Candice Breitz at the Worlds on Video at Strozzina, Florence
by Amy Halliday
Strolling through the grand Renaissance loggia of the Palazzo Strozzi in the heart of Florence's historic centre, the last thing one expects to encounter - in this city of martyred saints and idealised nymphs - is more than 30 screens of cutting-edge video art. Sepulchered in the converted cellars of the building, La Strozzina is the Centre for Contemporary Culture, recent host of 'Worlds on Video', a survey show of international video art which includes South African Candice Breitz.
Brietz's contribution - her well-known Soliloquy Trilogy, 2000 - was located in the entrance room, one of many screens intriguingly affixed to the four legs of an upturned chair. A compelling curatorial feature was the arrangement of this room, which appeared at first glance to consist of little more than a collection of haphazardly overturned chairs.
Upon closer inspection however, the chairs turned out to be very precisely arranged, with video screens mounted on their legs and details printed on backrests, with an upright chair directly in front of each for sitting and viewing the piece (complete with individual headsets). In this way, the room managed to provide several discrete viewing stations for the single-channel works, while evoking a sense of carefully constructed chaos in their arrangement.
Several rooms extended from the central one, each with a number of plasma screens mounted on walls and with similarly individual viewing experiences, such that the exhibition presented less of a critical engagement with/intervention into the state of video art than a veritable audio-visual library, where viewers could sample works from around the world on a private and personal level. But this fits in with the centre's largely educational focus, underscored by its provision of free catalogues, school tours and multiple-entry tickets.
Nevertheless, the diverse exhibition did bring into play several of the central issues of video art, particularly its relationship to other visual vocabularies such as cinema, documentary, painting, animation and sculpture, and the place and problematics of narrative (re)construction. Kota Ezawa's Last Year at Marienbad, 2007, for example, is a digital animation based on the Resnais film of the same name, in which the artist uses a computer to pare down and reinterpret significant scenes from the original work. Devoid of sound, with characters labelled only with alphabetical ascriptions and the inter-leading scenes removed, the viewer is left to make sense of the abstracted comic-strip style narrative chunks.
In On-time, still life 1, 2006-7, Arnold Von Wedemeyer sets up his camera to film a still life over time: a vase of gradually blooming and then withering tulips, a piece of bread going stale. In the background, a television screen broadcasts changing stock market prices; natural, economic and aesthetic temporality merge in this modern vanitas piece, its content (alluding to the 17th century 'tulip craze' which precipitated history's first stock market crash) particularly poignant in the wake of the contemporary credit crisis.
Zhenchen Liu's Under Construction, 2007, is a chilling combination of documentary sequences and digital flights of fancy. First-hand interviews with dispossessed citizens are interspersed with the ethereal movement of the disembodied camera/eye through walls, windows and rubble of their bulldozed housing site, which has been sacrificed to the cult of modernisation in Chinese metropolises such as Shanghai. The presumed objectivity of the documentary material - surrendered to rapid acceleration, digital processing and computerised animation - becomes strongly emotive; the seductive illusion of three-dimensionality drawing viewers into disemboweled buildings alongside the camera, as if complicit in the devastating process of globalisation at its core.
In contrast, Sarah Morris paints a very different urban portrait in Los Angeles, 2004, an impressionistic assortment of broad celebrity brushstrokes: the psychological build-up to the Academy Awards, the architecture of Mulholland drive, the waiting room of a plastic surgery clinic, all combined with scenes of her own geometric paintings. Reality and fantasy merge, becoming indistinguishable.
The icons and narrative structures of Hollywood are likewise the subject of many of Breitz's video works, particularly her Soliloquy Trilogy.
While perhaps not as compelling as her more recent multi-channel works ('Worlds on Video' focused exclusively on single channel video), the piece distills something of the essence of Breitz's ongoing interrogation of the Hollywood star, and the construction and perpetuation of a mediated lifestyle in which emotion and language are scripted.
Soliloquy Trilogy's protagonists are Sharon Stone (in Basic Instinct), Clint Eastwood (in Dirty Harry) and Jack Nicholson (in The Witches of Eastwick) - three iconic figures from similarly iconic movies. The scenes in which they speak have been extracted from the film and chronologically arranged, the screen remaining black when they are speaking but not seen. The fragments result in a jagged soliloquy stuttered by the star; a jarring, incoherent monologue in which questions are unanswered, statements disconnected, meaning breaking down as words are wrested from their context, the viewer a silent witness to the violence of language unhinged.
By subverting the traditionally illusory technique of editing, Breitz exposes the predictable construction of cinematic narrative and celebrity, and disallows the viewer the comfort and familiarity of passive consumption.
Within the dynamic and diverse production represented at the exhibition, Breitz's piece seems somewhat tired, over-familiar in its mode of deconstruction, its predictable analysis of popular culture, but perhaps this is merely because it is an older work than many on display.
Her more recent work, such as her Portraits series, featuring Michael Jackson in King, Madonna in Queen, Bob Marley in Legend and John Lennon as a Working Class Hero currently on show as part of her Berlin solo at Temporäre Kunsthalle, is far more elusive and complex in its examination of the cult of celebrity.
Here, a collection of fans individually singing entire albums by their favorite idols, have been synchronised and sing collectively on one screen of devoted, performing heads. In this series the celebrity inferred is absent, but iconicity revealed and refracted across the personalities and performances of die-hard fans, creating and sustaining the aura by which the original gains currency.
It will be interesting to see where Breitz goes next, however, as the international art scene becomes increasingly saturated with (pop) cultural critique. Her most recent works, which debut at Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin, are entitled Him and Her. Here the artist returns to the examination of some of her favorite icons: Jack Nicholas and Meryl Streep. Whether she manages to breathe new life into her exploration of who are, at the current date, very much celebrities of a previous generation, remains to be seen.
Amy Halliday is an Art History lecturer for an international study programme in Florence and currently lives in Siena, Italy
Opens: September 19
Closes: November 2
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
Piazza Strozzi, Florence
Tel: 049 6333 0487
www.strozzina.org
