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

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Carol Diehl

Wandering in a Zurich museum some years ago, with dreary weather outside and drearier art inside, I came across a monitor continuously playing a video so humorous and ingenious that it completely changed my mood. It was Christian Marclay's Telephones (1995), a 7 1/2-minute compilation of brief Hollywood film clips that creates a narrative of its own. These linked-together snippets of scenes involve innumerable well-known actors such as Cary Grant, Tippi Hedren, Ray Milland, Humphrey Bogart and Meg Ryan, who dial, pick up the receiver, converse, react, say good-bye and hang up. In doing so, they express a multitude of emotions--surprise, desire, anger, disbelief, excitement, boredom--ultimately leaving the impression that they are all part of one big conversation. The piece moves easily back and forth in time, as well as between color and black-and-white, aided by Marclay's whimsical notions of continuity. A shot of a woman decked out in '70s tiger-patterned clothing is followed by one of Whoopi Goldberg talking on a zebra-striped phone. A man saying "I haven't been able to think or concentrate on anything but you" segues to another man's perplexed reaction: "I see," he says. The individual soundtracks are surprisingly successful in setting a mood even in such minute segments, and Marclay uses them, along with other inherent effect--dialing, ringing, beeping, voices, the receiver being dropped or slammed down--to create a rhythmic tone poem.

Not since I first encountered the work of Nam June Paik had I seen video that so successfully montages bits of found footage to create an overriding abstraction, and where the resulting sound 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 scene, Marclay, who was born in 1955, is not only trained as an artist but is well known as an experimental musician. His instrument is the turntable, and he is credited with being among the first DJs to sample and mix the works of others into unique compositions. Marclay's current retrospective, which was organized by Russell Ferguson of the UCLA Hammer Museum, comprises over 60 works from 1980 to the present, including colage, painting and sculpture, 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 Telephones, Marclay applies his abilities as a DJ to mix not recordings but film, resulting in an ambitious 17-minute work that is a kaleidescopic tapestry of often-hilarious sights and sounds. Monumental in scale, it is made up of four 8-by-10-foot projections set side by side, simultaneously playing fragments of footage from over 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. One quickly loses the impulse to identity the protagonists, who include such diverse personalities as Arthur Rubinstein, Elvis, Harpo Marx, Maria Callas, Julie Andrews and Marilyn Monroe, and simply revels in the orchestrated cacophony of layered sound and image that sweeps with staccato swiftness across the four screens.

Marclay begins with instruments tuning up, then seamlessly guides us through peaks and valleys of reflection and tumult to a crescendo of explosions and high C's. He avoids an overwhelming bombardment of the senses by developing light themes--such as those of similar instruments or a segment where vocalists sing "yes" and "no" to each other in enigmatic dispute--with some clips repeatedly jumping from screen to screen creating visual and aural texture and pattern. Brief and separated from their original context, the images carry no meaning, and the viewer experiences the sights of people and places primarily as abstraction, actively and with rhythm; it's a visual experience that works primarily on the level of sensation rather than intellect, similar to what you feel listening to music. At the same time, it is conceivable (and was surely intended) that the soundtrack of Video Quartet could stand on its own, a composition of which Edgar Varese would have been proud.

Often, however, Marclay doesn't deal with actual sound at all, but with the possibility--or just as frequently 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 on them, has people walk on them, puts them through a printing press, or on a turntable strapped around his neck like a guitar and scratches them. While CDs are less ubiquitous in his work, at least so far, Marclay has, among other things, made a "fountain" of accumulating recording tape, woven it into a net and wrapped a violin in it, Christo-style. His sculpture includes fanciful fabricated impossible-to-play instruments: drums whose stems have grown, like Alice in Wonderland's neck in the Tenniel illustrations, to such heights that only a giant could reach them; an accordion lengthy enough to be a Chinese New Year's dragon; or guitars that look as if they were left in the backseat of the car during a heat wave, their necks melted and droopy. By altering instruments, Marclay triggers a response in the viewer, who is compelled to imagine what it would be like to attempt to play such a thing, or what kind of sound 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 look, in this case because the cover causes the pedals to look like toes. When I see an ordinary piano in a room, I simply register that it's a piano, nothing more. But when I see it muffled in felt, I automatically fantasize about the stifled sound it would emit. So it is with Marclay's Drumsticks (2000), which are made of glass. It's almost impossible to look at them without considering both the awkwardness of using them, the delicate tap one would have to make in order not to break them, and the sound of cracking and shattering when they inevitably did fall to pieces.