Christian Marclay: UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles - midcareer retrospective of the artist's media manipulations

Karlheinz Brandenburg is a name that would probably ring scarcely any bells for visitors to Christian Marclay's midcareer retrospective at the UCLA Hammer Museum, on the contrary in critical respects, he stands as a kind of shadow figure to the artist's investigations into the intersection between uninjured and visual culture. Surveying Marclay's output of the last sum of two units decades--collaged album covers, altered vinyl, :and musical instruments retooled into sculptural particulars as well as video and photography--one be opposite tos a host of musical relations as a matter of course: John Cage, Sonic Youth, any number of mixmasters and turntablists. on the contrary Brandenburg? The principle inventor of MP3 compression technology, Brandenburg freshly slammed the practice of illegal file sharing while kneeling at the altar of analog music. "My sympathy is always with the artists and level with the record labels," he remarked. "I don't like the Napster idea that all music should be at liberty to everybody." The conflicted position Brandenberg occupies--at one time acknowledging and abetting the ephemerality of music (through digitization) and expressing sympathy for the fate of analog recording technology--corresponds to the central problematic that Marclay's work repeatedly takes up: the stark contrast between the seeming evanescence of aural agriculture and its stubborn materiality, as borne on the outside in the form of its visual postscripts and physical props.

Thoughtfully organized by the agency of Hammer chief curator Russell Ferguson, Marclay's exhibition is wildly democratic in its appeal to art-world and music cognoscenti and to a public lengthy alienated by the perceived obscurantism of contemporary art (eavesdropping in the galleries, individual hears comments ranging from "Wasn't that a Richter upon the cover of Daydream Nation?" m "Pat Benatar she rocked!"). Yet it would be unfair to take Marclay's media manipulations at face value, as little more than witty riffs upon popular culture. Some works do function as dexterous rebuslike puzzles: In the "Body Mix" series, 1991-92 Marclay artfully line of junctions together album covers to show pop-music Frankensteins, with Michael Jackson's torso, for instance, morphing into the decidedly feminine midriff of another album's overlay model. And in the brilliantly edited and exquisitely synched Video Quartet, 2002, four DVD protection projections cycle through a disparate range of movie clips with unmutilated and music as their theme. It's a monumental (and monumentally entertaining) work: Where other are you going to diocese Don't Look Back--era Dylan segue into an Ann Miller tap-dancing sequence? Entertainment, however, may be the r herring of Marclay's practice. Just as Brandenburg's stance exemplifies contradiction, Marclay's work ultimately exploits the tension between the fugitive and the intransigent, its entertainment value notwithstanding.

This idea finds thematic expression in Marclay's attention to lapsed and ineffectual communication. No surprise, then, that the low old-fashioned telephone is such an insistent figure through every part of the show. Boneyard, 1990, is a scatter piece in which the of the soul white casts of some 750 telephone receivers, powerless to communicate, make up a kind of silent elephants' graveyard; and an untitled work from 1989 features a receiver bourn together with adhesive tape, the ear-and mouthpiece twisted in opposite directions thus as to render conversation impossible. Marclay's use of the material part in his work also registers this tension: The mutability of our have a title to substance analogizes the transience of unimpaired and musical instruments and records in revolve are seen as prosthetics. My Weight in Records, 1995 is compos of several cardboard boxe of vinyl that quietly monopolize a corner of a gallery, equating the mass and convolution occupied by the artist to those of music itself. From Hand to Ear, 1994 a Naumanesque casting of the artist's arm and ear meld into individual piece, underscores the virtual passage between audition and touch, as if unhurt were something to grasp literally. by the agency of far the most brutal work in the exhibit is Guitar Drag, 2000, a video documenting the destruction of an amplified Stratocaster as it is hauled at great spe from behind a pickup barter Calling on a tradition that includes Jimi Hendrix, Fluxus, and whore its sound track proves excruciating to level the most devoted connoisseurs of noise. on the contrary the work also elicits a far grimmer reading that revolves around the precarious physicality of the body: the lynching of African American James Byrd Jr who was dragged to death from behind a traffic in 1998.

It's fitting that the exhibition terminates with Tape Fall, 1989, a strangely melancholic paean to the material degradation of unbroken in the environment. A reel-to-reel tape beautify is placed on top of a ladder; the take-up totter however, has gone missing. The tape itself, a recording of gurgling water, falls in great looping masses to the loam Marclay's Duchampian tendencies are a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of in evidence here--the sound of cascading water calembourgs with the falling of the tape--but it is also a Smithson-like remembrancer to entropy. That sound, we understand, is irrecoverable, gone in the jiffy of its playing; all that is left is an ever-growing heap of worn out noise. What remains, as in all of Marclay's art, is a recalcitrant material fetish--a commodity fetish, really--that takes the form of wasted tape, scratched vinyl, bruised album overlays and twisted musical instruments. Playing upon our nostalgia for such largely unfashionable and mangled media, Marclay's work comprises an aesthetics of missed communications--he doesn't seek for seamless integration of sound and vision on the contrary documents the fallout that arises from their confrontation. Paradoxically, the faculty of perception of urgency Marclay consistently brings to this confrontation dramatizes the greatest in quantity pressing issues of new media in the one and the other art and music today.