Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Louisiana contemporary
With the photo works Monuments and the video work Working Class Hero (A portrait of John Lennon) Breitz turns her gaze towards the fan culture, which is revealed as a modern identity project. It is both caricature and deeply felt – commercialized surface and existential depth at one and the same time.
Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon)
The video installation Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon), 2006, is a kind of re-performance of John Lennon’s first solo album Plastic Ono Band after Lennon’s break with The Beatles in 1970.The album is performed in its full length – 39 minutes and 55 seconds – in karaoke form by 25 dedicated Lennon fans – each with his or her own background and way of empathizing. They sing all the numbers from the album, while being filmed by Breitz in a recording studio. The work consists of 25 plasma screens and is exhibited in Louisiana’s Large Hall – darkened for the occasion and set up to resemble a recording studio.
Monuments
Monuments consists of four giant-size photographs. The subjects are a kind of group photos – or sculptural assemblages of fans of rock and pop idols as different as ABBA, The Grateful Dead, Iron Maiden and Britney Spears. The word monument recalls classical sculptures in public space. But Breitz reinterprets the genre with living people here and now in an alternative form.
About Candice Breitz
Candice Breitz was born in 1972 in Johannesburg and lives and works as an artist in Berlin. Since 2007 she has been a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. In 2005 Breitz exhibited the work Mother + Father, 2005, at Louisiana as part of the exhibition Sip My Ocean. Louisiana later bought the work for the museum’s collection.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl. Strandvej 13 - Humlebaek