Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality.

Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, 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 late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument.

Citing the influence of John Cage, Yoko Ono and Vito Acconci, Marclay has long explored the rituals around making and collecting music. Drawn to the energy of punk rock, he began creating songs, singing to music on pre-recorded backing tapes. Unable to recruit a drummer for his 1979 performances with guitarist Kurt Henry, Marclay used the regular rhythms of a skipping LP record as a percussion instrument. These duos with Henry might be the first time a musician used records and turntables as interactive, improvising musical instruments.

Marclay sometimes manipulates or damages records to produce continuous loops and skips, and has said he generally prefers inexpensive used records purchased at thrift shops, as opposed to other turntablists who often seek out specific recordings. In 1998, he claimed never to have paid more than US$1 for a record. Marclay has occasionally cut and re-joined different LP records; when played on a turntable, these re-assembled records will combine snippets of different music in quick succession along with clicks or pops from the seams - typical of noise music - and when the original LPs were made of differently-colored vinyl, the reassembled LPs can themselves be considered as works of art.

Some of Marclay's musical pieces are carefully recorded and edited plunderphonics-style; he is also active in free improvisation. He was filmed performing a duo with Erikm for the documentary Scratch. His scene didn't make the final cut, but is included among the DVD extras.

Marclay released Record Without a Cover on Recycled Records in 1985, "...designed to be sold without a jacket, not even a sleeve!" Accumulating dust and fingerprints would enhance the sound. A review in Spin at the time cited Marclay's "coolest theatrical gesture" in his live performances of phonoguitar: the artist strapped a record player onto himself and played, for example, a Jimi Hendrix album. In his artwork Five Cubes (1989), he melted vinyl records into cubes. The Sound of Silence (1988) is a black-and-white photograph of the Simon & Garfunkel single of the same title.

Following this turn, Marclay has in more recent years produced visual art, although usually of representations of sound, or the various technologies of representing sound. His Graffiti Composition (2002) posted musical notes on walls around Berlin, compiled photographs of them as they faded, and is performed in concert. Shuffle (2007) and Ephemera (2009) are also musical scores. In Sound Holes (2007), he photographed the many patterns of speaker holes on intercoms. From 2007-2009 he worked with cyanotype at Graphicstudio to capture the motion of cassette tapes unspooling. And an interest in onomatopoeia dating back to 1989 has culminated in his monumental Manga Scroll (2010), a 60-foot scroll of cartoon interjections that doubles as a musical score.

In 2010, he produced The Clock, a 24-hour compilation of time-related scenes from movies that debuted at London's White Cube gallery in 2010. In 2016, he produced Made to Be Destroyed, a compilation of film clips showing the destruction of art works or buildings.

Thom Jurek writes: "While many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art - and it is art, make no mistake - writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up of vinyl records and pasting them together with parts from other vinyl records, they never seem to mention that these sound collages of his are charming, very human, and quite often intentionally hilarious."Marclay has performed and recorded both solo and in collaboration with many musicians, including John Zorn, William Hooker, Elliott Sharp, Otomo Yoshihide, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Flo Kaufmann and Crevice; he has also performed with the group Sonic Youth, and in other projects with Sonic Youth's members.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023