art press 340 reviews

monaco Candice Breitz Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco Salle du quai Antoine 1er 10 october - 25 november 2007

To start by pointing out something that’s no less impressive for being obvious: by recycling fragments of TV series and Hollywood movies, cutting them up and putting them back together so as to underline the eternal ambiguity of the relationship between stars and their public, by making use of the chaotic and conflictual intensity of the screen that watches, absorbs and manipulates us, Candice Breitz seeks to set up an experiment in concentration. But how should that word be understood here? From the point of view of this South African-born artist who live and works in Berlin, concentration refers to accumulation and centralization, of course, but also to a kind of vertigo produced by excess and inevitably characterized as much by discontinuity and bursting apart as by focalization and condensation. Mother and Father (2005), winner of the 2007 international prize for contemporary art awarded by the Prince Pierre Foundation in Monaco, is organized into two installations, each made up of six plasma screens where, on a black background, separated from their usual setting, the plots and backdrops of their movies, and thrust into a different, unexpected matrix, half a dozen women actors (Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep) and a similar number of their male counterparts (Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland and Jon Voight) manifest an irrepressible ardor for projections and narratives. Their abrupt verbal explosions and gestures, the sharp- edged spasms of situations and actions, feed the fierce passions of maternity and paternity. They are agens for the investigation of a tumultuous world of stifled impulses, cries, tears, laughter and happiness lost and found, producing a whole vocabulary of exacerbated feelings crashing into one another in a suffocating profusion that ends up ripping apart the sugar coating on Hollywood-formatted popular entertainment. The Monuments series, made for this exhibition, are large photos of the fans of rock and pop icons (Marilyn Manson, Abba, Iron Maiden, Britney Spears, the Grateful Dead) meeting in a space chosen for its evocation of their respective idols, engaging in mimetic performances linked together by a common desire to show off, and recorded with no direction, no instructions but “Do something different than what everyone else is doing.” These images, powerfully imprinted with the themes of veneration, the intertwining of the complex dimensions of self-affirmation and the staging of the values and references of a given community, bring into tension the natural propensity to individuality and the sharing of the melancholy and droll extravagances of an extreme passion. The important thing here is the exaltation not of a lonely and closed, finalized totality but the scattering of possibilities and the infinite variation of human beings. Breitz thus produces an inflammation of the disturbing traits of this popular culture driven by the mass media that imposes codes and systems of life on us. Her aim is to make them suddenly cool down and collapse like a soufflé. Didier Arnaudet Translation, L-S Torgoff