Christian marclay biography

Christian Marclay explores the culture of making and collecting music through an innovative synthesis of visual and audio art, including performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video. Credited with inventing “turntablism,” Marclay pioneered the technique of using records and turntables as musical instruments, and has collaborated with musicians like John Zorn, William Hooker and Sonic Youth. As humorous as it is cutting edge, Marclay’s work is also notable for his playful take on postmodern critique and his use of audiovisual puns.

Born in San Rafael, California, in , Marclay was raised in Geneva, Switzerland. He studied art at the École Supérieure d’Art Visuel in Geneva, Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and Cooper Union in New York. While never formally trained as a musician, Marclay has credited John Cage, Yoko Ono and Vito Acconci as influences. In , unable to recruit a drummer for his Theater of Found Sound performances, Marclay began using the percussive sounds of a skipping LP to create audio rhythm tracks. For Recycled Records (–86), Marclay took his sound manipulations further, slicing apart vinyl records and reassembling the fragments to create new sequences of distorted tone and sound. Marclay’s visual explorations of musical culture are equally emblematic of his oeuvre; in his Body Mix (–92) series, a critique on the commodification of pop music, Marclay assembles mutant bodies from various disparate album covers.

In , Marclay’s film The Clock, a hour supercut of time-related scenes from film and television, debuted at London’s White Cube Gallery to dizzying critical acclaim. The piece won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial, earning Marclay inclusion in ’s TIME Today, Marclay lives and works between New York and London. His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Tate Gallery, London.

Marclay began his investigations into sound and art through performances with turntables in , while he was still a student. His early work included a series of ‘Recycled Records’ (−86), fragmented and reassembled vinyl records that became hybrid objects which could be played, replete with abrupt leaps in tone and sound. For his ‘Body Mix’ series (−92), he stitched album covers together to create works that are strange phantasms of music and culture – such as Deutsche Grammaphon conductors with the slender legs of Tina Turner – that bring to mind Surrealist ‘Exquisite Corpses’. This transformation of musical instruments or objects into visual puns is an essential component of Marclay’s work. Virtuoso (), for instance, features an accordion with its bellows elongated to more than seven metres. This playful approach to sound and image is also a feature of his ‘Snapshots’, an on going series of informal photographs that depict elements of sound and onomatopoeia discovered in everyday situations.

During the past two decades, Marclay has created ambitious work in a variety of media. The video Guitar Drag () features a Fender Stratocaster being dragged behind a pick-up truck along rough country roads in Texas. While on one level the work is an expression of Marclay’s interest in creating a new sound, it is also a nod to the guitar-destroying antics of rock stars as well as a reference to the murder of James Byrd Jr., an African-American dragged to his death behind a pick-up truck. Video Quartet (), a large, four-screen projection featuring hundreds of clips from old Hollywood films, with actors and musicians making sound or playing instruments, encapsulates his vision, and is an elaborate audio-visual collage that evokes pop culture, appropriation art and sampling. Marclay used a similar technique with Crossfire (), a four-screen installation with clips of actors handling and discharging guns directly at the viewer from all four walls. The wo

Swiss-American visual artist and composer

Christian Marclay (born January 11, ) is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality.

Marclay's work explores connections between sound art, noise music, photography, video art, film and digital animations. 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 s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument.

Early life and education

Christian Marclay was born on January 11, , in San Rafael, Marin County, California, to a Swiss father and an American mother and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. He studied at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva (–), the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston (–, Bachelor of Fine Arts) in the Studio for Interrelated Media Program, and the Cooper Union in New York (). As a student he was notably interested in Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement of the s and s. Long based in Manhattan, Marclay has in recent years divided his time between New York and London.

Work

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. In , he formed a punk rock band called Bachelors Even with his friend, guitarist Kurt Henry. Unable to recruit a drummer for the band, 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