Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Sep 22, 2022, 06:27AM

I Am a Camera

A 2008 New City Art interview with artist Candice Breitz vs. a 2011 Oxford African American Studies Center interview with author/journalist Touré.

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Touré: Is there a centrifugal force? Is there some commonality linking us all?

Candice Breitz: I want to, or even need to, be a part of that continuum.

Touré: You are your only judge.

Breitz: Language is supposed to be a transparent quality, a medium that connects people to each other, which serves as a bridge from one person to another.

Touré: Hogwash. This is obviously false.

•••

Breitz: You don’t need to be an art-world insider to be connected to the culture of video and digital distribution, or to the cult of celebrity.

Touré: Surely. Nothing makes someone inauthentic. But I already rejected the white gaze so I'm not sitting around worrying that it's unusual for white people that I love Nabokov and Milan and yoga.

Breitz: To put it crudely, sometimes when people eat the same food, they shit the same shit.

Touré: This is a chimera. I am a camera.

Breitz: Both are unavoidable quantities. 

•••

Touré: Surely, shaming is not enough, but what power do we have to do more than that?

Breitz: There is a certain equation at the heart of the mass media that never goes away: on the one hand what is constantly being sold to us is the promise of individuality, the promise of the possibility to define ourselves as distinct from others, but at the same time mass consumerism insists on homogeneity.

Touré: If there was honestly something then they'd all produce the same answer but instead they were befuddled to produce anything.

Breitz: Often when people sing karaoke, they sing love songs, songs that are supposed to express something internal, emotions from the inside.

Touré: The American part turns it into a whole other question. 

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