Christian Marclay

by Gordon, Kim; González, Jennifer; Higgs, Matthew; Dale, Ben

• ISBN13: 9780714843742
• ISBN10: 0714843741
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-06-01
• Publisher: Phaidon Press

Summary

Christian Marclay works across numerous visual media - sculpture, installation, performance, found object, and collage - alongside music and its artefacts, to create a unique, multidisciplinary art. Also a musician, composer and DJ, in his visual works he sometimes evokes the memory of music, such as The Beatles (1989), a pillow crocheted out of Beatles audiotapes. Elsewhere Marclay examines the clich+d images of music-making, for example those found on LP record covers: charismatic, classical music conductors; anonymous, smiling Easy Listening girls; sultry rock stars. These are then carefully sewn together to form hybrid, often humorous, spliced'-together figures (Body Mix, 1980-ongoing). A major travelling retrospective of the artist originated at the Hammer Museum, UCLA and travels to the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in February 2005. The highlight of this exhibition is Marclay's tour de force Video Quartet (2003), a four-screen installation combining (mostly) Hollywood film clips associated with music, edited together with virtuoso precision. A respected musician who has collaborated with John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, and others, Marclay has presented his unique sound-and-vision at the Whitney Biennial, New York, 1991 and 2002; the Venice Biennale, 1995 and 1999, among many key international exhibitions.

Author Biography

Jennifer González is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writings have appeared in Frieze, Art Journal and Diacritics. She has also contributed to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1995), With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (1999) and Race in Cyberspace (2000). Recipient of the Joanne Cassullo Teaching Fellowship, she teaches on the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Kim Gordon is a visual artist originally from Los Angeles. She relocated to New York in 1979 and, with partner Thurston Moore, founded the experimental punk band Sonic Youth. She continues to work as an artist, with recent exhibitions Participant Inc. (2003) and Reena Spaulings Fine Art (2004) in New York, and at South London Gallery (2006).

Matthew Higgs is an artist, writer and curator based in New York. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art Monthly, Afterall and in numberous exhibition catalogues. He is currently Director and Chief Curator of White Columns, New York.