Anna Best

Best’s ‘Mrs L’ surfs the net as a novice. She is the invention of Best, and to an extent an alter-ego. She works in a department store, and her random drifting from one web site to another perhaps relates to this. “People don’t often do this kind of aimless surfing,” says Best, “because it can be a nightmare. But Mrs L follows threads of personal interest, like wandering around the world.” Rather in the spirit of some modernist narrative poem, there is another key character, Mrs A-Z: the biographer of Mrs L, as well as a cast of secondary characters.

Peter Edwards was the ‘technical collaborator’ on this project, and the seventeen-metre long drawing on paper, here shown on trestle tables, represents instructions to him for the construction of the web-site. His own technical notes for this process are also being shown. The finished site itself can be seen on a monitor, as well, of course, on the web (the piece is called Error 404 and is at www.c-ship.org).

To an extent the drawing resembles some of the drawings Best was doing in the 1980s, in which layered, semi-diagrammatic and sometimes fearsomely biological drawings were labelled with words and phrases. In a review for Art Monthly Michael Gibbs wrote of Error 404 that it “manages to elide the local into the global, the personal into the universal, producing a compelling, if exhausting, piece of social literature set in cyberspace.”

“The content,” Best says, “was stolen from other web-sites, and then edited and stitched together. It‘s score, a storyboard. It‘s about being an artist. Drawing here is a navigation tool and the whole is somewhere between drawing and writing, like a map. There‘s a semi-automatic writing style to the narrative.” Best began as a sculptor but moved on to work with video and other media and to the creation of ambitious events (perhaps most notably the ‘Wedding Project’ which involved an actual wedding with reception, organised by the artist). Error 404 has been shown in various forms in England, Wales, Spain and Venezuela and was selected by ‘architectstoday’ as one of the two best web sites of 2001.

text by David Lillington