Candice Breitz
Working Class Hero (a Portrait of John Lennon), 2006
Video installation, twenty-five channels
39 min 55 sec
Working Class Hero (a Portrait of John Lennon) is a moving image work that looks into fandom, the legacy of music icons and collective portraiture.
This work was recorded in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2006 as part of a residency at the BALTIC Centre of Contemporary Art and is an iteration of three other video installations by Breitz from 2005 centered on iconic pop singers: Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley), shot in Jamaica, King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson), shot in Berlin and Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) shot in Milan.
All four works were developed in a similar way. Breitz would find fans of the celebrity in question by placing adverts in local newspapers, magazines or fan-specific websites and publications with an invitation to apply to participate in a video tribute. The ad required that ‘you love to sing. You are not shy in front of a camera. You want to pay tribute to John Lennon’ and you must be ‘a serious fan’.
The selected twenty-five John Lennon super fans were then invited to perform Lennon’s first solo studio album, Plastic Ono Band (1970), from start to finish. The fans featured ranged in age from 25 to 62, and in addition to 8 Geordies and 5 Liverpudlians, it included participants from Wales, Scotland, Japan, Italy and the United States.
The resulting twenty-five channel video installation has individual screens, each presenting the singer performing the song a cappella, alone in a professional recording studio. The separate video channels function as portraits of the individuals, while the whole installation acts as a ‘portrait’ of the album’s cultural significance.
The communities Breitz investigates are often shaped by popular culture and media representations. As each participant performs with their own mannerisms, style and moves, the video installation reveals the relationships between individual and group dynamics, or how someone becomes themselves within a larger community. Collectively, the portraits present a survey of the culture of the fan, identification and the consumption that characterises the relationship between an icon and their community of fans.
