictionalized photographs have turned the representation of women in art on its head. However, the simultaneous occasion of a show of Castigliones photographs at The Metropolitan Museum in New York with Barbara Krugers retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art makes for a more biting and unpredictable comparison, one that sharpens the pathos of Castigliones narcissism as well as the bathos of Krugers diatribes.

Born Virginia Oldonini in 1837, The Countess Castiglione assumed her title through her marriage to the Count of Castiglione, Francesco Verasis, in 1854. The following year, in order to drum up support for the unification of Italy, King Vittorio Emanuele dispatched the Count and Countess to Paris where he hoped his wiles and her beauty would help garner the support of the French emperor Napoleon III. Little did King Vittorio know how persuasive the Countesss beauty could be, when, only months after meeting Napoleon III, the Countess became part of an international scandal when she disappeared with him for several hours at a garden party. Not long after, the Countess made her first visit to the photo studio of Pierre-Louis Pierson. It is still not known whether the 400+ photographs they produced together over the next forty years were intended as personal trophies or illicit propoganda. Inspired by the heroines of literature and the stage as well as by the highest fashions of the day, Castigliones photographs were made for private viewers only or to satisfy her own colossal vanity. And even though most of her character references and costumes are now profoundly dated and illegible, over the years her prescient faith in the power of appearances and her exploitation of the tricks of the trade have helped turn her amateur obsessions into art.

Vengeance (1963-1967), for example, shows the Countess as the scowling Queen of Etruria, a fictional character apparently based on an obscure Spanish queen and the founding myths of the Roman Empire. Made in response to one of many marital bouts concerning her spending practices and scandalous behavior, the Countess commissioned the portrait and sent it to her husband with the note "to the Count of Castiglione from the Queen of Etruria." (Nearly bankrupted by her extravagances, he eventually divorced her.) In a sweeter vein, Elvira (1861-67) shows the Countess seated in a ball gown of exceeding ridiculousness, with her naked head and shoulders visible above a mound of frothing silk, like a cherry perched on top of a ice cream sundae. Nonetheless, the stunning harmony of the stiff pose, the elaborate dress and her "la Lamballe" coiffure (layered pleats of hair piled high and dotted with pearls) is due in no small measure to the Countesss ability to pull it off.

For all her deluded grandiosity, however, her most moving photographs were made in the final years of her life, when her failing beauty and bruised vanity led her to assume the self-imposed life of a hermit. Having moved to a small, barricaded apartment where mirrors were banned and which she had painted floor to ceiling in black, the Countess nonetheless had the courage and self-awareness to memorialize her decline as works of art. The Foot, the Amputation of the Gruyère (1894) is the most self-deprecating from this period, showing a view of Castigliones feet as if she were lying in her own coffin. Similar in mood (but less macabre) are the St. Cecilia and the Rachel series, where the Countess assumed a number of veiled, langorous attitudes depicting melancholy and mourning. At one time supposedly having had a hand in the Unification of Italy and the Franco-Prussian War, the death of the Countess of Castiglione only confirmed her status as a first-rate femme fatale, one whose brash and elegant sexual politics live on in her images today.

Depictions of women as the victims of their own vanity or as the passive subjects of male desire are anathema to Barbara Krugers work, and I suspect she would loathe Castigliones self-abnegation regardless of her political conquests. Nonetheless, their goals are the same: to challenge and gain access to the masculine halls of power all the while demonstrating their independence from them. But where Castiglione gained her influence by sleeping with her allies, Kruger gains hers by sleeping with her enemies.

In our media-saturated world, where visual cliches and catch phrases get processed and reprocessed in a perpetual regurgitation of information, Barbara Kruger has accomplished no small feat: anytime you see red and white sans serif type pasted over a grainy black and white image you immediately think of Barbara Kruger. Through her surgical reconfiguration of mainstream media images and words, Kruger has carved her idiosyncratic style out of the monolith of consumer capitalism, turning its soporific jingles into jagged slogans eviscerated by their over-sharpened hype. Krugers work is relentless, and her unflinching confidence over the years has been even more influential than her style, to the extent that you dont really think of individual works by Barbara Kruger as much as an overall philosophy and tone of voice. The philosophy is attack! and the tone of voice is aggressive.

Her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is an all out assault on the mind, an anti-aesthetic of fractured images and forked tongues spewing all the classic, acerbic Krugerisms: I Shop Therefor I Am. Its A Small World, But Somebody Has to Clean It. Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face. Central to Krugers approach is her splintering of the apparent complicity of consumer society, a false contract that magazines and televsion suggest everyone is perfectly happy with. By turning the "we" of the mainstream media into "you and I" and "us and them", Kruger demarcates a position for her work outside the male-dominated ramparts of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. At least that was the case in the 1980s, when such confrontational dissent still held a flicker of promise left over from the 1960s. Twenty years later, coming home to the same Madison Avenue she has railed against her whole career, Krugers guerilla warfare seems oddly heartwarming, even quaint, like Dadaist pranks nestled safely in vitrines or a wizened Johnny Lydon recounting the story of God Save The Queen.

Krugers work is better geared for the street, where it functions as pure information unencumbered by the material concerns of preservation and value. In other words, the sheer monetary value of art as property can overwhelm whatever message it might convey, and if Krugers method has a blind spot it is in regard to the fact that the economic forces responsible for the propagation and consumption of her work are largely beyond her control. An interesting irony, then, is that wherever Kruger has been willing to relinquish control to economic forces is precisely where her work is most interesting as art. The best part of her show at the Whitney by far is the final room of the exhibition, where her trademark cut-and-paste emblems are displayed on a numbing array of media and merchandise: T-shirts, ball caps, newspapers, TIME magazine covers, watches, mouse pads, paperweights . . . it goes on and on.

Thus, what for most other artists would be a populist nightmare for Kruger is the fullfilment of her wishes, the achievement of a powerful and independent voice within the power structure that that voice sets out to critique. And although it could be argued that Krugers brand of mainstream defiance has become a clich³ in itself, Kruger earns my respect for being able to accept her death by capitalism with the same aplomb that the Countess of Castiglione accepted hers: with dignity, a little irony, and a cold hard stare into the maw of her all-consuming adversary. That willingness attests not only to Krugers personal strength but also to the place she occupies for women artists. Like the dynamite that disappears as it blows a hole in a barrier, Kruger has sacrificed herself so that others may rush in. this? Can a museum buy an exhibition as a whole?

JS: Certainly. I enjoy this aspect of the project very much, and I like being a part of it. If only museums made these kind of gestures more often! Then we could go see the Armory Show, or the Surrealists International, or Chambres d'Amis over and over again.

AL: I am reappearing in the Van Abbemuseum at the moment. Do you have any thoughts on this?

JS: You have risen from the dead. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Look what happened the last time someone resurrected...

Maybe we should keep you in your tomb, roll the stone back in front of the entrance and keep it guarded for eternity, so we don't run the risk of your becoming a savior. But then Phillip van den Bossche would be out of a job! Maybe he can be one of the guards of the tomb. I understand he is very interested in modern weapons.