Candice Breitz on Pop Idols & Portraiture

From an article by Christy Lange titled
“Candice Breitz on Pop Idols & Portraiture”

When she was commissioned by T-B A21 Vienna to make a work in Jamaica recently, Candice Breitz decided to deliver Bob Marley’s Legend album from the ‘Babylon’ of consumer culture and to return it to its Jamaican fans. Breitz tracked down dedicated Marley fans and invited them into a recording studio to perform the Legend album a cappella from start to finish. The resulting installation was a composite portrait of 30 performances shown on 30 monitors – a bumpy, variable chorus of Marley’s most devoted fans. Following Legend, Breitz decided to pursue this method of portraiture in the depiction of two more superstars, Michael Jackson and Madonna. King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) and Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) are the result of two album-length re-recordings of Thriller and the Immaculate Collection, as sung by devotees of the superstars. Their performances are alternately reminiscent of the anxious anticipation of stardom seen in the straining faces of Pop Idol contestants, and the unselfconscious enthusiasm of amateurs. Breitz found her King imitators in Germany, where Jackson’s reputation was apparently untainted by his recent trial… Queen stars 30 Madonna fans from Italy singing their hearts out to their idol’s songs. Breitz describes the experience in the studio as “something like a singles club”. Performers brought their own props, negotiating their way through Madonna‘s multiple identities. One Madonna wannabe croons in a deluge of confetti, another constantly reapplies his lipgloss between songs. Through these individual portraits, Breitz extracts the redeeming potential of mass culture – its ability to provide a vehicle for undirected expression. As previous works by Breitz paradoxically suggest, mass culture can be both monolithic and malleable. While Marley, Madonna and Jackson may play a lopsidedly central role in shaping their fans’ lives and identities, these fans play a reciprocal part in resurrecting the stars’ original appeal, which has been subsumed by the celebrity culture that created them. The culture of stardom may thrive on a series of cheap imitations, mimicking an elusive idea of ‘celebrity’, but even in this concatenation of simulated identities, a few authentic portraits can still be discovered.

Source: Modern Painters