Mixing medias

Christian Marclay on his new show
Replay and why he worries about being
pegged as just a video artist

by STACEY DEWOLFE

Replay, an exhibition of video works by internationally renowned artist and musician Christian Marclay, makes its North American premiere at DHC/Art this weekend. Though not promoted as such, the show is a retrospective of sorts, beginning with 1984’s “Record Players” and culminating with the magnificent four-channel installation “Video Quartet” from 2002.

What is a surprise to many of Marclay’s admirers is the diversity of his practice. Fans of experimental music know him from his collaborations with John Zorn, Michael Snow and Sonic Youth—a turntablist whose improvisations involve playing a record player as one would a guitar.

“The danger of a show like Replay is that people think I’m a video artist, but I’m not. I do all kinds of things,” says Marclay from his home base of New York. Working with more “low-tech” media, as well as the still image—a new show of photography opens this month in Geneva—Marclay describes himself as someone “interested in different things” using “whatever media is appropriate to the questions that I’m asking” at the time.

“Sometimes I might start with the media, because the media is conducive to an interest, but it kind of goes back and forth. The more you learn about a medium, the more you find out about what is possible to create with it. I try to stay open.”

VINYL DESTROYER

Though many found objects have found their way into his work, the vinyl LP seems to have held a special place, and indeed, a collection of Marclay’s record-related projects can be seen in Sympathy for the Devil at the MAC. These works continue to resonate in terms of their playfulness and humour, but the development of recording technology has had an impact on their relevance as social commentary. This is also true of “Record Players,” whose performers engage in the serious business of destroying a stack of LPs. “A lot of the meaning of the piece has sort of disappeared. In that age, everyone listened to records, everyone knew how fragile they were and how to treat them. That piece is really a rejection of that.”

Like much of Marclay’s performance-based work, “Ghost (I Don’t Live Today),” a homage to Jimi Hendrix, began as a live event, performed at NYC’s The Kitchen in 1985 and later released on vinyl. Here, Marclay appears as the ghost, playing his turntable in response to the “unconventional things” that Hendrix did to his instrument, Marclay describes these performances as “music composition with videos,” saying “they are both, not one or the other.”

“Telephones” from 1995 is the piece that introduces Marclay’s first experimentation with montage. Comprised of clips from films both contemporary and classic, the piece reconstructs the narrative of a phone call, intercutting between the speakers and listeners. Culled from random snippets of dialogue, the strange utterances and oddly moving silences form a new audio track that ends with the percussive slam-slam-slam of the phone receiver hitting the cradle.

ORGANIC ENCOUNTERS

Though Marclay acknowledges that working with found footage means spending weeks in front of a computer, editing, he still describes the process as organic. “I will sometimes make discoveries by chance, just based on the footage that I find,” he says. “One has to remain open to whatever you see and encounter and then incorporate it, or reject it.” The process is time-consuming but stays true to the improvisational spirit behind all of his work. “I have a plan and a structure, but the footage determines what it is going to look like.”

What it looks like, at least as far as “Video Quartet” is concerned, is something wondrous: an epic audio-visual symphony that captures the grandeur of Hollywood at its most celebratory. Compiled from thousands of clips, the images settle momentarily into recognition, and then are gone. And underneath, but not subordinate, is the audio track. Through a collage of music and voices, instruments and machines, the piece feels like a tribute to the industry’s unseen creators, the musicians, sound recordists and engineers behind that which most audience members take for granted: the sound.

That Replay is running concurrently with the Montreal debut of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box at Vox seems fitting as Marclay—whose first art-school band was named for the artist’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”—is something of a fan.

“The whole thing about Duchamp is that there are so many ways to interpret the work,” says Marclay. “It’s what people project onto it that’s interesting. As Duchamp said, the public completes the work because they give meaning to the work."

REPLAY IS AT DHC/ART (451 ST-JEAN)
FROM NOV. 30–MARCH 29, 2009