Candice Breitz
Candice Breitz : infected images
by Pascal Beausse
Candice Breitz’s images seem to be suffering from weird diseases. One easily recognizes pop culture stars, one can even play media-oriented Trivial Pursuit, search one’s memory to find the titles of the movies and video clips they are extracted from. However there is no point in trying to outsmart your opponents, since those images appear as diverted from their initial program. It all happens as if Candice Breitz’s work consisted of infesting the products of contemporary visual culture with media-related viruses. Mainstream audiovisual media – Hollywood movies, soap-operas, video clips – are being diverted, cut, re-edited, and regurgitated in a fatally cyclical duration, obeying an implacable logic unknown up to now. At a time when criticizing the media is quite fashionable, the artist can locate their activity beyond a mere “judgmental” attitude (the well-behaved limitations of which we all know too well). In a world where globalization gains ground through the unrestrained broadcasting, over all territories and all latitudes, of similarly-formatted cultural products, it may still be possible to invent a new life for media-related figures and messages, a less predictable and stale life for these images; The Dreamlife of the Media that lurks in the deepest recesses of Hollywood, MTV & Co’s subconscious.
Candice Breitz immerses herself in show business. On a historical level, she’s lucky to be working when she is, what with the advent of digital home-studios, and the emergence of tools enabling the broad public to seize flows of information and to reshape them, appropriate them, and work out personal versions of them. Having images from the global network transmitted before her editing bench, she works out new scripts for them, non-narrative, but rather, mostly linguistic scripts. The true raw material used in her media-virology lab is language.
Powerlessness of Speech
A recurring feature in Breitz’s video installations is the systematic use of loops, leading to the ad libitum repetition of a sentence, a locution, or a simple phoneme. Speech is taken into an anti-performative dimension; far from having an impact upon the characters or the story, it only acts upon itself in a backward-looking involution, draining itself of its ability to produce anything real. Speech becomes a liberated material living in an impure auditory space, deprived of meaning and unintelligible. Concretely speaking, Candice Breitz’s installations often result in an aural chaos where the voices of an assembly of speakers become tangled. There’s no dialogue, no narrative construction: there are only talking heads blending the tessitura of their tone colors, producing a totally dissonant patchwork of sound. This is what we may call the “Tower of Babylon effect,” from which the title Babel Series is drawn, and which can also be applied to Four Duets or Karaoke. The use of English is recurring, lingua franca of a planet in the thrall of the Empire.
Indeed, Karaoke is structured around the collective entertainment principle which gives the piece its title. United in a centripetal circle, the video screen deludes us into seeing a group as drawn together by the same song, surrounding the viewer like zealots attempting to convert him to the cult of Muzak. They form a kind of chorale that would not resemble a lost community or an idealized past. It’s an autistic chorale, in which each member sings under the dictation of the video screen, zealous as a more or less serious pupil. None of these singers is a native English speaker. What they are practicing requires from them not only an ability to reproduce a tune, but also a command of the English language that allows them to pronounce the lyrics properly. Karaoke has an anti-Benetton impact; it does not dream of a worldwide idyllic community gathered around a classic pop song. Differences and inequalities well up to the surface, as do strategies to offset the lack of command and amateurism; indeed, one of the singers whistles the tune instead of singing the words. The norm here lies in the ability to copy and imitate the accents of a non-native, yet harmonizing, culture. Can we only talk to each other using lyrics and lines from soap-operas? In doing so, what does one reveal of their individuality? What is uttered here is the violence sired by the authoritarian model and the abidance by the rules, expressed to the point of unavoidable cacophony.
Of Making-Of
Each of Candice Breitz’s works is based on a single frame-providing principle, applied in a systematic and accurate way that’s enabled by digital editing. Since, in the contemporary world, each individual is reduced to a bunch of megabytes, and since each one of these fragments can be severed and manipulated, all distortions become possible. The artist puts into practice un-contemplated areas of the spectacular machine and its corollary: the “do-it-yourself” program is an added bonus. However, despite what the chaotic appearances may lead us to believe, there is no intent to restrict oneself to merely showing off as-yet-unexplored audiovisual manipulations.
Candice Breitz gives herself to a radical, incongruous use of semiotics, updating language reflexes in their self-reflexive dimension. Language is taken apart so as to get to the very heart of its contents: the individuation process. Four Duets consists in slicing up songs, only to keep the words “I,” “me,” and “you”, and to compare two versions of a song re-edited thusly. The female singer singing “I, I, I” and “me, me, me” is faced with her body double repeating “you, you, you”… Disorder leads to reducing the world to a narcissistic duo. Egotistic vertigo.
The ABCs of the Media
The sampling method is applied to language, which is thus deconstructed. Babel Series goes extremely far into the use of loops, keeping only a single phoneme from Sting, Prince, Madonna, Abba, Grace Jones, Freddy Mercury, and George Michael video clips. While one repeats “da-da-da” over and over, the other keeps saying “ma-ma-ma,” “pa-pa-pa,” or “no-no-no…” This use of phonetics based on articulation brings about a maelstrom of sound, a magma within which the bases of articulated speech are superimposed, tangled up. The use of systematic, brutally-looped samples evokes what one refers to as a “scratched vinyl” effect; the medium stutters. The machine stammers tirelessly, keeping the beat, implacably, uncompromisingly.
Editing is the chief modus operandi in the audiovisual world. It is commonly considered a way to produce a cinematic space out of fragments recorded in the real world. The reality effect specific to audiovisual narrative modes aims to create a specific reality, separate from the actual reality. The excess of reality caused by the cinematic space is abolished by Candice Breitz; manipulated as mere objects, the voices slip away from the speakers. The filmmaker resorts to a non-narrative application of the “acousmatic voice” described by Michel Chion: through radical repetition, a voice somehow slips away from the body that utters it, and thus becomes disembodied. The soundscape created by Babel Series becomes independent from the images, which feature figures conditioned by the mechanical rhythm of the loops into which they are locked. The pop stars’ voices are indeed uttered by human effigies, but as they are looped, the tangling up creates a specific soundscape, alien and disembodied from the stars, incorporeal voices. In Candice Breitz’s hands, editing becomes a weapon of deconstruction.
Behind the Scenes
Soliloquy Trilogy applies the deconstruction-through-editing method to Hollywood actors’ performances. In this film, only the shots that feature the lead actor reciting their text have been kept. The film’s duration is cut down to the star’s speech time. This post-Marxist reading of acting, concentrating on the actual work they provide, creates a new story focusing upon the monologue of the original movie’s central character. It also requires the viewer to provide their own mental effort, to reconstitute the ellipses, reviving their own memory of the movie. The artist’s manipulation leads the viewer to perform, in turn, an iconoclastic manipulation, by making up a life located out of the superstars’ frame, thus freeing them from the script and its marketing.
The installation called Mother + Father furthers the hi-jacking of Hollywood actors by methodology, allotting each screen, on its pedestal, the role of a character. Extracted from several movies dealing with family ties, those excerpts are entirely decontextualized (the setting in which they were inscribed has been digitally deleted and replaced with a plain background). Thus the exhibition space becomes an operation theater, where actors give birth to a meta-film launched by editing anew their lines as part of a new and unlikely script. Then Hollywood’s moral subconscious resurfaces, highlighting psychological patterns and stereotypical casting with concern to the sacro-saint dream family as fantasized by American society and its tradition-oriented values.
Becoming denounces another recurring theme that’s dear to entertainment cinema: the break-up. Each sequence – based, like Soliloquy, on the extraction of all scenes which don’t feature the main actress – is re-enacted by the artist, in black-and-white, against a plain background. The aim is to become one with the actress, merge with her part by mimicking her performance. This is the lip synch method: shown back-to-back, the two performances are united by the star’s voice. The artist literally appropriates the principle of an MTV program in which teenage viewers can become pop star look-alikes over the course of the show. Like the best artists of our times, Candice Breitz fights against alienation with its very weapons. She magnifies the tendency of the star system to make actors into fetishes by becoming the scarecrow of those figures shaped by show business aesthetics. By depriving fiction of its glamorous coating and rendering an austere version, she emphasizes the over-fabrication and the falseness of entertainment cinema. Abusive methods, such as those resorted to in Actor’s Studio, are revealed to us in all of their ridicule. After this powerful un-doing, the stars can no longer claim to make us dream. As for the artist, she accepts being seen as just one of the masses, mooching off the mass media.
Otherness, Exoticism, and Language Impoverishment
Aïwa to Zen is slightly different; this time, Candice Breitz shoots scenes in a single setting, with five actors. This evolution to film direction, however, confirms her analysis of how inter-human communication is formatted. To play the episodes of this soap opera, the actors have but one hundred and fifty words at their disposal, those the artist could think of before her first trip to Japan. Drawn from art, glossaries of art, manufactured goods, cooking, and tourism, this list is totally aware of its own poverty, and is to be taken as a collection of exotic stereotypes about a culture enriched by its otherness. The Japanese actors use this truncated list, devoid of grammatical dimension, to play at communication. They willingly caricature their own culture, showing that the richness of human relationships entirely depends on the command of a language. This “real” fiction, reduced to the bare narrative and linguistic minimum, appears as a satire of a vernacular TV program, expecting an extra load of words, syntax, and grammar-related elements in order to become as dense as reality.
A Virus Inside the Television
The strategies used by Candice Breitz to recycle media-related material tally our present-day era, cankered by the media’s self-referentiality. The mass media have created a world of their own, an ocean of information within which receivers have elaborated a symbiotic relationship. This new world is called the media sphere. Interfaces, allowing just anyone to act upon media-related matters, started to multiply, thus opening a path away from the binary relationship between transmitter and receiver typical of the previous generation, which was restricted to passive behavior. The manipulation of media-related material became the credo of communication industries themselves, anxious to deepen market dependence. But recycling and re-contextualizing enables one to by-pass the requirement of behaving like a good pupil by complying with mainstream aesthetic features. Though ready-made, the matter used by Candice Breitz does not abide by the tautological scheme of pop culture, which would merely consist in reproducing, within the symbolic field of art, the icons of the time. The viruses she resorts to, and the yet unseen forms they give birth to, offer another reading of contemporary popular culture and of social bonds. The virus of primary language, the virus of symbolic re-editing, and the virus of intrusive dubbing, all invite the viewer to look at reality through the filter of culture. Looking through mass media productions by infecting them with viruses comes down to elaborating a morpho-genetics of pop culture. Candice Breitz gives life to monsters extracted from the show business to reveal how – when in their natural environment – the media puppets convey formatted role models and stereotypes. In doing so, she vilifies the reification of human relationships promoted by the show business.
Candice Breitz’s images seem to be suffering from weird diseases. One easily recognizes pop culture stars, one can even play media-oriented Trivial Pursuit, search one’s memory to find the titles of the movies and video clips they are extracted from. However there is no point in trying to outsmart your opponents, since those images appear as diverted from their initial program. It all happens as if Candice Breitz’s work consisted of infesting the products of contemporary visual culture with media-related viruses. Mainstream audiovisual media – Hollywood movies, soap-operas, video clips – are being diverted, cut, re-edited, and regurgitated in a fatally cyclical duration, obeying an implacable logic unknown up to now. At a time when criticizing the media is quite fashionable, the artist can locate their activity beyond a mere “judgmental” attitude (the well-behaved limitations of which we all know too well). In a world where globalization gains ground through the unrestrained broadcasting, over all territories and all latitudes, of similarly-formatted cultural products, it may still be possible to invent a new life for media-related figures and messages, a less predictable and stale life for these images; The Dreamlife of the Media that lurks in the deepest recesses of Hollywood, MTV & Co’s subconscious.
Candice Breitz immerses herself in show business. On a historical level, she’s lucky to be working when she is, what with the advent of digital home-studios, and the emergence of tools enabling the broad public to seize flows of information and to reshape them, appropriate them, and work out personal versions of them. Having images from the global network transmitted before her editing bench, she works out new scripts for them, non-narrative, but rather, mostly linguistic scripts. The true raw material used in her media-virology lab is language.
Powerlessness of Speech
A recurring feature in Breitz’s video installations is the systematic use of loops, leading to the ad libitum repetition of a sentence, a locution, or a simple phoneme. Speech is taken into an anti-performative dimension; far from having an impact upon the characters or the story, it only acts upon itself in a backward-looking involution, draining itself of its ability to produce anything real. Speech becomes a liberated material living in an impure auditory space, deprived of meaning and unintelligible. Concretely speaking, Candice Breitz’s installations often result in an aural chaos where the voices of an assembly of speakers become tangled. There’s no dialogue, no narrative construction: there are only talking heads blending the tessitura of their tone colors, producing a totally dissonant patchwork of sound. This is what we may call the “Tower of Babylon effect,” from which the title Babel Series is drawn, and which can also be applied to Four Duets or Karaoke. The use of English is recurring, lingua franca of a planet in the thrall of the Empire.
Indeed, Karaoke is structured around the collective entertainment principle which gives the piece its title. United in a centripetal circle, the video screen deludes us into seeing a group as drawn together by the same song, surrounding the viewer like zealots attempting to convert him to the cult of Muzak. They form a kind of chorale that would not resemble a lost community or an idealized past. It’s an autistic chorale, in which each member sings under the dictation of the video screen, zealous as a more or less serious pupil. None of these singers is a native English speaker. What they are practicing requires from them not only an ability to reproduce a tune, but also a command of the English language that allows them to pronounce the lyrics properly. Karaoke has an anti-Benetton impact; it does not dream of a worldwide idyllic community gathered around a classic pop song. Differences and inequalities well up to the surface, as do strategies to offset the lack of command and amateurism; indeed, one of the singers whistles the tune instead of singing the words. The norm here lies in the ability to copy and imitate the accents of a non-native, yet harmonizing, culture. Can we only talk to each other using lyrics and lines from soap-operas? In doing so, what does one reveal of their individuality? What is uttered here is the violence sired by the authoritarian model and the abidance by the rules, expressed to the point of unavoidable cacophony.
Of Making-Of
Each of Candice Breitz’s works is based on a single frame-providing principle, applied in a systematic and accurate way that’s enabled by digital editing. Since, in the contemporary world, each individual is reduced to a bunch of megabytes, and since each one of these fragments can be severed and manipulated, all distortions become possible. The artist puts into practice un-contemplated areas of the spectacular machine and its corollary: the “do-it-yourself” program is an added bonus. However, despite what the chaotic appearances may lead us to believe, there is no intent to restrict oneself to merely showing off as-yet-unexplored audiovisual manipulations.
Candice Breitz gives herself to a radical, incongruous use of semiotics, updating language reflexes in their self-reflexive dimension. Language is taken apart so as to get to the very heart of its contents: the individuation process. Four Duets consists in slicing up songs, only to keep the words “I,” “me,” and “you”, and to compare two versions of a song re-edited thusly. The female singer singing “I, I, I” and “me, me, me” is faced with her body double repeating “you, you, you”… Disorder leads to reducing the world to a narcissistic duo. Egotistic vertigo.
The ABCs of the Media
The sampling method is applied to language, which is thus deconstructed. Babel Series goes extremely far into the use of loops, keeping only a single phoneme from Sting, Prince, Madonna, Abba, Grace Jones, Freddy Mercury, and George Michael video clips. While one repeats “da-da-da” over and over, the other keeps saying “ma-ma-ma,” “pa-pa-pa,” or “no-no-no…” This use of phonetics based on articulation brings about a maelstrom of sound, a magma within which the bases of articulated speech are superimposed, tangled up. The use of systematic, brutally-looped samples evokes what one refers to as a “scratched vinyl” effect; the medium stutters. The machine stammers tirelessly, keeping the beat, implacably, uncompromisingly.
Editing is the chief modus operandi in the audiovisual world. It is commonly considered a way to produce a cinematic space out of fragments recorded in the real world. The reality effect specific to audiovisual narrative modes aims to create a specific reality, separate from the actual reality. The excess of reality caused by the cinematic space is abolished by Candice Breitz; manipulated as mere objects, the voices slip away from the speakers. The filmmaker resorts to a non-narrative application of the “acousmatic voice” described by Michel Chion: through radical repetition, a voice somehow slips away from the body that utters it, and thus becomes disembodied. The soundscape created by Babel Series becomes independent from the images, which feature figures conditioned by the mechanical rhythm of the loops into which they are locked. The pop stars’ voices are indeed uttered by human effigies, but as they are looped, the tangling up creates a specific soundscape, alien and disembodied from the stars, incorporeal voices. In Candice Breitz’s hands, editing becomes a weapon of deconstruction.
Behind the Scenes
Soliloquy Trilogy applies the deconstruction-through-editing method to Hollywood actors’ performances. In this film, only the shots that feature the lead actor reciting their text have been kept. The film’s duration is cut down to the star’s speech time. This post-Marxist reading of acting, concentrating on the actual work they provide, creates a new story focusing upon the monologue of the original movie’s central character. It also requires the viewer to provide their own mental effort, to reconstitute the ellipses, reviving their own memory of the movie. The artist’s manipulation leads the viewer to perform, in turn, an iconoclastic manipulation, by making up a life located out of the superstars’ frame, thus freeing them from the script and its marketing.
The installation called Mother + Father furthers the hi-jacking of Hollywood actors by methodology, allotting each screen, on its pedestal, the role of a character. Extracted from several movies dealing with family ties, those excerpts are entirely decontextualized (the setting in which they were inscribed has been digitally deleted and replaced with a plain background). Thus the exhibition space becomes an operation theater, where actors give birth to a meta-film launched by editing anew their lines as part of a new and unlikely script. Then Hollywood’s moral subconscious resurfaces, highlighting psychological patterns and stereotypical casting with concern to the sacro-saint dream family as fantasized by American society and its tradition-oriented values.
Becoming denounces another recurring theme that’s dear to entertainment cinema: the break-up. Each sequence – based, like Soliloquy, on the extraction of all scenes which don’t feature the main actress – is re-enacted by the artist, in black-and-white, against a plain background. The aim is to become one with the actress, merge with her part by mimicking her performance. This is the lip synch method: shown back-to-back, the two performances are united by the star’s voice. The artist literally appropriates the principle of an MTV program in which teenage viewers can become pop star look-alikes over the course of the show. Like the best artists of our times, Candice Breitz fights against alienation with its very weapons. She magnifies the tendency of the star system to make actors into fetishes by becoming the scarecrow of those figures shaped by show business aesthetics. By depriving fiction of its glamorous coating and rendering an austere version, she emphasizes the over-fabrication and the falseness of entertainment cinema. Abusive methods, such as those resorted to in Actor’s Studio, are revealed to us in all of their ridicule. After this powerful un-doing, the stars can no longer claim to make us dream. As for the artist, she accepts being seen as just one of the masses, mooching off the mass media.
Otherness, Exoticism, and Language Impoverishment
Aïwa to Zen is slightly different; this time, Candice Breitz shoots scenes in a single setting, with five actors. This evolution to film direction, however, confirms her analysis of how inter-human communication is formatted. To play the episodes of this soap opera, the actors have but one hundred and fifty words at their disposal, those the artist could think of before her first trip to Japan. Drawn from art, glossaries of art, manufactured goods, cooking, and tourism, this list is totally aware of its own poverty, and is to be taken as a collection of exotic stereotypes about a culture enriched by its otherness. The Japanese actors use this truncated list, devoid of grammatical dimension, to play at communication. They willingly caricature their own culture, showing that the richness of human relationships entirely depends on the command of a language. This “real” fiction, reduced to the bare narrative and linguistic minimum, appears as a satire of a vernacular TV program, expecting an extra load of words, syntax, and grammar-related elements in order to become as dense as reality.
A Virus Inside the Television
The strategies used by Candice Breitz to recycle media-related material tally our present-day era, cankered by the media’s self-referentiality. The mass media have created a world of their own, an ocean of information within which receivers have elaborated a symbiotic relationship. This new world is called the media sphere. Interfaces, allowing just anyone to act upon media-related matters, started to multiply, thus opening a path away from the binary relationship between transmitter and receiver typical of the previous generation, which was restricted to passive behavior. The manipulation of media-related material became the credo of communication industries themselves, anxious to deepen market dependence. But recycling and re-contextualizing enables one to by-pass the requirement of behaving like a good pupil by complying with mainstream aesthetic features. Though ready-made, the matter used by Candice Breitz does not abide by the tautological scheme of pop culture, which would merely consist in reproducing, within the symbolic field of art, the icons of the time. The viruses she resorts to, and the yet unseen forms they give birth to, offer another reading of contemporary popular culture and of social bonds. The virus of primary language, the virus of symbolic re-editing, and the virus of intrusive dubbing, all invite the viewer to look at reality through the filter of culture. Looking through mass media productions by infecting them with viruses comes down to elaborating a morpho-genetics of pop culture. Candice Breitz gives life to monsters extracted from the show business to reveal how – when in their natural environment – the media puppets convey formatted role models and stereotypes. In doing so, she vilifies the reification of human relationships promoted by the show business.
