Christian Marclay
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for Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay
born 1955
American sculptor, installation artist and musician. Marclay studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel in Geneva and at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Influenced by Fluxus, the interdisciplinary art movement of the 1960s, the experimental music of John Cage, and the punk and art bands of the late 1970s, Marclay started to perform in clubs in New York, playing his own record collages, which he had made by cutting up vinyl records and gluing them back together in different configurations.
For Marclay, making objects is about altering objects in order to extract new meaning, as with his stitched-together record covers or his Record without a Cover (Recycled Records, 1985) that was distributed without a sleeve or cover to allow it to accumulate dust and scratches. In 1989 he created Footsteps, an installation at the Shedhalle in Zurich, by covering the floor of one of its galleries with 3500 vinyl records. Visitors had to step on the records to reach the other galleries. The scratched and stepped-on records, which featured the sounds of a tap dancer, were sold afterwards.
Tape Fall (1989) featured a ladder with a Revox tape player perched on top and single reels of recorded magnetic tape that fell continuously onto the floor beneath the ladder. When the reel was empty, it was simply replaced with a new one, creating an ever-growing mountain of loose and entangled audiotape. His critically acclaimed 14-minute Video Quartet (2002) consists of four digitally synchronized video channels projecting simultaneously a sampling of hundreds of pieces of found film and television footage featuring musical performances from a variety of genres, in both colour and black and white. Marclay’s single-channel video The Clock (2010) is made up of thousands of found film clips (many drawn from popular cinema) that each depict a specific moment in time; the whole is synchronized to real time and runs a full 24 hours. This work, first shown at London’s White Cube gallery in October 2010, garnered wide acclaim throughout 2010–11 and raised Marclay’s profile in the art world.
Marclay also created sculptures that often include references to musical instruments. In 2008 he created a series of intense blue photograms using the cyanotype process: many capture the abstract tangles made by placing unspooled cassette tapes on photosensitive paper; others imprint a block-like pattern of plastic cassette cases arranged in a grid. Marclay has also performed and recorded music with collaborators as diverse as John Zorn, the Kronos Quartet, and Sonic Youth. [Klaus Ottmann. "Marclay, Christian." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T096900.]
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