Christian Marclay: this artist makes music like you've never seen before and art like you've never heard before

Interview, March, 2005 by Philip Sherburne

The art world is enjoying an extended fling with pop music--Fischerspooner and Lansing-Dreiden balance smart songcraft with multimedia presentations, while Black Dice fill galleries with squalls of feedback--and sound art is booming, most recently in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou's exhibition "Sons & Lumieres: A History of Sound in 20th Century Art." But few have done more to fuse fine art and audio culture than Christian Marclay. Since the late 1970s he has used elements of collage, sculpture, readymades, painting, photography, video, and installation, and done pioneering work in the field of experimental turntablism--which he developed in parallel to hip-hop's own rise in the early '80s--to render the history of recorded music as a vast, endlessly remixable archive full of unexpected harmonies and uncanny counterpoints.

In his latest project, Shake Rattle and Roll (fluxmix), the 50-year-old Marclay plunders the Walker Art Center's substantial collection of Fluxus objects, presenting a 16-channel audio- and video installation in which his white-gloved hands shake, rattle, and roll (and tap, thump, and thwack) dozens of items by George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and their peers. Along with Duchamp and John Cage, these artists are important influences for Marclay's own whimsical, meaning-rich work, and his multimedia mix tape fittingly rescues Fluxus's art of everyday life from secure storage and restores its dynamism. Rather than a didactic presentation of mute objects, Marclay's presentation brings Fluxus to life by highlighting its musical inclinations.

PHILIP SHERBURNE: Let's talk about your recent show, "Shake Rattle and Roll (fluxmix)."

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY: It started with this idea I had of doing a project with the Swiss National Collection, taking objects--from an antique chest to an old bicycle--that the government or the historical society deemed worth saving, and using them for their sound. But that project never happened. When the Walker invited me to be an artist in residence I still had this idea kicking around in the back of my mind. And then, when I found out they had a large Fluxus collection, it all made sense because Fluxus was all about doing things in a nontraditional way, reacting to the whole art system of creating collectable objects. They were more iconoclastic, trying to make fun of the whole process, so there's a lot of humor in it. At the same time, there's a delight in the strangeness of objects. I, of course, couldn't just do anything I wanted with them, I had to wear white gloves.

PS: They made you do that?

CM: Well, that's museum policy. The appropriate way of handling objects is with white gloves. So it became this magic show. And that playfulness was so much in tune with what Fluxus was all about. In some cases there are nonmusical objects that I use musically, and sometimes there are musical objects that I use differently from their proper function. These are the kind of spoofing, iconoclastic, and Dadaist gestures that Fluxus was all about. And to see these objects in a museum, protected--embalmed almost--made no sense. It was contrary to the initial objective of the artists. A lot of art objects end up like that. You can't touch them, even if they're objects that were made to be interacted with. And so it was about critiquing the institutionalization of the art object, but in a very playful and humorous way.

PS: I'm surprised to hear that you thought of this project before you had access to the Fluxus collection. So much of it seems tied up in Fluxus, and there's so much of Fluxus in your work in terms of sound, in terms of play, and in the recycling of everyday objects. The show feels like an art mix tape. You're taking these things and throwing them into a mix. It's curatorial, but it's a performative spin on curation.

CM: Creating an exhibition in a nonmuseological way has always been something I have been interested in. I did a project in 1995 in Geneva at the Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, which used everything in the collection that had anything to do with music. It's a historical museum filled with everything from antiquities to contemporary art, and I just selected anything that had to do with music to create these flea market-like installations. Then I did another installation at the Kunsthaus in Zurich where I was playing with the museum's collection. So, again, these shows are not didactic. They don't inform the viewer about the art object and its historical value; it's more about using the art objects like raw material in very playful ways, and it makes you look at the objects differently.

PS: When did you first become aware of the Fluxus movement?

CM: I discovered Fluxus in the mid-seventies when I was an art student in Geneva, Switzerland, through John Armleder and his group Ecart. This group of artists was working in sort of a post-Fluxus mode and restaging some of the performances by Fluxus artists. What struck me about these performances was that many had something to do with sound, but they were more about making fun of the classical music rituals and the traditional relationship with the audience. That early exposure to Fluxus was important in my development and was an influence on my later interests in performance art.