CHRISTIAN MARCLAY- ARTIST & DJ, WHO LOVES SILENCE

"I was born in US but raised speaking French and learned English later. I've always felt like I was between two cultures, between two languages. I think I became an artist because I didn't trust language that much and I was more interested in other types of communication, like visual language or music, things that rely on different signs or perceptions"


Christian Marclay emerged in both contemporary art and music scenes during the 1980s. His work covers numerous visual media-sculpture, installation, performance, found objects and collage-along with music and its artifacts, to create a unique, multidisciplinary art.


"I was living in Brook line(Boston); while walking to school on a heavily trafficked street a block away from my apartment I found a record on a pavement. Cars were driving over it. It was a Batman record, a children's story with sound effects. I borrowed one of the turntables from school to listen to the record. It was heavily damaged and skipping, but was making these interesting loops and sounds, because it was filled with sound effects. I just sat there listening and some kind of spark happened".


"I've never really studied music. I couldn't play an instrument, so I used records. Turntables and records are my instruments. The punk movement had freed people from the idea that you had to be skilled to play music. I didn't pick up dance music. It was 70s and performance was very important, punk rock as well, which influenced me the most".

MUSIC:

Marclay is all about live performance, improvisation and social interaction with other artists. He comments, "In these performances I bring people together, audiences and musicians from very different backgrounds, who play different kind of music, and who, under normal conditions, would never play together. Now every December he organizes event called "The Sound of Christmas" providing a unique opportunity for this new generation of turntablists. Here is the clip from it:





"We hear recorded sound all day. The live performer has been replaced by inanimate object, a disembodied recording. Records are about dead sounds, but when I bring records into a performance and play with them, I change my role from the passive listener to an active player. I give new life to these dead records. I try to do something with it that's different. I don't necessarily like those records, it's more dislike. The reason I use those records is that they're easily available, cheap and just junk".

He scratches the records, brakes them apart and glues them back, puts stickers on them. The records come from everywhere - stores, garage sales, thrift stores etc. and they range from classical to Rockn' Roll, movie clips, broadcasting.


"Recording technology, he says, has turned music into object, and a lot of my work is about that object as much as it's about the music. The ephemeral and immaterial vibrations that make music have become tangible objects-records, tapes, Cd's. This transmutation is very interesting to me. One doesn't necessarily think of music as a physical manifestations. It can also be an illustration, a painting. In a performance you have the visual presence of someone producing sound. In my work I'm constantly dealing with the contradiction between the material reality of the art object as a thing and it's potential immateriality. In a way immateriality is the perfect state. In music this aspect of immateriality is very liberating".


Marclay's first release was "RECORD WITHOUT COVER(1985). A standard vinyl was distributed without the jacket, that it would remain vulnerable to all finger prints, dust and rough surfaces with which it became in to contact. Collectors were instructed not to put in any protective sleeve. The recording itself combines sounds from other records along with the scratching and skipping noises. Cristian Marclay says, that he wants to change our listening habits. That when the record skips we try very hard to make and abstraction of it so it doesn't disrupt our musical flow. He tries to make people aware of these imperfections and that we can accept them as a music; the recording is a sort of illusion, while the scratch on the record is more real.


A record without recording."UNTITELED"(1989) thus presents viewers with the challenge. It's silence serves as a sign of pure emptiness that might be filled with any desire, any sound;it ultimately comes to represent a fetish, reflecting the projections and fantasies of any consumer.


Paralleling his experiments with vinyl disks, Marclay also playfully reworks album covers, distilling and deconstructing their predictable forms. A sexual politics are being analyzed in Marclays works such as "MY FAIR LADY", "DICTATORS(1990) and "INCOGNITA"(1990). It's 25 classical musical albums that are joined to form a patterned grid. It's a join between the orchestra conductor and anonymous woman who pose on album covers as erotic ornaments, not as musicians. In a playful sen-up of this masculine and largely patriarchal culture that lionizes the classical orchestra conductor and denigrates woman as a sexual objects. "BODY MIX"(1991) series are as well related to gender studies.








"THE CHORUS"(1988) encapsulates Marclay's ongoing fascination possibilities of synaesthesia, when the visual object produces , if not the effect of sound, it's after effect.The visual work produces an opening for the imagination. The photograph itself is silent. As such, this silence delivers an extraordinary array of sounds- some lyrical, some grating, some brittle, some elegant.








INSTALLATIONS:



Working on a much larger scale for his installation "FOOTSTEPS"(1989) in Zurich, he tiled the gallery floor with 3,500 vinyl disks, on which he had recorded the sound of his own footsteps mixed with the quick rhythms and syncopation on tap dancing. The viewers walked directly on the albums so that the each disk would be etched with a unique and complex pattern or scratches and skips. When the exhibition was over, the records were packaged and sold.









Several of Marclay's larger installation projects have developed out of the archives. For "ACCOMPANIMENT MUSICAL"(1995) at the Musee d'art et d'histoire, Geneva, the artist re-installed more than 400 art objects and artifacts, each tied to the history of sound-making and it's representation.
"AMPLIFICATION" 1995 was installed int the beautiful Chiesa di San Stae. Transluscent prints on cotton scrims of were shifting with each breath of wind. The images seem to haunt the space with the sweet presence of passing time and the notes of unheard and forgotten melodies.


VIDEO:

Marclay's archival impulse is not limited to museum exhibitions. His video work, such as "TELEPHONES"(1995), "UP and OUT" (1998) and "VIDEO QUARTET"(2002) use films and their soundtracks as ready made material to be mined for their cultural references. "TELEPHONES" video runs for 7 min. and includes a meticulously edited montage of brief clips from classic Hollywood movies in a kind of tone poem. Miscommunication and unspoken desires are the underlying tropes, envied by moments of humor.





"GUITAR DRAG"(2000) is one of the more painfully anthropomorphic and politically resonant work. An electric guitar being securely attached by rope to an old pick up truck and dragged over the rural dirt road. He maid this video, because of what happened to James Byrd. The guitar also relates to violence, rebellion, crazy youth. The work is there to get people to think and discuss these issues, and when you get this mixture of disgust and experiment at the same time, it generates debate and that's always good.


His use of film as a ready made material allows for juxtapositions not normally seen in the cinemas, providing for subtle forms of cultural criticism as well as playful editing.

FUTURE of the MUSIC, according to Marclay

"The music of the future will be constantly manipulated, always evolving, an unstable flow of sounds , never the same twice. This music will be ephemeral again, free of permanent recordings, free of marketing devices"!