In a world saturated with mass media messaging and imagery, how do we define ourselves as individuals in the face of increasingly globalised popular culture? This is territory that Candice Breitz has been investigating for nearly two decades through her photographs and video work. Breitz’s video installations in particular explore notions of identity construction in which there are no easy distinctions between nature and nurture; where identity can be seen more as an ongoing performance (whether consciously devised or not) influenced by the complex socio-cultural environments in which we live. Considered within the genre of contemporary portraiture, her work contributes to a broadening understanding of what a portrait can be; the themes and issues Breitz explores expand beyond representation to question the complexities and circularities of identity formation.

Maintaining a sense of individual identity, of ‘who I am,’ has come to mean a variety of different things; the sense of a coherent, stable identity that used to be taken for granted no longer applies. Social media platforms have increased the awareness that, within those forums at least, we can all actively create the identity we present to others. These platforms give us the sense that we have control over our identity and how it is presented. But how much does this conscious construction reflect the, perhaps less deliberate, formation of identity that we all play out more widely on a daily basis? To what extent are we – consciously or otherwise – continually performing our identities for others based on borrowed models of who we should be or want to be? Where do we find our role models? And how much effort is required to maintain that identity?

In Becoming, a multi-channel installation created in 2003, Breitz delved into these questions by looking at how characters in mainstream films present role models that we can aspire to but never quite attain. To create Becoming, Breitz selected scenes from seven Hollywood romantic comedies (Pretty Woman, The Sweetest Thing, Wishful Thinking, Angel Eyes, You’ve Got Mail!, Three to Tango, and Legally Blonde), with each scene focussing on the female lead. She was then filmed lip-synching to the actor’s voice and copying their gestures in a studied effort to ‘become’ the actor/character in each scene. As amateur depictions of these cinematic scenarios, Breitz’s recreations lay bare the struggle of attempting to embody the cinematic role models presented to us on screen. Breitz’s renditions are stripped of all contextualising elements that might lend realism to the films: they are captured in black-and-white, against a bare wall. In the installation the two matching scenes are displayed on back-to-back monitors so that you can only see either the original scene or the copy, never both together, and the actor’s voice seems strangely dislocated from Breitz’s determined efforts to fill it with her presence. In challenging herself to play these borrowed roles, Breitz found she had to go to incredible effort to empty herself of her ‘self’ in the endeavour to become someone else.[1] Breitz’s carefully crafted performances draw our attention to the intricately constructed presentation of dramatic worlds in the films we consume, and how unconvincing these characters become when taken out of this glamorised context. Her performances also hint at the intrinsic association of actor with character within the celebrity-driven economy of Hollywood cinema. With each work titled for the name of the actor rather than the character – Becoming Drew or Becoming Reese – Becoming also comments on the constructed identities of these Hollywood stars themselves. As Anne Wagner has noted,

“To look back and forth between ‘original’ and ‘copy’ is to realise that ‘becoming’ Julia or Reese was a process that each actress herself has had to undergo. Which means, of course, that there is only an invented ‘original’ when it comes to the Hollywood star.”[2]

In Becoming, but also in many of her subsequent works, Breitz questions the extent to which we are all engaged in creating an invented original for ourselves, and to what degree the cultural influences that subliminally contribute to our representations of selfhood are reductive stereotypes. In Becoming, both the actors and Breitz are playing a character – consciously attempting to be someone else; the professionally trained actors succeed in creating a believable character while the amateur awkwardness of Breitz’s performances unravels the labour involved in assuming a character. Neither is intended to be the representation of a ‘true self’ in the tradition of portraiture, but the question of sameness and difference that arises can be seen as a precursor to Breitz’s later works that continue to draw on the history of performance in video art, and can be more readily recognised as belonging to a contemporary genre of portraiture.

In her influential essay from 1976, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism, Rosalind Krauss posited video as a narcissistic medium. As opposed to other media of the visual arts she traced how video performance in particular uses self-reflection to create a loop that ensconces the performer within an endless present of their own image. Rather than working from an externally given text, the performer responds only to their own image, thereby constantly re-creating themselves in each new moment. The performer becomes their own text and in doing so sets up a mirror that creates a self-referential relationship that can be seen as a representation of the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism.[3] The works referred to by Krauss (including Vito Acconci’s Air Time (1973) and Centers (1971), and Richard Serra’s Boomerang (1974)) were created in the early days of video art, but the cultural critique they represent has been observed ever since in the increasingly self-absorbed nature of contemporary media and the expression of self through one’s own image. The centrality of the medium of video to the representation of such self-expression makes it a crucial tool in Breitz’s investigations of contemporary identity. Her use of video is central to an understanding of Breitz’s portraits not only due to the medium’s inherent narcissism, but also because of its time-based nature. Since the Renaissance, portraiture has been considered a representation of presence rather than likeness, of a sitter’s personality and psychological state, or what Leonardo da Vinci called “the motions of the mind.”[4] More recently, as the subject has increasingly been conceived of as a fragmented and multiplied entity, movement comes to be an important means of representing the changeable and fluid nature of contemporary identity.

In the 1960s Andy Warhol exploited these qualities to create time-based portraits, Screen Tests (1964-1966) that began to redefine the traditional notion of portraiture even before the explosion of performance video in the 1970s. Shot on film (and therefore diverging from the particular video narcissism that Krauss was referring to), the Screen Tests used time and movement to create durational performances that challenge the formal conventions of traditional portraiture. Without any script or instruction, other than to sit in front of the camera for the three minutes of the film reel, the sitters were confronted with nothing but the eye of the camera and therefore the reflection of their own image. They appear distracted, self-conscious, amused, bored.

Having substantially completed a doctoral thesis on Warhol’s work, focusing particularly on the abstraction of subjectivity in Warhol’s late commissioned portraits and the dissolution of portraiture as a genre under the duress of late capitalism, Breitz has a strong interest in the importance of Warhol’s work in the context of contemporary portraiture, not only the portraits he himself created (moving and still), but also in his activation and critique of consumer and popular culture, and the ways in which celebrity and stardom infused both his work and his life. Warhol always carried a camera. He created a persona that was inseparable from his image and this conglomerate created the myth, the cult, of Andy Warhol. In the public eye, there is no separation between Warhol the person and Warhol the star. In a series of works that seek to complicate the notion of presence as the essence of portraiture, Breitz has addressed this absence of the ‘real’ person in celebrity culture. To create her series of video ‘portraits’ of pop musicians – Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley), King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson), Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) [all 2005], and Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) [2006], Breitz invited a range of fans of each iconic musician to perform a particular album in a professional recording studio – Legend for Marley, Thriller for Jackson, The Ultimate Collection for Madonna, and Plastic Ono Band for Lennon – and gave them the freedom to dress, bring props and perform in whatever way they chose to communicate their love of that celebrity. With each portrait filmed in a different city, the communal expression that comes through in each of the works evokes the impact of these global stars on their local fans. The Marley fans, filmed in Jamaica, largely appear to present themselves with an earnestness that shows how much their love of the music conveys a great sense of national pride and strong emotional attachment to both the songs and to Marley himself. King, on the other hand, which was filmed in Berlin, shows the fans dressed variously in costumes reflective of their personal style and their interpretations of the iconic Jackson image; their expression depicts an individualistic yet globalised adoration of the star. As portraits, however, none of the installations actually features the titular subject of the portrait themselves. They are represented only through their music and the collective image created by their fans. By presenting the celebrity through the performance of the fans, these works question who owns the image of the pop star – an image that is so much bigger, so much more idealised than any single person could actually be – and how much the creation and persistence of this image is intimately tied to the expressions of the fans themselves. Within the portraits, pop song lyrics open up a space or mirror into which fans can project themselves and merge with the identity of their idol – a kind of inverted narcissism.

“Mirror-reflection…implies the vanquishing of separateness. Its inherent movement is towards fusion. The self and its reflected image are of course literally separate. But the agency of reflection is a mode of appropriation, of illusionistically erasing the difference between subject and object.”[5]

As multi-channel installations, Breitz’s portraits merge individuality and collectivity. They suggest how consumption of the universalised images presented to us in the guise of pop culture icons can result in a wide diversification of individual expression. In the performances of the fans, we can see something of each person’s unique personality, yet can also clearly recognise the styles, poses, and fashions that are borrowed from the identity of the star.

Him + Her, completed in 2008, are a pair of works in which Breitz explores the degree to which media depictions of gendered identities inform societal norms. To create these two seven-screen installations, Breitz excerpted fragments of footage from film roles played by Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and re-edited them into narratives that suggest the multitude of conflicting internal voices that we are all continually attempting to massage into a unified sense of self. The works present and exaggerate the socially acceptable stereotypes of a man and a woman pervasive in Western media. These stereotypes, created from elements taken from mainstream films, present us with the ‘roles’ that populate the territory of each respective gender. This is seen not only in the characters played by each of the actors but also through the performances themselves. As Breitz has noted, in Nicholson’s performances, an essence of ‘Jackness’ invariably permeates the various characters played by the actor. There is a consistency to his on-screen presence that somehow persists no matter what role he is playing – at times we seem to be watching a star creating his own image through performance; yet Streep subsumes herself so much to the individual characters she plays that there is ultimately almost nothing identifiable that creates any sense of a ’Merylness’.[6] Rather than presenting portraits of two specific individuals, the works generate a universal (although specifically Western) image of the character of a man and the character of a woman. In this depiction, men are seen to be self-obsessed while women are seen as victims. As Anne Wagner observes, “To put the matter in a nutshell: a man is an evolving and autonomous entity, self-aware, if not always self-confident, over the passage of time. A woman, by contrast, is a collection of roles: daughter, lover, wife, mother, old maid, divorcee, homebound neurotic, full-fledged hysteric – all of these, yet with the central question – ‘who are you?’ – going unanswered.”[7]

Narcissism continues to pervade Him + Her: We watch these actors publicly playing out the soul-searching and the internal struggles we all experience. Breitz mirrors individual clips, creating loops and repetitions that enhance this narcissism. This is especially present in Him, where Nicholson often refers to himself as someone who’s not there, someone he’s trying to find. He resonates as a man trying to understand what’s expected of him and what it means to be a man. The narrative might be understood to track the stages that a stereotypical ‘man’ goes through during a lifetime, from adolescent machismo and confusion through to the challenges and pressures of old age, all the while trying to distinguish between who he is and who he feels he should be. Her, on the other hand, aligns more with the notion of a performed identity. While Nicholson’s performances show a character intent on discovering who he is – finding a core sense of identity that is recognisable and unchangeable; Streep’s character(s) focus much more on what she should do. Women, the work seems to suggest, gain a sense of self from others rather than from within, and the portrait of the stereotyped woman presented to us is fragile, needy, and victimised, someone who struggles to fulfil the social/cultural expectations placed on her.

Read as portraits, Him + Her explore the continual slippages of the self, representing identity as liquid and mutable – or, rather, multifaceted, transferable, unstable. The self-reflective questioning portrays figures struggling to maintain a unified identity through a series of performances enacted across time. As Breitz has commented, within the churning narratives of these works, ‘both Him and Her are in fact writers, individuals trying to somehow narrate themselves into being or perpetuate themselves through narration. Isn’t that what we all do on a daily basis?’[8] With the footage for Him + Her having been sourced from a wide selection of popular films (23 in the case of Nicholson, 28 in the case of Streep), the works question the degree to which a coherent biography can be constructed. Fiction and reality collapse into each other and we begin to watch not Nicholson and Streep, or their characters, but the reduced depictions of rote femininity and masculinity that they represent. The gender stereotypes evoked provide us with models of behaviour that we find ourselves variously fighting, relating to, or rebelling against. Breitz’s interest in the ‘activation’ or ‘re-animation’ of popular culture sees her using this material as a way of re-contextualising the media that we consume on a daily basis.

In creating these sampled works, Breitz’s sophisticated editing techniques become a base video grammar that allows her to re-work the expressive structures of existing footage. By appropriating and reconfiguring this material, the very language of the works enacts persistent themes in Breitz’s practice, specifically the ways in which we cut-up, rearrange, appropriate and re-mix the pervasive media culture in which we live in order to construct the selves that we then present to the world. This is a state of selfhood-in-motion that Breitz has referred to as ‘the scripted life’, a process in which we are constructed by external forces to the same degree that we imagine being able to construct our selves. Such editing techniques also contain a violence that reflects Breitz’s approach to language more generally. Having grown up in South Africa, Breitz’s experiences under Apartheid taught her that language could be a divisive tool used to promote segregation and miscommunication rather than understanding.[9] In many of her video works editing becomes a device through which Breitz is able to manipulate language to either erase or create new meaning from existing footage. Breitz does this not only with sampled (found) material, but has also applied such techniques to her own footage.

In creating the Factum series (2010), Breitz spent time with seven pairs of identical twins and one set of triplets, filming interviews of up to seven hours in duration with each individual sibling, and then editing the resulting footage into dual (and one triple) screen installations of approximately an hour each. Each installation presents a portrait in which the expression of difference comes to be the key defining quality of individuality. The differences, however, are not necessarily immediately evident. The series is named after the two mixed media works, Factum I and Factum II (both 1957) by Robert Rauschenberg. These two works, while appearing at first glance to be identical, on further investigation slowly reveal subtle differences that distinguish one from the other. For Rauschenberg, these twin works were a deliberate critique of the supposed spontaneity of abstract expressionism and an attempt to show that artistic creation was, rather, a determined, decisive act.

“Rauschenberg was very much a creature of instinct but he never bought into the surrealist belief that images themselves well up unstoppably and unrepeatably from the unconscious. He knew that they are chosen and shaped, and it was to dramatise the choosing and shaping - and to refute the myth of abstract expressionist spontaneity, on which the special authenticity of the painting was thought to depend - that he made…Factum I and Factum II.”[10]

In her own Factum series, Breitz brings the notion of authenticity and choice (or, looking back to Becoming, of original versus copy,) into the context of identity construction, and considers the extent to which concerted effort goes into the performance of the identities we construct to differentiate ourselves from others. The durational aspect of these works plays on the creation of such differentiation and, as we are drawn into the lives of the individuals presented to us on the screens, we gradually come to notice the idiosyncrasies, quirks – the characteristics - that mark one twin (or triplet) as different from the other(s). As Jonathan Neil has commented, even in Rauschenberg’s non-moving image pieces, time is the essence of the difference between them. Neil notes that Rauschenberg created the two pieces simultaneously rather that one after the other “so as to render difference itself, to render difference as an inescapable, indeed necessary, goal of creation, artistic or otherwise. Getting at this difference takes time. We might even say that time is the medium of difference.”[11] In Factum we initially encounter two (or three) individuals who appear to be mirror reflections of one another, and it is only over time that we come to notice the nuanced differences between them. As Anne Wagner notes in her catalogue essay for the exhibition Candice Breitz: Same Same (in the context of which the Factum series was first shown), while the notion of personal identity was located by John Locke in 1689 as the product of consciousness and therefore of thinking beings, it is perhaps more in doing and feeling that we in fact express our individuality – and these are not always consciously controlled.[12] In Factum, we observe both the similarities and differences, not only in the physical appearances of these identical twins, but also in their gestural expression. While they talk almost obsessively about the many ways in which they are conscious of being both similar to and different from their twin, it’s these behavioural traits that most strongly separate and connect them. Through their actions we see behaviour, rather than being, as the foundation of identity; and performance can therefore be understood as foundational to contemporary portraiture. If we define ourselves as individuals through difference, then time becomes a key component of such representation of identity in art.

Factum delves into our intense determination to be individuals and differentiate ourselves from others and yet demonstrates persistent behavioural similarities, showing that common characteristics are inescapable within a particular cultural context. The dual-channel portraits in the series suggest that, like in King or Legend, the expressive tools that we sample, adapt, and remix to express our individuality are drawn from the cultural environment within which we live and therefore, while allowing for the expression of difference, they also tend to create similarities that undeniably identify us as members of a group or community. Throughout their interviews, the twins show varying levels of choice and awareness in the ways in which they have actively tried to differentiate themselves from their twin. These differences of expression do not answer but rather intriguingly complicate the question of whether nature or nurture plays a stronger role in the formation of identity. There seems to be an ongoing slippage between the two – between someone behaving ‘naturally’ on the one hand, and on the other consciously performing the character that they have constructed to present to the world. Throughout the performance, these two modes merge to become who each person is.

In Factum, but also in Breitz’s other works discussed here, we cannot know to what degree each person is consciously enacting a performance and to what extent they are just ‘being themselves.’ In these works, Breitz’s deliberate preference for working with amateurs rather than professional actors leads one to at first assume a degree of naturalism in the appearance they present to us. In her latest work, a trilogy titled The Woods, Breitz has chosen for the first time to work with professional or aspiring professional actors. The participants in the three video installations that make up the trilogy – successful Bollywood child actors captured in Bombay (The Rehearsal), child actors working towards Hollywood careers filmed in Los Angeles (The Audition); and two Nollywood stars, who Breitz worked with in Lagos, who have built their careers playing children on screen throughout their adulthood (The Interview) – have more formally studied how to present themselves as characters, how to play roles and seduce the viewer into believing they are someone else. In the lead up to the making of the trilogy, Breitz made The Character (a work that is very much a prelude to The Woods), in which she interviewed a range of Indian school children about a particular film that each had watched (they all watched different films), then edited the footage into one continual story that appears to trace the (somewhat contradictory) narrative of a single character through the trajectory of a film. The work suggests two possibilities regarding character formation: firstly, that readings of a character are always subjective; and secondly, that a particular character comes into being (is formed through) the many different interpretations and opinions projected by others. Via her particular use of the interview format and the editing techniques applied to create both Factum and The Character, Breitz can be said to have constructed the characters while at the same time leaving open to viewer interpretation the degree to which these characters represent, respectively, the ‘real’ people we see on screen and the fictional character that they describe.

In making The Rehearsal (the episode of the trilogy that stars young Bollywood actors)[13], Breitz wove her script out of sentences of ‘found language’ directly lifted from interviews with Bollywood’s most prominent star, Shah Rukh Khan. This methodology drives her work with found footage further and increasingly complicates our attempts to assess the ‘true’ identity of the people who appear on screen. By providing collaged scripts to the child actors who appear in the work, Breitz creates a multi-layered, ambitious work that brings together many of the questions around identity construction that have been central to her existing body of work. By using professional actors to interrogate notions of celebrity and character construction on screen, The Woods demonstrates Breitz’s deliberate occupation of the undefined territory between fiction and reality, actor and character, performance and portrait. Her work cleverly exposes the complex negotiations and appropriations we all navigate in our attempts to define ourselves, either consciously or unconsciously, as individuals within an increasingly globalised culture.

[1] P.12, Burke, Gregory, ‘Candice Breitz speaks to Gregory Burke’, in Switch, Toronto: The Power Plant, Volume 1.2: Summer 2009. p

[2] P.14, Wagner, Ann M., ‘Double Identity, or Sameness and Difference’ in Candice Breitz: Same Same, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2009

[3] Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, in October, Vol.1, Spring 1976, MIT Press, pp.50-64

[4] P.86, Walker, John, Portraits: 5000 Years, Abrams, New York, 1983

[5] P.56, Krauss, Rosalind, ’ Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’ in October, Vol.1, Spring 1976, MIT Press.

[6] Matt, Gerald. `Sound Minds: Gerald Matt in Conversation with Candice Breitz, in Rosenberg, Angela (ed.), Candice Breitz / Inner + Outer Space, Berlin, Temporaere Kunsthalle Berlin, 2008.

[7] p.15, Wagner, Anne M., ‘Double Identity, or Sameness and Difference’ in Candice Breitz: Same Same, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2009.

[8] P.14, Burke, Gregory, ‘Candice Breitz speaks to Gregory Burke’, in Switch, Toronto: The Power Plant, Volume 1.2: Summer 2009

[9] interview. 276, Kröner, Magdalena. `Candice Breitz: Schreien, Stottern, Singen: Das Playback des Ich: Ein Gespräch mit Magdalena Kröner, Kunstforum, No. 168: January - February, 2004. This interview was originally published in German translation.

[10] Hughes, Robert, ‘Spirit of the age,’ The Guardian, Thursday 26 January 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/jan/26/art1, accessed 24 July 2012

[11] Neil, Jonathan T.D., ‘Factum 1 Factum 2’, Modern Painters, December 2005, LBM, New York, pp.76-77.

[12] P.11, Wagner, Anne. M, ‘Double Identity: Sameness and Difference,’ in Candice Breitz: Same Same, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2009.

[13] At the time of writing, The Woods was still in production and had not yet been completed.