The Stage Of Life

Candice Breitz: The Character explores the world of the titular South African artist through a collection of her video installations and their thematic discussion of lives lived in a media-saturated age. Featuring all her major works from the past decade, it's a 'survey' (“A 'retrospective' sounds like something that happens to you when you're considerably older,” the 40-year-old laughs) of a cogent, almost singular body-of-work.

“Sometimes it's almost creepy how closely related the works can be,” says Breitz, in Melbourne for The Character's opening. “I never set out to consciously create works that are consequent, that build on or grow out of existing works. That said, there are certain ideas that bang around in your head incessantly, and those are the ones that recur in various ways. You return to them intuitively; they stay with you even when you think you're entering completely new territory.”

And, so, it's easy to see the lines drawn between Becoming (in which Breitz acts out scenes from Hollywood romantic-comedies), King (in which 16 of Michael Jackson's most ardent fans sing along to the entirety of the Thriller LP), Him + Her (in which the on-screen output of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep is hatcheted into fragments of artful free-association), The Character (in which Indian school-children recount the plot of a movie) and The Woods (in which the idea of the child-star is explored through Bollywood, Hollywood and Nollywood).

“I'm less interested in stars per se than I am in the consumers of mainstream entertainment,” Breitz explains. “I'm interested in thinking about the people on the other side of the screen, those who absorb and receive that culture and try to find meaning in it. What celebrities represent for those who invest in them or identify with them fascinates me infinitely more than any given celebrity. For me, a star or a celebrity is a collection of longings and desires and identifications, an individual who becomes a shared locus of interest for a large number of people rather than an individual who is inherently special. I'm interested in what it is that prompts a large number of people to invest in a particular person; what it is about that entity or the way that entity is packaged – whether it's Michael Jackson or Meryl Streep – that exerts such a broad appeal?” 

Breitz's work goes beyond being some mere exploration of celebrity culture, instead addressing greater themes of the modern, media-saturated, over-documented era. The rise of social media platforms hasn't evened the playing field (“Mainstream marketing forces would like you to believe that there's been a democratisation of the media, but there's still inevitably an asymmetry between the concentration of wealth and power in figures like Tom Cruise or a Brad Pitt, versus someone who becomes a momentary YouTube star”), but it has created a generation of kids who, used to being constantly filmed, have essentially become method actors, playing out their lives as performative pantomimes.

“Whether we're aware of it or not, we're constantly performing ourselves; we give different performances when we're addressing our parents than when we're addressing our lovers, or our employers, or our friends... we're constantly reconfiguring ourselves according to shifting situations,” Breitz says. “I'm interested in performative being, in exploring how selfhood, to some extent, comes about through [this] performance.”