I'm Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard Cohen)

This multi-channel video installation brings together a community of 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. Each of the eighteen individuals featured was offered the opportunity to perform and record his own version of Cohen’s magnificent comeback album, ‘I’m Your Man’ (1988), in a professional recording studio in old Montreal. At Breitz’s invitation, the album’s backing vocals have been sumptuously re-interpreted by the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir, an all-male choir representing the Westmount congregation that Cohen belonged to all his life. Originally commissioned by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Breitz’s I’m Your Man is a tender farewell to a recently lost poet and musician, as well as a poignant celebration of late masculinity.

The work 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; King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) and Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), shot respectively in Berlin and Milan during 2005; and Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon), shot in Newcastle in 2006.

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