Mix-master: working in a range of mediums, including video, collage, painting and sculpture, Christian Marclay applies a musician's sensibility to mostly found materials—with startling results - Critical Essay

Wandering in a Zurich museum a certain number of years ago, with dreary weather outside and drearier art inside, I came across a monitor continuously playing a video for a like reason humorous and ingenious that it completely changed my vein It was Christian Marclay's Telephone (1995) a 7 1/2-minute compilation of brief Hollywood film clips that creates a narrative of its possess These linked-together snippets of sights involve innumerable well-known actors of the like kind as Cary Grant, Tippi Hedren, Ray Milland, Humphrey Bogart and Meg Ryan, who dial, pick up the receiver, hold intercourse react, say good-bye and hang up In doing thus they express a multitude of emotions--surprise, desire, anger, disbelief, excitement, boredom--ultimately leaving the impression that they are all part of individual big conversation. The piece put in motions easily back and forth in time, as well as between color and black-and-white, aided by means of Marclay's whimsical notions of continuity. A discharge of a woman decked without in '70s tiger-patterned clothing is followed by the agency of one of Whoopi Goldberg talking upon a zebra-striped phone. A man saying "I haven't been able to think or concentrate upon anything but you" segues to another man's make intricateed reaction: "I see," he says. The individual soundtracks are surprisingly lucky in setting a mood plane in such minute segments, and Marclay uses them, along with other inherent effect--dialing, ringing, beeping, voices, the receiver being dropp or slammed down--to create a rhythmic tone poem

Not since I first clashed the work of Nam June Paik had I seen video that thus successfully montages bits of set footage to create an overriding abstraction, and where the resulting unbroken was as intrinsically compelling as the visuals. It was no surprise to learn, therefore, that, like Paik, who made his start with John Cage in the early avantgarde music pageant Marclay, who was born in 1955 is not solitary trained as an artist on the contrary is well known as an experimental musician. His instrument is the turntable, and he is credited with being among the first DJ to sample and mix the works of others into unique compositions. Marclay's generally received retrospective, which was organized by means of Russell Ferguson of the UCLA Hammer Museum, comprises above 60 works from 1980 to the near including colage, painting and plastic art as well as installation, video and performance, all of which explore visual connections to the experience of music.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Video Quartet (2002) in which, as in Telephone Marclay applies his abilities as a DJ to mix not recordings on the other hand film, resulting in an ambitious 17-minute work that is a kaleidescopic tapestry of often-hilarious sights and wholes Monumental in scale, it is made up of four 8-by-10-foot projections station side by side, simultaneously playing fragments of footage from above 100 films that depict various forms of sound-making, from actors and performers singing, tap-dancing and playing instruments, to car crashes and tin cans falling down stairs. individual quickly loses the impulse to identity the protagonists, who include similar diverse personalities as Arthur Rubinstein, Elvis, Harpo Marx, Maria Callas, Julie Andrews and Marilyn Monroe and simply merry-makings in the orchestrated cacophony of layered unmutilated and image that sweeps with staccato swiftness across the four screens

Marclay begins with instruments tuning up then seamlessly guides us from one side peaks and valleys of reflection and hubbub to a crescendo of explosions and high C's. He avoids an overwhelming bombardment of the faculty of perceptions by developing light themes--such as those of similar instruments or a portion where vocalists sing "yes" and "no" to each other in enigmatic dispute--with more [i]or[/i] less clips repeatedly jumping from defence to screen creating visual and aural weft and pattern. Brief and separated from their original connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts the images carry no meaning, and the viewer experiences the sights of nation and places primarily as abstraction, actively and with rhythm; it's a visual experience that works primarily upon the level of sensation rather than intellect, similar to what you perceive listening to music. At the same time, it is conceivable (and was without doubt intended) that the soundtrack of Video Quartet could stand upon its own, a composition of which Edgar Varese would have been proud

oftentimes however, Marclay doesn't deal with actual entire at all, but with the possibility--or just as at short intervals the impossibility--of sound. The exhibition leaves the impression that there is nothing that can be done to or with records that Marclay hasn't tried: he breaks them, paints upon them, has people walk upon them, puts them through a printing pres or upon a turntable strapped around his neck like a guitar and scratches them. While CD are les ubiquitous in his work, at least for a like reason far, Marclay has, among other things, made a "fountain" of accumulating recording tape, woven it into a gin and wrapped a violin in it, Christo-style. His statuary includes fanciful fabricated impossible-to-play instruments: tympanums whose stems have grown, like Alice in Wonderland's neck in the Tenniel illustrations, to of the like kind heights that only a giant could reach them; an accordion long enough to be a Chinese novel Year's dragon; or guitars that direct the eye as if they were left in the backseat of the car during a heat wave, their neck dissolveed and droopy. By altering instruments, Marclay triggers a replication in the viewer, who is compell to imagine what it would be like to attempt to play of that kind a thing, or what kind of unbroken it would make. Looking at them, I think of the piano that Jospeh Beuys encased in a slipcover of gray felt Like many of Marclay's instruments, Beuys's piano has a slightly anthropomorphic gaze in this case because the overspread causes the pedals to gaze like toes. When I diocese an ordinary piano in a compass I simply register that it's a piano, nothing more. on the other hand when I see it muffl in felt I automatically fantasize about the stifled unhurt it would emit. So it is with Marclay's Drumsticks (2000) which are made of glass. It's almost impossible to direct the eye at them without considering one as well as the other the awkwardness of using them, the delicate tap individual would have to make in order not to break them, and the unmutilated of cracking and shattering when they inevitably did fall to pieces.