Candice Breitz

I went to The Power Plant‘s International Lecture Series featuring Berlin-based South African video artist Candice Breitz. I want to say that it changed my life, but that seems like a bit of an overstatement. Let’s just say that it was mind-blowingly good.

I knew virtually nothing about her work before I went. Luckily, she showed lots of it (these are all stills but there is lots of great video documentation on her website).

Candice Breitz, Mother + Father, 2005
Two Six-Channel Installations

She’s largely been working with appropriated film and video footage for the past few years, including this piece where she painstakingly cut mother and then father characters out of their original films frame by frame. Using only sections where the characters spoke about being mothers or fathers, Breitz then edited them together so that the six characters in each installation seemed to be talking to one another about what it means to be a parent. So imagine Susan Sarandon yelling at Shirley MacLaine, who’s being defended by Diane Keaton, all narrated by a monologue by Meryl Streep. It was sort of schizophrenic, but only in the best possible ways. Like Nam June Paik taken to a whole new animated level.

But even better than her appropriated footage works were her cover song/”portrait” projects where she invited fans of different pop music icons to come into professional music studios and sing along to an entire album of the singer’s work, live in front of the camera. The resulting “covers” of the album by the fans are then synchronized and stacked into banks (or installed in rows, depending on the project) so that an entire choir of fans is singing along to famous pop music.

Candice Breitz, Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), 2005
30-Channel Installation: 30 Hard Drives

It sounds like a really simple idea, and it is, but what you don’t expect is how good all the singers sound together. And what you can’t anticipate is the individuality that comes out as some individuals choose to sing a harmony line, a counter-melody or ad lib between verses. And the props and costume changes involved in the Madonna and Michael Jackson portraits were truly outstanding.

They are not only beautiful, but seem to be truly participatory, respectful, collaborative projects with the community. Breitz spoke about her participants with so much affection and respect for their fandom and emphasized how important it was for her to set the parameters of the project but, once the participants had arrived at the set, to allow them complete control over how they approached the singing, when they started recording, what they did, how they dressed, whether or not they danced… Plus she held debrief sessions with each of them afterwards, at which point they decided whether or not they wanted to sign the release forms allowing her to use the footage (apparently no one has ever refused).

It also helped that she is uniquely articulate, intelligent and willing to admit her own misgivings about the complexity of working with communities in art projects. She’s being commissioned to do a project for The Power Plant in 2009 and said she wants to do a portrait with fans here but did not reveal her singer ideas just yet, so stay tuned… My money’s on Neil Young.