Candice Breitz

Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon)

10 October 2006 - 27 January 2007

During a recent residency at BALTIC, artist Candice Breitz invited a diverse community of dedicated John Lennon fans to pay tribute to their hero in a recording studio in Newcastle upon Tyne. Each fan was given the opportunity to re-perform Lennon’s first solo album Plastic Ono Band (1970), from beginning to end. The resulting video installation, with a looping duration of 39 minutes and 55 seconds (matching the length of the original album), will be displayed on 25 plasma screens that are staggered spirally around BALTIC’s seven-story-high public stairway. Each 42” plasma screen is dedicated to one fan’s idiosyncratic re-performance of the howling and cathartic songs on Plastic Ono Band, an album that explores the traumas of Lennon’s childhood (isolation, abandonment and death), and which was made parallel to Lennon and Yoko Ono undergoing intense Primal Therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov.