“Within any consciousness there is a Greek chorus, a mess of intertwined voices” – Candice Breitz.
Candice Breitz, born in 1972, is a South African contemporary video and photography artist. She manipulates video footage and appropriates from popular culture. She’s currently a professor in Berlin where she lives.
The following is an installation video she’s done in 2008 where she manipulates Hollywood movies picking out different characters played by Meryl Streep over the stretch of 1978 to 2008. The characters are cropped out of the movies and brought together as though in an internal conversation. “The resulting narrative [] sees the transformation of the star [] to “her” – gendered stereotypes grappling with introspective [] dialogues.” It is a curious video that sheds light on different aspects of how “She” is perceived in Hollywood movies mainly on the questions of love and marriage. We find these different women, or perhaps the same woman, discussing and the conversation evolves into an argument the flows over different topics related to the female life as per Hollywood’s depiction, which seems to evolve around the woman/wife’s dependance on the relationship with a man/husband. Sometimes the argument breaks out of it but eventually returns back to this dependance on the man/husband.
HER, 1978 – 2008 from Candice Breitz on Vimeo.
Breitz uses cleverly not only words to construct the conversation she depicts to us but also visual similarities which she arranges in specific patterns to magnify the different situations and moments in the conversation.
There is, of course, the counterpart of this installation called “Him” based on characters played by Jack Nicholson, where the dialogue takes on a different turn and sort of swirls down into an overly narcissistic dialogue.
HIM, 1968 – 2008 from Candice Breitz on Vimeo.
Would this be the narrow perspective of Hollywood on male and female characters where one is overly concerned with nothing but themselves while the other’s actions completely depend on their significant other? Breitz gives us the opportunity to at least reconsider by highlighting certain common points that come back in every movie.
The full installation is called “Him + Her” in the format of 14-channel digital video installation. It is currently displayed as part of the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
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