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

PS: What do you think about the current vogue for so-called sound art?

CM: I'd like to think it sort of came out of the whole performance-art movement. Maybe it started in 1958 with John Cage teaching at the New School, and it's just growing out of there through punk and hip-hop. The art world had embraced punk at some point, and now there's a need for sound again. The art world is always eager to find new blood and something else to stifle.

PS: All the major museums and galleries have shows devoted to it.

CM: Well, I think it's great that there is this interest in sound and music, but the overall art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented. We still think of museum galleries as 19th-century galleries, like "How do we hang this on the wall, how do we light it?" But nobody knows anything about sound--how you hang a speaker, how you EQ it to the room. There isn't that kind of knowledge and expertise within the museum world. More and more museums have a lounge-type listening room, but there are still a lot of changes that need to happen before the art world is ready to present sound as art. And, you know, it doesn't matter because there are so many ways for people to enjoy sound these days. Sound is so easily diffused, spread around through the Internet, downloaded to portable MP3 players and walkmans, you name it. Everything is so portable and so easy to share that you don't need an art institution to tell people what to listen to. I think it is in sound's nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and to go places where it's not supposed to go.

PS: I think sound is often best when it's unexpected in that sense. I heard "Amazing Grace" today in the subway, and I was really moved. I'm not religious or anything, but it was just one of those moments.

CM: Well, New York is such a source of unexpected visual and aural stimulation. It doesn't necessarily have to be art for it to touch or transport you. I mean, it is art, you know, an artist singing in the subway, but it doesn't have to be presented in a place where you have to go to get it.

PS: Most people know you for your work with records and with vinyl. Have you considered doing something about the download culture and digital distribution?

CM: Yeah, I would like to. I'm kind of low-tech, not very good with downloading, but what I like is how sound circulates and how you can produce things and put them on the Internet where it circulates and takes on a life of its own. It is an uncontrollable environment, which is very attractive.

PS: But you are such an object-oriented artist, and this new technology is all about dematerialization.

CM: The whole idea of it is fascinating, and I think that's a revolution in itself--just the fact that you don't really need these big vinyl records; you don't need a big radio with big knobs or all this heavy equipment. There's a speed and lightness to that world that is just fascinating and very liberating.