Category: Art Writing

Art writing I’ve done since the early 2000s, orginally appearing in a range of online and print publications internationally.

Candice Breitz talks to Rosemary Heather

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Berlin-based South African artist, Candice Breitz
Candice Breitz has been Professor of Fine Art at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2007

When forgotten, pop stars become like wallpaper in our daily lives. Once they become ensconced as icons, they take on an ulterior function. Probably only students listen to Bob Marley these days, but this doesn’t stop me from singing on of his songs, involuntarily, when walking down the street. This is one of the subjects of Candice Breitz’s work. By recording a popular song as sung by its multitude of fans, or taking the overly familiar images of media stars and breaking them down into their constituent parts, Breitz makes evident the unconscious roles these icons play in our lives. If the idea of ‘Clint Eastwood’ has become as natural to us as a tree, Breitz works to make sure he comes to seem unnatural to us again, helping us to decode our world and understand it a little better. In Factum (2009), commissioned for her solo exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto, she worked with sets of twins to literally construct a composite portrait of their public selves. Splitting the one into two–two people on two screens who look all but identical–serves as a nice metaphor for her practice as a whole, which reconfigures the mediated world into a self-reflective entity. I spoke with Candice in September 2009 when she was in Toronto for the opening of the Factum exhibition.

You’re working with not necessarily the newest stars but the most established. Figures like Bob Marley, Meryl Streep are so ubiquitous they’re almost beyond conscious attention. Even when I was preparing for this interview, I got Buffalo Soldier stuck in my head…


Candice: It happens to the best of us! There’s an excellent German word for this phenomenon… a song that gets annoyingly stuck in one’s head is called an Ohrwurm or Earworm.

This goes the heart of what you’re doing. You could have chosen Colin Firth or Brad Pitt, so I’m just wondering what it is about those stars in particular that interest you? Is it because you’re a fan?

Well, I’m interested in the kind of patina that celebrity acquires with a little bit of distance. And I think that—with very rare exception—I haven’t really been interested in addressing things that are happening now, things that are too
contemporary, because I think it can be hard to understand things when you’re standing right in front of them. In a sense, I’m much more interested in material which has the potential to tell us something about who we were, who we have been in relation to who we are now, than in material that claims to be able to tell us who we are right now. So much of what is happening right now won’t remain significant in the long run; it won’t have that Buffalo Soldier quality. From the vantage point of now, it’s hard to tell which cultural moments will be collectively internalised and
become part of our shared memory and our ongoing cultural being: proximity can be blinding.

You could say that I’m interested in treating the footage that I recycle almost archaeologically. I made an installation in 2002 that I titled Diorama, using short clips from the soap opera Dallas as my raw material. That was the first time it
occurred to me that the television screen is somewhat like a vitrine – you know, you visit a museum of natural history and they’ve got stuffed creatures and preserved artefacts displayed in glass boxes, objects that are supposed to open onto a greater understanding of who we’ve been or how we’ve interacted with our natural environment. And so within my installations, I like to think that the television or the plasma display becomes a vitrine of sorts: slightly aged footage can give off a lot of clues as to what our priorities were and are, what values we have aspired to, how current conventions came into being. With a little bit of historical distance, it becomes much easier to translate, to be in dialogue with footage.

And your formal strategies of breaking down the stars’ performances into memes. Do you think that that helps to break down our identification with them… or, as I said, our ability to disregard them, our tendency to treat
these individuals as sort of psychic wallpaper?

We wallow so much in images from the mainstream media, voluntarily or otherwise, that much of this imagery comes to feel almost like a natural landscape, so natural in fact that it can be easy to forget how contrived, how constructed much of this imagery is. To come at it from different angles so that it becomes legible in alternate ways, is a way to acknowledge that the language that is available to us via the mainstream media is a conventionalised vocabulary of gestures and expressions, not to mention constructed forms of behaviour. I’m interested in looking at what terms are privileged by the mainstream, in breaking the vocabulary down: I think of myself more as a minimalist than a pop artist…

Oh that’s interesting…

So sort of breaking it down — as you suggest — into memes. I haven’t thought of my process in those terms, but it makes sense. What are the basic building blocks of mainstream culture? And how do they aggregate to convey who we are? To strip something down—a love song, a blockbuster film, a soap opera—to the basic units that structure it, is to point to its constructedness, to the fact that it has been composed or put together rather than just existing in a natural state…

And that also shows that we do have a kind of intimate relationship with these characters. I think because you reconstruct these images, and present them as an installation, your work sort of acts out this process of the way we internalise these personalities.


It’s certainly not about taking cynical distance… Nor would I want to suggest that I stand outside of the culture that I interrogate or recycle in my work. I’m as prone to this culture as the next person. I think it’s important to avoid dismissing it too readily. Regardless of how self-reflexive and clever we’ve become about picking popular culture apart—understanding its effects and the ways in which subjectivity is inflected through it—it nevertheless has an affect which can’t be swept away, and which I think we have to seriously consider. I think it’s important to try and
understand this affect in its complexity rather than simply characterising it as a negative force and turning a blind eye to it. Why are people so affected by a song or movie that is transparently manipulative or that portrays complex, layered experience in deceptively simplistic terms? People are not stupid. Your average moviegoer understands that they’re being manipulated to some extent, that people don’t appear or behave in reality as they appear or behave on the big screen. And yet the affect remains. I think that’s worth thinking about.

Just to add to that, I was covering the film festival in Toronto and I was at the press office and there was a media scrum around Megan Fox. So I got a little glimpse of her… even though, basically, I don’t know who she is…

I don’t either, but I know the name…

Exactly. And I was still, like, dazzled because she looked so…

…Put together?

Put together. That’s the exact expression that I’d use…

I suppose what my work tries to do is to understand the ‘putting together,’ you know, the consequences of being exposed to so much ‘put-togetherness,’ not only for those individuals who are put together and made visible to us by various marketing forces, but also for those of us who consume the tribe of put-togethers via our cultural habits.

You could say that these globalised stars, like Bob Marley, did the advance work of globalism, because they were global stars before globalism. And yet we’re moving into an era where it could be argued that there’s more diversity and fragmentation of the people who are considered stars, there are lesser stars, the whole B-list to D-list phenomenon brought to us by Reality TV… I’m interested in the fact that your work is also moving in that direction. Your newest project with the twins, Factum (2009), for instance, moves away from stars to real people.

I’m not sure I would agree that working with ‘real people’ is a shift in my practice. Since I started making videos around 1999, I’ve pursued two parallel trajectories. On the one hand, I’ve made a series of artworks using found footage, which tends to address celebrity in its various guises. But I’ve also been interested in the flip side of this phenomenon, not just the people endowed with celebrity and visibility, but also the invisible others who sit and watch the screen, who consume what is on the screen. I’ve made a series of works, starting with a piece called Karaoke in 2000, which are about the reception of popular culture, the fans or consumers that make celebrity a possibility in the first place. My work has tracked both the ‘somebodies’ and the ‘nobodies,’ as Warhol might facetiously put it. In a work like Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) (2005), the fans are not telling their stories in a conventional sense, but I think they do tell us a great deal about who they are through their re-performances of the music, in the choices they make about how
they stage their relationship to the music. I think of Legend, and the other projects in which I have worked with communities of fans, as oblique forms of portraiture, attempts to get closer to understanding what it is about listening to music that creates meaning for people, why it is that a particular kind of music gains significance within a particular person’s life.

So working with ordinary people—as I do in Factum—is not really a shift as such. What’s perhaps new about this series, is that it attempts to ask the question, gingerly perhaps, maybe even neurotically, about the extent to which the
biographical experience of ordinary people can survive the overwhelming dominance of celebrity narratives that are at the heart of the culture industry. With genres like biography and portraiture, it’s hard to avoid certain claims for
transparency, certain tropes that imagine a lifetime of experiences as a kind of monolithic trajectory. Factum is my attempt to find a jagged way to look at how a mass of fragments comes together to make up a particular life or, actually, a particular pair of lives. Whether the works are ultimately interesting on those terms, I’m not sure… They’re still very fresh, very recently completed.

And yet you made the decision to dress the twins the same.

I guess that’s the arty part!

It’s beautiful – formally it’s gorgeous. But in terms of what you were saying about biography, there’s a splitting effect there which is interesting in relationship to your older work, it relates maybe to ideas about replication in relation to mass media. Are you maybe familiar with Robert Rauschenberg’s Factum paintings? Do you know them?

Yes, I am.

My series of double portraits of identical twins is named after those paintings. The two paintings are twins of a sort, twins that were separated at birth. One went to live in MoMA in New York; the second is in the collection of MoCA, Los Angeles. That said, I don’t think Rauschenberg was thinking about twins when he mad Factum I and Factum II in 1957. He was probably thinking about the tension between two different ideas about what a work of art is: the work of art as an exteriorized expression of subjectivity, as a product of a creative subject regurgitating its interiority or selfhood, versus the work of art as a thing that is subject, like all other things in the world, to various external forces beyond the
artist’s control. At that moment in time, industrial production—its capacity to produce things en masse through mechanical repetition—was one such force. When Rauschenberg takes a gestural brushstroke and attempts to duplicate it, as he does in his Factum paintings, he predicts everything that was about to happen with pop and minimalism: the work of art was about to be overtly serialised, artists were about to start producing their works industrially in a manner that would echo commodity production. The mythologies so dear to Pollock and the Abstract
Expressionists were about to be obliterated.

Though Rauschenberg may not have been thinking about twins, I think his Factum paintings basically ask questions about how a work of art comes into being… via the nature of the artist… or via the nurturing forces of the larger world as these impact on the artist. My Factum portraits I guess raise similar questions in relation to subject formation. Like Rauschenberg’s paintings, identical twins are at first glance overwhelmingly similar, but the more time you spend with them, the more apparent the differences—subtle and dramatic—become. Despite all the forces of sameness
that press in on us, and there are many, the idiosyncrasy of inner life nevertheless prevails. That of course goes for everybody, not just twins. Delicate as it may be, there is a resistance to homogeneity in the minute decisions that we each make in everyday life, and this is what interests me. Hence the title of the show at The Power Plant in Toronto – Same Same – with its silent ‘…but different.’ I’m interested in the small and quirky ways in which people manage to differentiate themselve under the duress of sameness.

People perform that…

I’m Canadian and it’s often observed that Canadians have a kind of outsider perspective because we’re living next to the behemoth of the US. And I’m just wondering if you feel, as a native of South African, that this gave you a particular perspective on these globalised stars that maybe you wouldn’t have if you had grown-up elsewhere?

In South Africa we only got domestic television in 1976. I wasn’t really born into television, if you know what I mean – television wasn’t there during my early formative years. I clearly remember the day my parents brought a television home for the first time – I think it must have been around 1978; I was about six years old. The single channel that was available was tightly controlled and censored by the state.

A bigger kick than television itself came with the arrival of VHS a few years later: the possibility to selectively view footage, to have some kind of editorial control over what one was watching, to be able to fast forward, rewind, pause. VHS gave my generation the technical tools to break the moving image down in a domestic setting, to start intuitively understanding the constitutive elements of footage and the ways in which it could be manipulated. And once you can break something down, once you start to understand how something is constructed—the very fact that it is constructed rather than existing in some kind of transcendent form—then you can also start thinking about putting it together again in new ways, translating it, rewriting it. Later there would be a number of technical innovations that pushed this process further, but VHS was—for me at least—the first opportunity to think of footage grammatically, syntactically. By shuffling the constitutive elements of any given sequence of images, you can get it to speak different meanings, make it accessible in new ways, prompt people to reconsider what is being said.

Well, and just as a last comment, something about your work reminds me of YouTube, not unsurprisingly, I suppose…

What can I say? Those guys copied me…! But on a more serious note, I don’t find it surprising at all when different people arrive at similar forms at the same moment. If everybody eats the same food, we’re bound to end up occasionally shitting the same shit!

This interview orginally published on apengine.org (now defunct) in September 2009.

Artists at Work: Luis Jacob talks to Rosemary Heather

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

ROSEMARY HEATHER: How has your art practice developed in the local context in Toronto? We have known each other for 10 years, and I know you have always been very involved in different local scenes. Can you talk about your involvement with the Anarchist Free School, and how that informs your current practice?

LUIS JACOB: My education has played a big role. I studied semiotics and philosophy at the University of Toronto.

RH: You are not trained as an artist?

LJ: No, not formally at all. Art history, art theory and art technique are things I taught myself. The interesting thing about the University, with professors like Bart Testa and especially John Russon, was that they approached both semiotics and philosophy as being about intersubjectivity. Semiotics asks how significance comes about, and signification itself is a question of mediating relationships among people. This was not a purely linguistic or philological approach to semiotics, but was informed by cultural and social theory. Similarly, the philosophy I was taught was less concerned with metaphysics or logic than it was about intersubjectivity-about being with others in the world.

RH: The way you compile images addresses the whole viewer, and this brings up your non-hierarchical presentation of the images.

LJ: As individuals, we do belong to different worlds. It is important that artists address this reality. Recently I presented A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice at the Basel Miami Art Fair. This work includes a video of a nude dancer performing a choreography in the snow, and a Canadian art critic wrote that this video was ‘the most embarrassing in the fair’. I thought, ‘well what do they have to be embarrassed by?’ Of course, this is logical since nudity in our culture is the realm of shame and embarrassment. In the context of this art fair, the work was understood as an instance of bad behaviour. It was vulgar. But this is such an interesting observation, to notice that the work touches on vulgarity. Every once in a while someone gives me a comment, often a negative comment, that helps me to articulate something.

RH: The critic thought that the performer, Keith Cole, dancing naked in the snow, is silly somehow, and what you point out is that they are identifying something that is very intelligible but rejecting it.

LJ: Yes, rejecting it as false rather than as a mode of communicating.

RH: That leads on to questions about your interest in modes of expressiveness and sincerity-and as you say, inelegance and vulgarity-modes that are rejected. For me this is very much what your work at Documenta 12 was about. Maybe you could first describe the video installation?

LJ: The installation has a long title: A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice, Based on the Choreography of Françoise Sullivan and the Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth (With Sign-Language Supplement). This work is oriented around a freestanding wall. On one side of the wall there is a reading area comprised of two eccentric teak-root chairs where one may read a brochure that is also part of the artwork; on the other side of the wall there are three videos, a large projection flanked by two monitors.

RH: Keith Cole’s dance performance in your video projection is very much about expressiveness. For me, it transcends the ridiculous and is not meant to be read in an ironic register. In conversation, I once described it as a kind of levelling or equalization of different languages and modes of expression. The installation had sign language on the monitors, and the dance performance used camp. In the Album III on the surrounding walls, you also made room for different pictorial languages. To clarify, the dancer is naked in only one version of the choreography?

LJ: Yes, there are two versions of that performance. In Documenta, we featured Keith Cole performing a choreography in the snow while wearing a costume that referred to Françoise Sullivan’s original costume from the 1940s. That same choreography exists in a second version (that was shown in Miami, and will be shown at the Barbican in London) where he is performing nude.

Perhaps this has something to do with what you identify as sincerity, the fact that he is vulnerable, outside in the snow, and is completely exposed. You know he is not comfortable, and he is getting colder and colder as the minutes pass by. At one point he lies down flat on the snow. You can project yourself into what he is experiencing, even though you are only watching a video. Maybe this suggests a sincerity or directness of communication…

RH: He is putting himself on the line. It is very clear.

LJ: This sincerity may also have something to do with Keith’s body. He is a trained dancer, but his body looks at odds with what many people expect a dancer’s body to look like. This can register in different ways. One person can see it as a vulgar gesture: ‘I shouldn’t have to look at this non-idealized body. How dare you represent a non-idealized body?’ Another person can see it as liberating, or sincere. None of us possess an ideal body, so what can be read as vulgar by one person can also read as honest by another, or authentic. ‘Authentic’ is a loaded term, of course, but it is one I would like to keep open. I do believe that there is such a thing as authenticity, existential authenticity, and this is a term I prefer more than ‘sincerity’.

RH: What about your use of sign language? Why is it there? Why do you have two interpreters? Are they saying the same thing, or two different things?

LJ: One of the sign language interpreters is signing the words of Barbara Hepworth and Herbert Read in American Sign Language (ASL), and the other is signing the words of Françoise Sullivan and Paul-Émile Borduas in langue des signes québécoise (LSQ).

For someone who does not understand sign language, what is your relationship to seeing someone signing in an ‘other’ language? And for someone who does use sign language, what is your relationship to understanding one sign language but not the other? American Sign Language is chosen because it is the ‘universal’ language. But even for an ASL user, the LSQ often presents an experience of ‘otherness’ as well.

RH: That leads me back to your idea of creating collisions between different regimes of meaning, and how this addresses the whole viewer. Do you think that incorporating the ‘other’, or acknowledging the other’s existence, is a way in which you create the whole person?

LJ: Sure, but only if we understand that it is inadmissible to have real ‘otherness’. As human beings we are structured so that we always comprehend otherness, embrace or appropriate otherness in some way. Though inadmissible, however, we encounter ‘otherness’ all the time. Intrinsically, we are even ‘other’ to ourselves! Look at our unconscious. Look, even, at the many ‘selves’ we become throughout the course of our lives.

While at school I connected with the house music scene, a scene that dealt with intersubjectivity and its other-alienation-quite explicitly. The classic house songs are various theses about these same questions about togetherness and alienation, created by black and often gay musicians. If house music can be said to have one anthem it is a track by a man named Larry Heard, called ‘Can You Feel It?’ That is the thesis of house: that house is not a thing, certainly it is not a building, but rather house is a joyous, interpersonal experience.

Later on, after deciding to become an artist, I connected with Toronto’s anarchist community. In 1998 there was a major anarchist gathering in Toronto called Active Resistance, with hundreds and hundreds of anarchists coming from all across North America. That was an amazingly formative experience, which I understood as house in another guise. I found very interesting the way that people organized the event, and the way that people related to one another, in opposition to social hierarchies.

One of the results of the Active Resistance gathering at the local level was that a group of us in Toronto continued to meet afterwards, and decided to launch the Anarchist Free School. I soon became very invested in this collective project, and at a certain point I decided to make the different aspects of my life-being an artist, being involved in the dance community, being involved in the anarchist community-become present to one another.

RH: I wanted to ask you about your process. To produce Album III, the image archive you showed at Documenta 12, and which is part of an ongoing project in which you arrange found images on panels that are mounted on the wall. How did you collect the images you used?

LJ: All the images are collected from various books and magazines. Basically, I decided to work with images that floated within my orbit: junk mail, magazines being discarded by friends, or used books from Goodwill or Value Village.

RH: Tobias Buche has a similar project focused on collecting and arranging images, quite often using photocopies. However, you work exclusively with non-reproduced, non-digital sources…

LJ: Working with original images gives an artefact quality to the photographs, one that emphasizes not only their image content, but also their original context. Their artefact quality brings not only the imagery into dynamic play within the Album, but also brings into play the various life-worlds that the images originally inhabited. Once they are laminated on the panels they almost have a scrapbook feel, and especially with the pins it refers on the one hand to a bulletin board, and on the other hand, it alludes to those insect…

RH: Specimens…

LJ: Specimens, exactly. I produced Album I in 2000, when I realized that the steps of development in my work were becoming too close to one another, the process was becoming too tight. So I decided to throw it open and project my thinking in a different direction, even in different directions at once. The images for the first Album were selected because they all depicted things that are vertical and things that are horizontal. This simple process became a way to crack my authorship a little, and to work with other people’s ‘words’, so to speak-or other people’s images-and have them determine the narrative that I wanted to shape, allow that to land me somewhere unexpected.

RH: Can you elaborate on the idea of your process being ‘too close’ in its steps?

LJ: For an artist, having a definite set of themes makes the work legible, but I realized that legibility was not exactly the kind of communication I needed. I am interested in contact. At one time, I thought contact could be achieved through clarity and lucidity, so I always tried to make my work as clear as I could. Then I realized that clarity was actually a detriment to contact. I saw that what is effective in aesthetic contact is something closer to disturbance, something much deeper, more unconscious or intuitive. So rather than clarity I am pursuing forms of perversity and ways of doing things correctly wrong.

RH: ‘Correctly wrong’, that’s a nice turn of phrase.

LJ: When something is wrong in the right way, that is what I am calling perverse. When meaning-systems collide, or even coexist, energy is created that generates new meanings. This energy is based upon a synthesis that happens at the level of the recipient rather than at the level of the producer. This is what I understand by ‘aesthetic contact’.

RH: These ideas connect to your effort to crack open your practice and not assume that you had the ability to create clarity on your own. When you say you are making meaning-systems collide, this brings the unconscious into play, and relates to the way in which the images in the various Albums are organized according to formal homologies. It suggests an unconscious response.

LJ: I take for granted that all of us have creative capacities, rather intense and brilliant creative faculties that include the capacity to synthesize our experience of things. The Albums are quite large; some contain 160 panels with hundreds of images. This requires a kind of attention that is perhaps unusual within a gallery context. The piece ‘calls’ to viewers as being individuals who possess complex capacities, in the way Althusser describes ideology as ‘calling’ you. He used the term ‘interpellate’. The Albums call you…

RH: They name you…

LJ: Yes, the Albums frame the viewer as being able to grasp a large and complex whole. More and more we are becoming used to being addressed as people who can easily ‘get’ something in a flash, but the Albums do something quite different. There are homologies between images that stand next to one another, and through that process of connect-the-dots the specific narrative of each Album unfolds. But every once in a while there is also an image that does not match anything around it. These stray images become a kind of flag for the attentive viewer, of something that will be picked up at a later point in the narrative. It is amazing to me how adept our unconscious is in being able to hold onto these things that do not make immediate meaning, and keep them in suspension until the synthesis can occur later on.

LJ: Every encounter with an Album must of necessity be something like: ‘I am not the centre of the world. I can read many images, but not all of these images, because there are other worlds of representation that I do not belong to.’ Perhaps there is something non-hierarchical about this encounter with a wide horizon.

What is essential for our experience of art-what is foundational-is the experience of non-intelligibility, a kind of dislocation. Aesthetic experience for us today is first of all an encounter with otherness, with strangeness; but an otherness that, crucially, is there demanding appropriation, intelligibility. What is so constructive about aesthetic experience is that it requires a creative act on the part of the viewer, an act of synthesis that is original through and through. The ‘creativity’ so praised of artists, and the ‘originality’ so lauded in works of art, are in reality nothing but displaced descriptions that properly apply on the other side, on the side of the art-viewer who encounters their own authenticity in front of an artwork.

This interview originally published by https://www.afterall.org/ in March 2008.

Bruce LaBruce in Conversation with Rosemary Heather

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Canadian art provocateur Bruce La Bruce
Bruce sees porn as the last radical art form

Well, Googie in Super 8½says “I don’t give a damn about continuity.” And it is kind of a luxury, continuity. Because you have to have a person who is specifically hired to do that job and you really need someone who knows what they’re doing. The person who was doing it on Otto had no clue what she was doing and she’d never done it before and she would come to me and explain all the continuity errors of a scene that I just shot after the fact. And I’d be like, “Oh well, thanks for telling me now”. After everything had been shot…

Army of YouTube

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Faced with the awe-inspiring popularity of web-monoliths like YouTube, contemporary art risks becoming nothing more than a quaint relic of the 20th century.

It’s probably not fair to compare contemporary art practice with YouTube; yet there is evidence to suggest that somewhere in the ulterior of its collective brain, the art world does just this, and finds itself lacking. How else to understand the ongoing assurances given in art exhibition press releases and catalogue essays about the important role the viewer plays in the construction of meaning – and the intention to facilitate it with this very exhibition?

If artists once played a leading – avant garde – role in providing a complex and forward-looking framework for reflection on the contemporary world, it now seems most comfortable bringing up the rear, providing explanations for developments already intuitively understood and widely enjoyed by the culture at large.