Christian Marclay
1955–
Since the late 1970s Christian Marclay has explored the interplay of sound, noise, music, and image in a body of work that ranges across sculpture, installation, film, and musical performance. He has collaborated with musicians such as Sonic Youth and the Kronos Quartet and is one of the pioneers of “turntablism”— the use of vinyl records and turntables as musical instruments—and of the remix as a cultural form. In Video Quartet, a visual and auditory collage consisting of four synchronized videos that form one contiguous image-and-sound work, Marclay creates a seventeen-minute symphony that assembles and musically choreographs hundreds of clips from iconic Hollywood feature films from the 1920s to the early twenty-first century. The film scenes, which themselves relate a cultural history of the movies, feature people playing musical instruments or singing as well as other soundtrack elements: shouts, screams, objects generating noise, and moments of cinematic silence.
Video Quartet is a meticulously edited composition that at the same time maintains an improvisational atmosphere, the clips creating moments of synchrony or seeming spontaneously to respond to each other as if performed live. The project anticipates genres such as the “supercut,” a video montage highlighting a single theme that has become a popular form on YouTube. Marclay continued his exploration of montage in The Clock (2011)—winner of the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale— a film that chronicles a twenty-four-hour period by combining thousands of film excerpts featuring clocks, watches, and timekeeping mechanisms, commenting on cinematic time as it unfolds in real time on the screen and through cinema’s history.
Introduction
Christian Marclay (born January 11, 1955) 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 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument.
Wikidata identifier
Q923306
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 27, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, composer, installation artist, musician, performance artist, photographer, sculptor, sound artist, video artist
ULAN identifier
500116487
Names
Christian Marclay
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 27, 2025.
