“For me the record is this strange object that has completely transformed the way we think about sound,” Marclay says. “First of all it turned sound into something material that you can hold in your hand, and it turned it into a commodity you can make money with, which pretty much changes everything.” - Christian Marclay
DJ, performance artist and fine artist, Christian Marclay has dedicated his life to bending, warping, and discovering everything within sound that he can.
We couldn't find an official site for his work but you can read more about him HERE.
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THE FOLLOWING IS FROM AN INTERVIEW IN PARIS, LA - http://www.paris-la.com/1884
Christian Marclay (born 1955 in California, raised in Geneva) is an American visual artist and composer based in New York. Marclay’s work explores connections between sound, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramaphone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collage, Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the “unwitting inventor of turntablism.” His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the mid-1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop’s use of the instrument.
“For me the record is this strange object that has completely transformed the way we think about sound,” Marclay says. “First of all it turned sound into something material that you can hold in your hand, and it turned it into a commodity you can make money with, which pretty much changes everything.”
Where hip-hop artists revolutionized what was possible as a Dj Christian Marclay upped the ante with making the turntable into a legitimiate instrument itself. Since the late ’70’s, in performances, recordings, installations and exhibtions at clubs, concert halls, galleries and museums around the world, Marclay has taken the stereo components that we take for granted and made them into expressive tools. Creating a dizzying array of sound collages with dozens of records at a time, with no steady, reassuring beat to go along with it, he makes and remakes the sounds from all kinds of sources something much different from their original intention. If there’s a way to scratch, break, bend, warp or reconstruct a record, Marclay knows how to do it. One important point here- it’s not just the WAY that he uses records and turntables that is astonishing because his sound sculputures themsevles are provactive, funny, challenging and inventive.
Christian Marclay AUDIO INTERVIEW (June 2006)
What was the performance art coming out of?
People like Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and Laurie Anderson, but more directly from Punk Rock. There were a lot of bands, everybody started a band. In New York, a lot of this music experimentation, like No Wave music and Punk Rock, was taking place in clubs and had a strong influence on the art world. Art people would be directly connected to the music, and a lot of bands came out of art schools. At the time there was a lot happening in clubs, and it was more interesting to me than what was happening in the galleries. Right now that symbiosis between music and art doesn’t exist anymore; throughout the 1980s the galleries became powerful and things got very commercial, people were in the art business to make money, and that kind of killed live art. People gave up performances and went back to the studios. I feel now there’s a possibility of a return to more ephemeral activities. Maybe it’s in times of economic crisis, like the one we’re experiencing right now, that people find more innovative and daring ways to make art. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the experimentation was really happening in clubs like the Pyramid or 8BC, where tons of things were taking place every night. At the time I was not showing in galleries, I was only performing.
In 2001 Marclay spent a whole year in front of the screen, producing his most celebrated work to date, Video Quartet. This staggering montage of musical scenes from Hollywood films was the centre of his solo show at the Barbican in 2005, and is now in Tate Modern’s permanent collection. Making it was painstaking. Marclay stitched together 700 clips, including one of Harpo Marx playing the harp and another featuring Holly Hunter in The Piano. The result was an awe-inspiring cinematic installation across four screens.
In Crossfire Marclay is concerned with the experience of sound in a visual context. The piece is comprised of four video screens that are arranged so that they form walls to enclose the viewer in the space. Using a montage of clips taken from film scenes where we see, details of cowboys, soldiers, criminals, and police engaging in gun conflict. We witness a variety of scenes, from the disclosure of the weapons, the loading of guns, the aim, the crossfire, the intervening tension and the aftermath. Selected scenes are repeated on alternating screens to create a dynamic movement in the sequence. Although the viewer is under a continuous assault, Marclay’s precise arrangement of sound and image allows the gunfire to become a kind of percussion instrument, and Crossfire coaxes a strange music from the Westerns, gangster flicks and war movies that the artist has used as raw material. Some scenes from different sources are paired on opposite screens giving the effect of integrated conflict, the viewer stuck in no man’s land.
Excerpt from a conversation between Kim Gordon & Christian Marclay (2005).
Gordon: To me, your most interesting work is the most simple, like Record Without a Cover (1985). That’s so brilliant and it’s such a simple gesture, yet it works on so many different levels. You’ve done lots of pieces like that. Often, an artist will have only one idea and base a whole career on it. You’re one of the few I know who can go between the music world and the visual art world and be equally respected. There aren’t really many others, possibly Michael Snow. There’s a certain tradition, but it seems to be much more visually oriented. A true crossover is very rare.
Marclay: I don’t like repeating myself. I’m lucky that I have more than one interest. I can make some music when I’m not inspired to make sculpture; I can shift worlds. It’s refreshing. Right now, I’d like to make more music, but in a different way, without necessarily using records. I try to find new methods to challenge myself musically, like Graffiti Composition (1996), or Guitar Drag and Video Quartet (2002). Video allows me to work with sound and image simultaneously. Working with video and doing live performance are two different things; video is more like recording. Performing is great, because it’s all about the moment, and that’s what I like.
Marclay is an artist who works with the embedded ubiquity of sound. He has located sounds in so many settings that their accumulation has begun to signal a new sense of how wide-ranging the state of sound might be. An important part of this effort has been aided by his willingness to pursue sound where it is ostensibly silent, harbored in the private audition of thought or registered in normally mute materials and representations.
Marclay has gone beyond the limits of the modernist battery of sounds to include everything we can and cannot hear, and will never hear: all the symbolic and imagined sounds with their poetic, corporeal, and political resonances on display. He includes the sounds he has tracked to their existence in bodies, objetcs, images, scenes, texts, inscriptions, and in the mix of their complex relationship, where they can be heard as at least a whimper of an echo, as background radiation, as misfired memory. He releases sonds from their obligations as vibrating air, puts them in new lodgings, and relocates them trough performance. The diligence with which he has investigated so many sites has had a cumulative effect. The work progressively generates an unfolding parallel of the embedded and ubiquitous nature of sound in the world. The way Marclay operates as a general discoverer of sounds wherever they might occur and however they might operate makes us all better listeners as a result. What makes Marclay’s work thrive is how the context within which it can be understood has itself grown. Marclay is working the groove, cultivating the surround sound.