Christian Marclay


Book Description

With sampling, shuffling, and montage taking centre stage, the practice of Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay (*1955) has been anchored in the universe of sound since the end of the 1970s.An eminent conceptual artist and recipient of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his landmark 24-hour video installation 'The Clock' (2010), he is equally fascinated by all aspects of popular music and avant-garde music, Hollywood cinema, and experimental film.Drawing on the Fluxus vision of art and Pop spirit, and heir to John Cage and Andy Warhol, Marclay has been exploring all the possibilities of the visual arts and the relationships between visual and sonic phenomena for more than four decades through collage, assemblage, installation, video, photography, painting, and printmaking.Also a performer, he has taken part in numerous musical projects, making the vinyl record and the turntable his favourite instruments.This volume explores in depth his consequential open and multimedia work, whose echo and popularity have continued to grow over time.From his early performances in the 1970s to his iconic 'Guitar Drag' (2000) and his most recent large-scale video installations such as 'All Together' (2018) and 'Subtitled' (2019), assemblages of records and their covers, photographs in all formats, altered musical instruments, videos, combined prints and paintings, objects, and graphic scores ensure the connective tissue of this choral and resolutely polymorphic body of work in perpetual evolution--a practice in which the auditory dimension of our existence, whether literal or silently evoked, is constantly asserted.Accompanies the exhibition 'Christian Marclay', 16 Nov 2022 - 27 Feb 2023, Centre Pompidou, Paris.Design by Zak Group.




Cyanotypes


Book Description

Cyanotypes documents six distinct series of cyanotypes produced by visual artist, performer and composer Marclay in collaboration with Graphicstudio.Known as the inventor of 'turntablism', Marclay has explored the relationship between visual and sonic phenomena through his work in diverse media.In the cyanotypes, he reclaims the obsolete technology of the audio cassette as a tool for visual abstraction. First developed in the 1840s, the cyanotype is a camera-less photographic process performed by placing objects directly onto a photosensitive surface, resulting in a silhouetted image.Commonly known as 'blueprints', cyanotypes were famously used by nineteenth century botanist Anna Atkins and later by architects and engineers as a way of reproducing drawings.Marclay's cyanotypes capture the abstract tangles made by unspooled cassette tapes, inviting comparisons with the paintings of Jackson Pollock and other twentieth century artists.Designed by Swiss design firm NORM in collaboration with the artist, this volume includes a study of Marclay's experimentation and utilization of the cyanotype process and its broader contextualization with the history of the avant-garde by scholar Noam Elcott.




ON&BY Christian Marclay


Book Description

The second in a unique series of anthologies which collects key writings by and on the most significant artists in contemporary culture. Influencing a whole generation of artists, musicians and theorists, since the late 1970s Christian Marclay has explored the interplay between sound, audio cultures and art across a diversity of media: performance, sculpture, photography, collage, musical composition, film, video and installation. Born in 1955, Marclay first became internationally known in the 1980s for his sculptures and reassembled readymades generated from evocative materials such as fragmented vinyl records or album covers. His ambitious multi-screen installations such as Video Quartet (2002), Crossfire (2007) and The Clock (2010) have entranced audiences into contemplating the complexities of time and narrative and the role of sound in their experience and representation. Marclay has also collaborated musically with Shelley Hirsch, the Kronos Quartet, Zeena Parkins, Elliott Sharp, Sonic Youth and John Zorn, among many others. Edited by curator and critic Jean-Pierre Criqui, this volume brings together the artist's statements and conversations with Bice Curiger, Jan Estep, Russell Ferguson, Kim Gordon, Douglas Kahn, Frances Richard, Philip Sherburne, Michael Snow, Lars Söderkvist, David Toop and Philip von Zweck. Writings on all aspects of Marclay's work are provided by Clément Chéroux, Dennis Cooper, Christoph Cox, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Noam M. Elcott, Russell Ferguson, Douglas Kahn, Rahma Khazam, Wayne Koestenbaum, Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Y. Levin, Tom Morton, Ingrid Schaffner, Olivier Schefer, Zadie Smith, David Toop and Rob Young.




Christian Marclay


Book Description

Marclay fuses art and technology to draw on the sounds and images of life on Snapchat In Sound Stories, American artist and composer Christian Marclay (born 1955) fuses art and technology, using Snapchat videos as raw material. Featuring texts by Max Maxwell, this book documents the collaboration between the artist and Snapchat in an innovative project mixing the sounds and images of everyday life found on the multimedia messaging app, aggregating unattributed stories. Using algorithms created by a team of engineers at Snap Inc., Marclay experiments with millions of publicly posted Snapchat videos to create five immersive audiovisual installations, two of which are interactive. The Organ, a five-octave keyboard and its bench, allows the spectators to trigger video segments and their matched sounds onto the wall. Rooted in a sampling aesthetic fundamental to Marclay's work, these installations respond to the storytelling available on Snapchat and visitors' sounds and movements in the gallery space.




Index


Book Description

Maybe it?s because I?m not a very good draftsman, collage feels like a more natural approach to sketching and developing ideas. I cut and paste and use my photocopier as a quick way to experiment and develop ideas. My work is all about finding, sampling, appropriating images and sounds, and transforming them. The found image is usually what triggers a thought process?formulating ideas or simply reaffirming latent thoughts. It?s a way to instantly mediate an image and get a little distance from it. Accidents are also often revealing. Like the camera, or any video editing software, the photocopier is just another tool.? ? Christian Marclay00Marclay?s compilation of hundreds of high-contrast black-and-white Xeroxes are like scribblings in a notebook, the first stages of experimentation towards more finished works, a glimpse into the artist?s creative process. This book brings together the source material that has informed Marclay?s practice over the past few years. It was designed in collaboration with Laurent Benner, a graphic designer who has worked with Marclay on various other books and record covers. Their shared sensibility informs this beautiful new book.




The Bell and the Glass


Book Description

Edited by Susan Rosenberg. Conversation with Christian Marclay, Thomas Y. Levin, Ann Temkin and Thaddeus A. Squire.




Christian Marclay


Book Description

On 4 July 2005, Christian Marclay photographed a marching band at an Independence Day parade in Hyde Park, New York. He then produced eight photographs as large prints, and proceeded to tear them up into more than 40 pieces. The result is this artist's book, which composes Marclay's chaotic photo-fragments into a visual and narrative equivalent of a sound-art work.




Christian Marclay and Steve Beresford: Call and Response


Book Description

Seeing and imagining music in a pandemic: a dialogue of found scenes and inspired sounds between two protagonists of experimental music Known for his ability to locate music and sound in the most unexpected contexts, artist Christian Marclay (born 1955) began photographing the emptied London streets when the world shut down in the spring of 2020. He found the quiet--the absence of all the city sounds--both haunting and peaceful. On his daily walks, he began to imagine that there might be music in the landscape. He snapped a photo of an iron gate adorned with decorative white balls as it reminded him of a musical score. He sent it to his friend, the composer Steve Beresford (born 1950), and asked: "How would this sound on the piano?" Beresford responded a few hours later with a recording. Over the course of the spring, he took more photographs which inspired more music. This book collects the dialogue between Marclay and Beresford, which could only take place virtually during lockdown. In his introduction, Marclay writes, "I realized that all my pictures were of enclosures: gates, fences, windows, closed stores. A view of the world behind barriers." The correspondence between image, sound and its notation breaks through those barriers, expanding space in magical ways. Call and Responseis a testament to how the world at large can be not only reflected in image but translated into sound.




The Clock


Book Description

'The Clock' is constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or just a particular time of day. Marclay has excerpted thousands of these fragments and edited them so that they flow in real time. While 'The Clock' examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching 'The Clock' experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once. Even while 'The Clock' tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence.




To be Continued


Book Description