Strip-Tease: An Analysis of Four Duets
Frank Wagner
Candice Breitz’s subject and medium is pop culture… the video clip. Her technique is
editing, in the case of this particular work - video-editing. In her work, found footage that is
ingratiatingly effusive by nature – that which is grandiose and indulgent - is cut away,
reduced and honed to the point of being succinct. Candice Breitz presents us with the trash
of our civilization. She eternalizes the extract by mutating it into a concentrated and
stammering loop that repeats itself endlessly.
The pop song is typically structured by a string of short and sharply defined sound
bites that cumulatively form the teaser, bridging the song to its listeners and consumers.
The fundamental structural logic of the hit song lies in this teaser, which privileges direct
expression above all else. The melodies and arabesques of the pop song invariably unfold
between the basic poles of an “I” and a “you” - an identifiable sender and receiver. Naturally
though, it’s never quite this simple: the “you” of the pop song must be vague enough to
allow millions of listeners to simultaneously identify and yet keep a safe distance. Each
listener must feel that his or her relation to the imaginary “I” embodied by the pop star is
somehow unique - more liberated, more passionate, more appropriate – and thus better
able to fulfill the needs of the “I.” But this is only one side of the equation. The “I” that we
encounter as we identify with the singer – with her Look, with each of her extravagant
gestures – is of course also an imaginary “I.” This “I” necessarily creates a space not only
for an empathetic listening experience, but indeed a space in which the listener might,
through the song, re-live the drama, the pain, and the joy of being an “I.” These
mechanisms of identification that are so firmly entrenched in the binary structure of the pop
song have, suffice to say, been described often by pop critics – highly celebrated by some
and heartily condemned by others.
Armed with scissors (the high-tech variety of scissors to be found in sophisticated
digital editing software), Candice Breitz hacks away at a selection of four pop songs, literally
reducing these to nothing more than those fragments of footage that refer to an “I” or a
“you.” As she strips the song down to these basic elements, Candice Breitz simultaneously
sets in motion the simple logic by means of which the pop song exerts its effect on the
listener or spectator. Constant looping repetition… everything repeats itself over and over
again. The best pop songs are probably the shortest songs, songs that repeat themselves
so intensely that their words - along with the desires encapsulated in those words - etch
themselves immediately into our brains and memories, allowing us to sing along almost
instantly. Behind this rapid evolution of the ‘haunting tune,’ lies an entire industry that
dedicates itself completely to the fabrication of such surrogates of happiness.
Candice Breitz has little regard for the inane pop songs of the last three decades, be
they backed by heart-rending violin arrangements (as in the case of Whitney Houston’s I
Will Always Love You) or the stampede of disco machinery (as in Olivia Newton John’s
Hopelessly Devoted to You). What remains of the flimsy content of the original footage in
the wake of her digital scissors, is nothing more than the laughable “I” and “you.” Is there
anything of greater interest to us in this world? Is this not the basic logic of positive social
relations, now stultified, reduced to its exact opposite, and catapulted into the distant realm
of dreams? Breitz pits the poles of a relationship - two opposite modes of identification against one another. Two hymn-like venerations are extracted from the same song: an “I, I,
I, I, I…” striving desperately for affirmation plays against a second invocation that is its
inverted response: “you, you, you…”. The difference between the two looped calls has to do
largely with the fact that the “I” is most commonly extracted from the beginning of a songline and thus tends to be staccato and fleeting, whereas the “you” is more often to be found
1
at the end of a line or refrain, where it can be lavishly elaborated and extended by the
singer.
Before the reduced essence that remains of each of the four love songs as they are
re-presented to us by the artist, all aspirations to nobler meaning dissipate into mere stutter.
These pop stars sing of intimacy, of longing, of vulnerability and integrity, we remind
ourselves. And yet, in the Four Duets, little remains of the grandeur and operatic diva-like
voice of Whitney Houston. Only the most negligible traces remind us of the edgy and selfassured androgynous presence of Annie Lennox, that aggressively unapproachable icon of
female provocation. There is virtually no remaining memory of the complex masking
strategies of Karen Carpenter; of an anorexic personality forced to live in shady denial of
her incestuous relationship to her brother. And nothing but the most passing
acknowledgment of the hopeless devotions (be these to her lover, to the American flag, or
to her bank balance) of disco queen Olivia Newton John.
Candice Breitz is an unrelenting critic. She mercilessly deconstructs the objects of
her attention, in the process unveiling our idols as discontinued models of obsolescence.
She embodies the dross of the last thirty-five years in the Four Duets. She laughs out loud
at the four singers and their now thoroughly decimated messages; then exacerbates the
situation further by placing each singer in opposition to herself, such that each must be her
own audience. A public is no longer necessary for these performers - every moment is
perfected, learnt by heart, rehearsed a hundred times more than necessary. The content of
the songs is rendered all but irrelevant. Are we then in the presence of psychotic split
personalities or, rather, witnesses to the final stages of narcissistic desire? A vacant space
beckons to us invitingly from within this network of relationships. The singers sing at
themselves but also at us, the implied viewers. Eventually, however, we are prompted to
leave, thus abandoning the singers to confinement in their lone purgatories, to the solitude
of their endless litanies.
The use of the double as a critical device is in fact developed in significantly earlier
works by Candice Breitz, such as in her first internationally acclaimed photographic series –
the Ghost Series (1996). The painfully absurd process to which Breitz subjected her source
images to create this series has left many a critic dumbfounded. In the exact moment during
which South Africa was reconstituting itself as a democratic republic, Breitz, a white artist,
chose to apply Tippex (correction fluid) to postcard images in which ‘traditional’ black
African women pose against ‘tribal’ backdrops. Breitz painted white deletion fluid
painstakingly over the flesh of the `exotic’ women represented in the postcards, in the
process ‘correcting’ their color. After this relentless (if not aggressive) intervention, the new
ghostly images resonate as vehement counterpoints to warped stereotypes of the exotic
black subject. They position themselves against the kinds of stereotypical perspectives that
insist on defining the black subject in relation to whiteness, which is to say, against
narratives in which the African can only ever be imagined as a semi-naked black body.
Postcards such as those from which Breitz takes her cue, needless to say, tend to
perpetuate such bigotry, invariably framing the subjects that they represent within the tight
parameters of the racist white imaginary. Breitz’s canny skin color correction literally represents these black tribal others as doubles, doubles who can only ever be affirmed and
accepted in their relationship to a predetermined whiteness. As such, the Ghost Series
violently ruptures those modes of thinking that define white cultural and political hegemony,
inviting us to reorient ourselves in radical opposition to such models.
We encounter a parallel rupture in the Four Duets series, where Breitz subjects the
clichés of global mass culture to similarly cutting scrutiny. The Duets not only offer fresh
readings of the culture that they deconstruct, but open onto the possibility of an entirely new
culture that might exist in contrast to the flood of international lite culture that threatens to
drown all that is left of intellectual life. Here Breitz adopts a sophisticated sampling
2
technique as her method of composition: juxtaposed sound bites and digital weaves of
isolated fragments of music merge into new and often repetitive rhythms and sounds. Such
sampling first became possible with the advent of sophisticated digital technology and was
elaborated initially within the techno music movement as a subversive counter-model to
mainstream culture, only to subsequently be rapidly absorbed into and perfected by the
culture industry. By now the logic of sampling is widespread – found material or footage is
dismembered, then rearranged and layered before it is trendily repackaged. At worst and in
its least inspired forms, sampling amounts to little more than futile reprocessing. At best,
and given artistically complex execution, sampling can result in remarkable new musical
form.
While Candice Breitz certainly participates in the counter-cultural celebration of
mutilated harmonies that is sampling, her work proceeds in neither of the aforementioned
directions. Breitz is not interested in creating new harmonies or rhythms. On the contrary,
her disarmingly choppy technique – which tempts comparison to a strip-tease – ultimately
leads to a brutally analytical disclosure of the teaser driving each of the Four Duets, along
with the various modes of identification with which the teaser is associated. The Four Duets
are shot through with the forms of the hysteric, that much-studied clinical subject of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who has in recent years largely fallen into oblivion,
but who was at one point pivotal in the development of various psychoanalytical theories of
identity and subjectivity. In a world saturated by an unabated flow of media images, Candice
Breitz confronts us with an existential lack, with the blank space that is inscribed at the
center of our social relations, with the sense of absence that defines every fragile notion of
given identity. Both forms of lack - the empty space around which the hysteric defines
herself, and the core of absence in relation to which social identity is necessarily constituted
– mark the contemporary pop song, that archetypal haven of the cliché and the stereotype.
Candice Breitz simplifies and condenses the trivial pop song: in the Four Duets, we find
what is left of the love song projected onto the doubled persona of the singer where, now
extracted from its cloud of schmaltz and sentimentality, it alerts us to the vulnerability of the
human psyche.
Breitz thus transforms, to give Lacan the last word, light-hearted pop tunes into
profound lamentations on the vulnerability of the Symbolic and Imaginary realms, on the
fragility of culturally-determined and gender-specific definitions of identity. She returns us to
the irresolvable contradictions that we escape and transcend in fantasy, and finally also to
the vulnerability of the Real, to our modifiable but ultimately mortal bodies.
The titles of the four works in the Four Duets series, each of which includes the title of the
original song appropriated as its sub-title, are: Double Karen (Close To You), 1970/2000;
Double Olivia (Hopelessly Devoted To You), 1977/2000; Double Annie (Thorn In My Side),
1985/2000; and Double Whitney (I Will Always Love You), 1999/2000.
This essay was first published in: Christopher Phillips, ‘Candice Breitz: Four Installations,’
in: Sturm, Martin and Plöchl, Renate (editors). Candice Breitz: CUTTINGS. (Linz: O.K
Center for Contemporary Art Upper Austria, 2001) exhibition catalogue.
3