Candice Breitz
BABEL SERIES
(part of Dada South? an exhibition curated by Roger van Wyk & Kathryn Smith at Iziko SANG)
11/12/09 - 08/01/2010
Candice Breitz, Babel Series, 1999, DVD Installation: 7 Looping DVDs, Installation view: blank projects
The Babel Series consists of seven constantly stuttering DVD loops. Each steals a fragment of footage from the history of music video. The content of each video is relentlessly simple and literally monosyllabic: the seven different moments are appropriated from various pop performances (the line-up ranges from Madonna, Wham and Grace Jones to Queen, Prince, Abba and the Police). Each of the seven moments is then trapped in repetition as it is looped endlessly and noisily before the viewer on a series of television monitors. The seven loops play simultaneously in the space of the installation, creating a cacophonous babble that allegorically echoes the biblical story from which the work takes its title. What the seven videos have in common - beyond their reflection on narcissism and their deliberate choice of ambiguously-gendered stars - is that each evokes the primary building blocks of language. Together, the videos bang a millennial baby talk out of a series of dissonant beats,a baby talk that approaches sheer pandemonium.
A small fragment appropriated from Madonna’s song ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’ has her moaning “Pa – Pa – Pa – Pa – Pa – Pa….” Another video has Freddie Mercury gabbling “Ma – Ma – Ma – Ma –Ma – Ma….” Elsewhere,George Michael whimpers “Me – Me – Me – Me – Me – Me..,” while Grace Jones insists ‘No – No – No – No – No – No - No….’ The bodies of the performers are frozen in language on each flickering screen – constantly emerging and disintegrating as they articulate – both automaton-like in their circular trances and at the same time peculiarly organic in their twitches and jerks. Each contraction of a muscle, gesticulation of a hand, blink of an eyelid, is repeated hypnotically over and over again as the loops run. Here repetition is both the vehicle through which visual and verbal meaning is created and the mechanism through which language degenerates into chaos. The doubling of “Da” as “Da-Da” for example, produces
The potential for meaning, though the arbitrariness of that meaning is clear: depending on who we are, we might take “Da-Da” to mean ‘father’ or ‘yes’(Russian) or ‘hobby-horse’ (French) or `here’ (German). At the same time, the constant repetition of “DaDaDaDaDaDa” seems to make nonsense of the very possibility of transparent meaning. Language morphs and mutates into babble as repetition erodes sense and the possibility of communication. The pulsating bodies of the ambushed performers are opened to the projections of the audience as they somehow become vulnerable to the very viewers who would ordinarily be subject to the infantilizing spell of the pop hit.
In its staging of primal language as always already tainted, the Babel Series alludes poignantly to the challenges facing subject formation in a world in which children often learn their first words by watching television or singing along to pop songs. The installation implies that the entry of the subject into language is inevitably inflected through the global media, restaging concrete poetry such that the utopian aspirations of earlier artists to universal language are jarringly displaced by the infernal universality of the media industry. The resulting discordant environment owes as much to the new poetics of Dada, Futurism and the Soviet avant-garde as it does to Andy Warhol and MTV.
South African artist Candice Breitz (b. Johannesburg, 1972, lives and works in Berlin) has gained international renown for her video installations scrutinizing Hollywood and pop music stars such as Madonna, Meryl Streep, Sharon Stone, Michael Jackson, John Lennon, and Jack Nicholson. At times composed of intricate re-edits of existing footage, at times shot from scratch, her multi-channel video installations reflect on the competing roles that external factors such as family and the media play in the formation of selfhood, exploring the complex relationship between lives lived on and off-screen, and dissecting the web of identifications that make fans and their idols co-dependent. Her work has been presented in numerous group and solo shows at the New Museum (New York), Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), White Cube (London) and the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), among others. Breitz was awarded the 2007 Prix International díArt Contemporain by the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco. Parallel to her new piece for Performa 09, a survey exhibition of her work runs at The Power Plant in Toronto. An exhibition focusing on recent work opened at SFMOMA in October 2009.
Dada South?
Curated by Roger van Wyk and Kathryn Smith, Dada South? draws together a range of works by South African artists dating from the 1960s to the present, representing a range of avant-garde positions in the aftermath of Dada. South African art production is understood not simply as by-products of western avant-garde practices, but as drawing selectively and even randomly on these practices to articulate specific, local conditions. Through an eclectic collection of material, imaginary and intellectual work of our recent history, the exhibition proposes a review of the ambivalent relationship between cultural creation and political resistance.
In an adjoining space, original Dada works and publications by Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Sophie Täuber-Arp and others is assembled for exhibition in South Africa for the first time, providing conceptual reference points through which to formulate an understanding of Dada’s impact on art from South Africa.
The juxtaposition invites a fresh enquiry into South African artistic production, spanning from institutional to non-mainstream and underground practices. It is also an opportunity to reconsider Dada artists’ interest in Africa and the significance of non-western cultures in their practice.
Dada South? opens at Iziko South African National Gallery on December 12, 2009 and runs until February 28, 2010
