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Lot Essay
Double Olivia (Hopelessly Devoted To You) belongs to the celebrated series Four Duets by South African video artist Candice Breitz. Based on the eponymous ballad scene from Grease, Olivia Newton John – playing the female lead Sandy – is cut and spliced into a stuttering, cyclical duet with herself. Her image is projected simultaneously onto two television monitors: in one, she repeats only the words ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘I’ on a six-second loop, whilst in the other she repeats the word ‘you’ on a twenty-nine second loop. Temporal dislocation is the primary subject of the work: set in 1959, filmed in 1977 and ruthlessly re-edited by Breitz in 2000, one of the most iconic musicals of the twentieth century is compressed into a staccato stream of short-circuited nonsense, retaining only the basic pronouns of its mournful love song. The other works from the series – Double Karen (Close To You), Double Annie (Thorn In My Side) and Double Whitney (I Will Always Love You) – follow a similar pattern, transforming legendary pop tunes into uncanny pieces of abstraction, doubled and divided into tiny structural fragments. Works from the edition of Double Olivia have been included in Breitz’s solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford in 2003, and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in 2007.
Despite the strains of humour latent in Breitz’s unrelenting edit, Double Olivia also invites deeper consideration of the relationship between musical star and anonymous fan. As Christopher Phillips has written, ‘The double-channel installations invite both the identification and the projection of the viewer. Listening to a pop hit, “you” can imaginatively assume the role of the “I” of the singer and indulge in a vicarious taste of celebrity power. “You” might on the other hand experience yourself as the privileged object of the singer’s personal address, the very “you” toward whom she intimately gazes. Breitz gives a critical twist to these imaginary relations. As the singers address themselves on the paired television monitors, “I” and “you” suddenly collide. By virtue of this staging, the process of identification and projection is short-circuited, as the singer confronts her own uncanny double’ (C. Phillips, ‘Candice Breitz: Four Installations in Candice Breitz: CUTTINGS, exh. cat., O. K. Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, 2001). It is this process – the strategic collapse of the boundary between self and other, the familiar and the strange – that forms the conceptual backbone of Breitz’s practice.
Despite the strains of humour latent in Breitz’s unrelenting edit, Double Olivia also invites deeper consideration of the relationship between musical star and anonymous fan. As Christopher Phillips has written, ‘The double-channel installations invite both the identification and the projection of the viewer. Listening to a pop hit, “you” can imaginatively assume the role of the “I” of the singer and indulge in a vicarious taste of celebrity power. “You” might on the other hand experience yourself as the privileged object of the singer’s personal address, the very “you” toward whom she intimately gazes. Breitz gives a critical twist to these imaginary relations. As the singers address themselves on the paired television monitors, “I” and “you” suddenly collide. By virtue of this staging, the process of identification and projection is short-circuited, as the singer confronts her own uncanny double’ (C. Phillips, ‘Candice Breitz: Four Installations in Candice Breitz: CUTTINGS, exh. cat., O. K. Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, 2001). It is this process – the strategic collapse of the boundary between self and other, the familiar and the strange – that forms the conceptual backbone of Breitz’s practice.