Christian Marclay (Contemporary Artists (Phaidon))
by Kim Gordon, Jennifer Gonzalez, Matthew Higgs

Description

Christian Marclay is a New York-based, Swiss American artist who emerged in both the contemporary art and music scenes during the 1980s. He works across numerous visual media - sculpture, installation performance, found objects and collage - along with music and its artifacts, to create a unique, multidisciplinary art. Also a respected composer and DJ. he has collaborated with John Zorn and Elliott Sharp, among many others. In his visual works he sometimes simply evokes the memory of music, as in The Beatles (1989), a pillow crocheted out of Beatles audio tapes. Elsewhere he examines the cliched images of music-making, for example those found on LP record covers, charismatic, classical music conductors, smiling Easy Listening girls and sultry rock stars. These are then carefully sewn together to form hybrid figures echoing the splicing of the music itself (Body Mix, 1991-93). Marclay has presented his unique sound-and-vision works at the Whitney Biennial, New York, 1991 and 2002, and at the Venice Biennale, 1995 and 1999, among many other key international exhibitions. A major travelling retrospective of his work originated at teh Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2003 and ended its tour at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2005. The highlight is his tour de force, Video Quartet (2003), a four-screen installation largely combining Hollywood film clips associated with music, edited together with virtuoso precision.