For Candice Breitz, her first video installation, shown at the Istanbul Biennale in 1999, was a breakthrough work. It would later lead to a deeper understanding of her own practice and point her to new directions. Says Breitz, “How do you communicate with people whose experience of the world—culturally, linguistically, historically—may be very different from your own?”
Breitz’s video, the Babel Series (1999), was shown in Hagia Eirene Church, a large and beautiful exhibition space in Istanbul. She chose to use cultural images with international currency.
Each of seven separate monitors was devoted to an international pop star such as Madonna or Michael Jackson. The songs were reduced to a single syllable, endlessly looped. The cacophonous sound recalled the first utterances made by babies all over the world: MaMaMa, sang Madonna, and DaDaDa, sang Sting. Breitz’s artistic strategy gives a nod to minimalists like Piet Mondrian and Alexander Rodchenko who sought in their work a universal meaning.
Taking the audience past the moment of instant recognition of the stars, Babel posed the question of what kind of values and ideas are carried with their performances.
In tapping into the global music industry and its icons, Breitz utilized a universal pattern of influence. As neurologist Oliver Sacks writes in his book Musicophilia (2007), music has great power for virtually all of us: “This propensity to music shows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginnings of our species . . . it lies so deep in human nature that one must think of it as innate.”
Inviting fans to reflect on their own role within the culture industry, Breitz has also made enormously popular works like Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) (2006) in which fans of a particular star are invited to sing the song, and then shown on separate monitors singing as an enthusiastic and dedicated chorus. And a new series of photographs, including Marilyn Manson Monument, Berlin, June 2007 (2007), documents fan groups. This panoramic group portrait depicts a gathering of Goth-inspired fans in Berlin.
Breitz has also turned to the vast archives of Hollywood, editing popular movies to give lacerating new insights into the stereotypes they project. At the Castello di Rivoli, a contemporary art museum near Turin, Italy, Breitz set up two rows of six monitors each for her work Mother + Father (2005). Each monitor played parenting scenes from a Hollywood movie in which all detail had been blacked out except the key actor. Such caricatures examine the way the media has usurped a parental role of propagating values in a society of spectacle, as theorized by Guy Debord.
Now based in Berlin, Breitz takes global pop consumerism as her broad subject, critiquing through linguistic and structural means its effects on individuals and society. Her artwork wittily harnesses the language of consumer promotion as a creative riposte to its frequent appropriation of artistic creativity.
Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) 2006
Shot at the Culture Lab, Newcastle
University, UK, August 2006
25-channel installation
Duration: 39 minutes, 55 seconds
Installation view: Bawag Foundation, Vienna
Image courtesy of the artist and
Jay Jopling, White Cube, London
Photographer: Alex Fahl
© Candice Breitz
Mother + Father 2005
Two six-channel installations
Duration of Mother: 13 minutes, 15 seconds
Duration of Father: 11 minutes
Installation views: Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Paolo Pellion
© Candice Breitz
“Abba Monument, Berlin, June 2007” 2007
Digital C-print mounted on Diasec
180 cm x 358.4 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London
© Candice Breitz
“Marilyn Manson Monument, Berlin, June 2007” 2007
Digital C-print mounted on Diasec
180 cm x 463.5 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London
© Candice Breitz
“Iron Maiden Monument, Berlin, June 2007” 2007
Digital C-print mounted on Diasec
180 cm x 427 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London
© Candice Breitz