Image: Virtuoso, 2000, altered accordian.
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; gift of the West Coast Acquisitions Committee of the American Friends of the Israel Museum.

Opening Reception Sunday, September 28, 2003, 1 to 4 p.m.

It is sound, and our culturally determined reactions to it, that forms the basis of Christian Marclay's art. Taking his cue from both music and noise, he has produced a remarkable body of work exploring the space between what we hear and what we see. He has achieved critical acclaim both as a visual artist and as a musician in the United States and Europe. Christian Marclay is the first survey exhibition of Marclay's work by an American museum, and includes over 60 works in sculpture, collage, installation, photography and video, created from 1980 to the present. Among the works to be included are Recycled Records (1980-1986), The Beatles (1989), Virtuoso (2000), Guitar Drag (2000), Video Quartet (2002) and a group of photographs shown here for the first time. This diverse body of work brings together a variety of disciplines - music, visual art and performance - that establish Marclay as an artist who confidently bridges the realms of music and contemporary art.

Christian Marclay was born in 1955 in San Rafael, California, and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. He studied at Geneva's Ecole Superieure d'Art Visuel before returning to the United States to complete his BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, in 1980. He is now based in New York. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at prestigious museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2002), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2002), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2001), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2000), Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (1997). He has participated in numerous international group exhibitions organized by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002 & 2001), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2001), the Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2000), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2000), the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK (1999), and the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany (1998). Marclay has been performing and recording music since 1979. As a musician and DJ, he has released solo and collaborative records since the 1980's, and has performed at such venues as New York's Knitting Factory and The Kitchen. He has performed with a diverse group of musicians and DJs, including Sonic Youth, Kronos Quartet, Fred Firth, Butch Morris, John Zorn and Arto Lindsay. Marclay's solo releases include "Record Without a Cover," 1985, "More Encores," 1988, and "Records," 1997.

"Christian Marclay, as an artist and member of the avant-garde music scene, has continuously explored the process of seeing and hearing music. His innovative use of visual and audible materials has resulted in a body of work that is challenging, compelling, witty and often highly serious," says Russell Ferguson, the exhibition's curator and chief curator at the Hammer Museum.

Marclay focuses our attention not only on audible qualities, but also on the way sounds are experienced, visualized, and translated into other forms. Telephone conversations from movies, reviews of musical performances, compact discs, and album covers have all provided sources of inspiration for his work. This large-scale exhibition will introduce visitors to Christian Marclay's multi-faceted work and allow for close scrutiny of his artistic development since 1980. Organized loosely by chronology, it comprises notable works such as altered records, record covers that have been collaged and sown together, monstrous and beautifully distorted musical instruments, as well as large-scale video works.

As a musician and DJ, Marclay began to incorporate scratched, broken, and otherwise altered records into his performances in the early 1980s. Known as Recycled Records (1980-1986), they are radical collages of broken and re-assembled vinyl records. Still playable on the turntable, they were Marclay's first objects to stand alone as visual works of art. The exhibition features a half-dozen collages from this early series, as well as other examples of modified records created later, such as a record with a padlock, one with no grooves, and melted records.

In addition to actual records, Marclay began to use album covers as a medium, resulting in a group of work called Imaginary Records. Drawing on a vast collection of album covers and modifying them, Marclay began to explore the way music functions socially. Notions of nostalgia and sexual stereotypes are exposed in the smart and visually powerful album-cover collages from his Body Mix series. The exhibition includes seminal works such as Doorsiana, 1991; Footstompin', 1991; and Slide Easy In, 1992.

Marclay has used many media to create a variety of sculptures during the past 20 years, often incorporating familiar objects such as stereo speakers, telephone receivers and magnetic tape. One of the most evocative of these works is The Beatles, 1989. Included in the exhibition, this sculpture uses the collected works of the Beatles on audiotape crocheted into a soft pillow. It is indicative of Marclay's desire to not only present music or sound in a physical form, but to explore their deeper social meanings. The sculpture reflects the comfort and personal familiarity Marclay and millions of others shared with the Beatles and their music.

Also on view is the installation Tape Fall, 1989, in which a reel-to-reel tape player continually plays a recording of trickling water. The player is perched out of reach on top of a high ladder, and in the absence of a take-up reel the tape cascades onto the ground to form a growing mound of magnetic tape. The experiences of both hearing and seeing the tape's trickle become inextricably linked.More recent sculptures take the forms of impossible musical instruments, and several examples are included in the exhibition. Altered and grotesquely distorted, these instruments are now physically unplayable and instead become suggestive of the monsters that might play them, or the wild sounds they might produce. Drumkit, 1999, is a complete set of drums and cymbals reaching up to 13 feet on exaggerated stands; Virtuoso, 2000, is a 25 foot long accordion; and Lip Lock, 2000, a tuba and pocket trumpet amalgamation that leaves no room for human lips.

Marclay has recently begun to further explore previous creative principles and themes in new works using video. The 14-minute video Guitar Drag, 2000, shows an amplified Fender guitar attached to a rope being pulled behind a pick-up truck. As the guitar drags across back roads and dirt trails, it produces a range of cacophonous musical sounds that often correlate to what is seen. Guitar Drag explores the collected mythologies of the guitar, the rural South and the truck, and Marclay evokes such disparate associations as rock-and-roll guitar smashing and the history of lynching in the South.

A central part of the exhibition is the critically acclaimed Video Quartet, 2002. This large, four-screen DVD projection joins hundreds of old Hollywood film excerpts that feature actors and musicians making sound or playing instruments. The result is both a moving visual collage and a musical composition evoking John Cage, hip-hop riffs, and appropriation art.

The exhibition also introduces audiences to a group of photographs Marclay made over the last decade and has never before exhibited. These seemingly banal snapshots record everyday environments with references to sound or music.

The Center for Curatorial Studies Museum is the only East Coast venue for Christian Marclay. Following its showing at CCS, it will travel to the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (February 5 - May 2, 2004) and the Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland (June 12 - September 6, 2004).

This exhibition is accompanied by the first major catalogue on Marclay's work, featuring essays by exhibition curator Russell Ferguson, University of California professors Miwon Kwon and Douglas Kahn, and musician Allan Licht.

Christian Marclay was curated by Russell Ferguson and organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and was made possible by support from Eileen Harris Norton and the Peter Norton Family Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the LLWW Foundation; Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland; LEF Foundation; and Art for Art's Sake.

Press

"An Artist Makes Music Touchable" appeared on October 13, 2003 in The New York Times (3.96 Mb)

"Video Art That Fits Images and Sounds Together" appearedon November 2, 2003 in The New York Times (4.26 Mb)