Candice Breitz: I'm Your Man

This solo exhibition by artist Candice Breitz features the work I’m Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard Cohen), a nineteen-channel video installation presented across two spaces. The work brings together a community of eighteen ardent Leonard Cohen fans—each of whom has cherished Cohen’s music for over half a century—to pay posthumous tribute to the late legend.

In the antechamber that serves as the point of entry into the piece, a dapper choir of young men sporting brown suits and yarmulkes work their way melodiously through a series of oddly fragmented vocals. Their otherwise precise performance is dislocated by long stretches of silence. A second body of voices—deeper in texture and less trained than the first—permeates the antechamber during these silences, gradually drawing visitors into the larger room concealed behind the projection of the choir.

More than simply an appreciation of Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man is a celebration of the sexagenarian and septuagenarian men who we encounter in this second space, each meticulously captured on his own life-size monitor. Over the course of forty minutes, each of the men delivers a loving and idiosyncratic track-by-track rendition of Cohen’s eponymous comeback album, I’m Your Man (1988). Breitz’s synchronization of the solo recordings—which were filmed in a professional recording studio in Montreal—forges the eighteen amateur voices into a rough-hewn a cappella choir, held afloat acoustically by the chorus of younger men whose ethereal vocals seep in from the antechamber. The fragments performed in the antechamber become recognizable as the backing vocals from the same album, here sumptuously reinterpreted for the installation by the all-male Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir—the Westmount congregation that Cohen belonged to all his life. The same choir provided the backing vocals for Cohen’s last album, You Want it Darker, which was released in October 2016, nineteen days before Cohen passed away—it was the first time he had worked with male backing vocalists.

Although Cohen was only 53 at the time of the album's recording, I’m Your Man is melancholic and retrospective in mood (“The summer’s almost gone… And winter’s tuning up”). Suffused with an aging poet’s reflections on death and mortality, its lyrics offer the musings of a man coming to terms with his own fading (“My friends are gone, and my hair is grey… I ache in the places where I used to play”). Their content is rendered all the more poignant by Breitz’s treatment of the album, which tenderly contrasts the full-bodied presence of men in their prime with an older generation of men who are no less passionate or present, but certainly more fragile for having travelled the longer road. I’m Your Man marks the loss of Cohen, as it anticipates the loss of the generation to which he belonged; it is a musical eulogy that is both joyous and mournful. Breitz has described the work as a love letter to her Jewish father, who is of the same age as the men featured. Through this piece, she offers an incisive and moving study of late masculinity, one that insists on the possibility of a manhood that is free of emotional restraint and unapologetically vulnerable. Though it is the only work in her oeuvre that deliberately features men only, the artist’s feminist sensibility prevails.

I’m Your Man expands Breitz’s ongoing anthropology of the fan. Earlier works in this series have included Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley), shot in Jamaica in 2005; a pair of works titled King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) and Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), both produced in 2005; and Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon), shot in Newcastle in 2006. Although these multi-channel “portraits” mimic the flow and duration of the original albums that they take as their templates, they specifically exclude the auratic voices and familiar musical arrangements of the original albums, such that the musical icon ultimately remains present only through the voices of a devout amateur collective. 

Participants: Lew Auerbach, Sheldon Azimov, Thomas L. Bohan, Don Cummer, Jean-Pierre Ducharme, Shaun Fawcett (in memory of Ellen C. Fawcett), Marc Gian, Jerry Golland, Fergus Keyes, Richard Lahmy, Peter Lau, Victor Neufeld, Claude Ouellet, Philippe, Denis S. J. Shackel, Paul G. Shaw, Edward Lyon Singer, and Philip J. Taylor (d. 2018).

Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir: Roï Azoulay (Music Director), Cantor Gideon Y. Zelermyer (Soloist), and Conor O’Neil (Arranger). Choristers: David Buzaglo, Victor Chisholm, Gabriel Frank, Joshua Goldman, Isak Goldschneider, Conor O’Neil, David Packer, Lorne Shapiro and Jake Smith.

Part of the exhibition series Experience Leonard Cohen

I’m Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard Cohen), dated 2017, was originally commissioned by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) for the large-scale touring exhibition Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything, curated by John Zeppetelli and Victor Shiffman. It is presented at The CJM in the context of the exhibition series Experience Leonard Cohen, organized at The Contemporary Jewish Museum (The CJM) by Heidi Rabben, Senior Curator, and Justin Limoges, Director of Exhibitions.