The thirty Bob Marley superfans who heeded artist Candice Breitz's 2005 call to visit a Port Antonio, Jamaica recording studio, to be filmed individually performing the entirety of Marley’s Legend album a capella, were not propelled by showbiz dreams.
Rather, their participation was a way for them to connect with the beloved icon, in a manner as intimate as singing along in one’s teenaged bedroom.
The individuals who appear in these works have thus stepped forward to identify themselves as fans, and have been included purely on this basis: all other factors – their appearance; their ability to sing, act or dance; their gender and age – are treated as irrelevant for the purpose of selection. Each of the selected fans is offered the opportunity to re-perform a complete album, from the first song to the last, in a professional recording studio. The conditions are thus set for a typological study, as each of the participants steps into the studio, one by one, to offer their version of the same album under the same basic conditions. Having set the parameters of the experience, Breitz then allows the performances to unfold with little directorial interference. It is left up to each fan to decide what to wear, whether to use props, how to address the camera, when and if to dance, whether and how to follow the lead or backing vocals, how to behave between tracks, and whether to mimic the original recording or seek interpretive distance from it. Diverse as they are, the portraits are collectively characterized by a riveting tension between the somewhat inflexible conditions under which each shoot takes place (conditions which both reflect and reflect upon the severe limitations for creativity within the commodified realm of mass entertainment), and the struggle of each fan to register an idiosyncratic performance despite these conditions. In the process of this struggle, the singers generate an a cappella cover version of the album that scripts the work, a re-recording which might best be described as a ‘portrait’ of the original album. Although the portraits stubbornly insist on the exact format and duration of the original albums that they take as their templates, they specifically exclude the auratic voices and familiar musical arrangements from the original version, so that the star in question ultimately remains present in the work only in the unaccompanied voices of his/her fans.
Titling the series of works as she does, Breitz asks that we locate these multi-channel installations within the genre of portraiture, and prompts the question of how they in fact relate to this most humanist of genres. Though the title of a work may announce that it is a portrait of ‘Michael Jackson’ or ‘Madonna,’ these celebrities remain conspicuously absent in the final installations.
As art critic Christy Lange observed in conjunction with an interview with Breitz for Modern Painters:
While Marley, Madonna and Jackson may play a lopsidedly central role in shaping their fans’ lives and identities, these fans play a reciprocal part in resurrecting the stars’ original appeal, which has been subsumed by the celebrity culture that created them. The culture of stardom may thrive on a series of cheap imitations, mimicking an elusive idea of ‘celebrity’, but even in this concatenation of simulated identities, a few authentic portraits can still be discovered.
Listen—and sing along—to Bob Marley’s Legend in its entirety on Spotify.
