Christian Marclay2002

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Aurality is at the center of Christian Marclay’s work whether it reveals itself as sculpture, collage, assemblage, installation, performance, photography, video, or music and sound. Interested in the interactive potential of music and performance, in multiple bodies of work Marclay examines the relationships and differences between visual and auditory experience. Rooted in the experimental traditions of musique concrete, John Cage, noise and improvised music, Marclay's work bridges the music and art worlds. He has performed solo, recorded his own compositions and collaborated with many musicians including Butch Morris, Sonic Youth and the Kronos Quartet. In the last five years he has been applying the cutting, sampling and mixing techniques of the DJ to the medium of video, in works such as Telephones (1995) and his newest piece, Video Quartet, a four-channel video projection featuring hundreds of short film clips of people playing music.
 
"In my work as a visual artist, I have been questioning the way sound is stored, manipulated, marketed, distributed, and consumed. The invention of recording technology has transformed sound into tangible objects and thus commodities (i.e. records, magnetic tapes, CDs). The contradiction between the transitory nature of sound and those material objects continue to fascinate me. To attempt to visually represent sound or music, which is by nature immaterial and invisible, is always a sort of failure because this visualization excludes the aural. A silent representation of sound, as in a painting or sculpture, intrigues me because its muteness underscores sound’s intangible nature. The image becomes instead the representation of an absence."