Digest (2019)

Overview

Candice Breitz has spent the last twenty years reflecting on the impact of moving images within a variety of social and political contexts. For SB14, Breitz presents Digest (2019), a multichannel video installation consisting of 300 videotapes that have been permanently interred and sealed within as many polypropylene boxes. Each of the boxes features a single verb drawn from the title of a film that was in circulation during the era of home video. Home video set in motion a revolution, anticipating a future in which moving images would be accessible, affordable and infinitely reproducible, and in which viewers would be able to freely tamper with and intervene in the continuity of the viewing experience, developments which pointed to the erosion of the collective viewing experience that cinema had offered. The moving image was clearly bound for a disembodied and virtual future, one that echoed the profound disembodiment that digital culture would bring to cultural consumption in general. Digest is accompanied by the following disclaimer:

This incomplete survey of the analogue intestines of home video is not titled Merda d’artista or Boîte-en-valise. Despite its investment in strategies of Reversal and Retrospection, this mute depository comes both too early and too late to serve as a convincing Pense-Bête. These are neither the tales of Scheherazade nor the boxes of Pandora. These miniscule coffins are not Date Paintings or Time Capsules, nor are they adequate Surrogates for the moving images that they obscure. This Verb List is not a definitive Atlas. Nor is it an encyclopedia or compendium or index or library or collection or dictionary or inventory or archive or catalogue. Digest could not accurately be described as a monograph or a biopic or a catalogue raisonné. This is not art about art or about artists or about the art market. This is not a love song or a selfie.