Whitney Kids Mix It Up With Marclay
Nov 9, 2010

On September 25, as the sound of musicians warming up their instruments drifted through the galleries, Whitney kids participated in “Mixing It Up with Marclay,” a playful introduction to the exhibition, Christian Marclay: Festival. A visual artist, Marclay never formally studied a musical instrument or learned how to “read” music, but as a young art student during the era of punk rock and early performance art, he wanted to make music. Marclay started to experiment with turntables and vinyl records to “mix” sounds and became a pioneering turntablist. Eventually, he began producing graphic and video scores to be used in improvisational performances.

To introduce the children to Marclay‘s experimental thinking, the Whitney educator gave them a variety of noisemakers to play. Marclay, the educator explained, asks interesting questions about how we make music and what we think of as music. The children shook, rattled, and squeezed their instruments randomly; making a lot of, as they saw it, noise. But when the educator asked them to play in unison, another kind of sound emerged and the children immediately noticed the difference. They also learned about Marclay’s interest in onomatopoeias, and added their own graphic marks to Marclay’s, Chalkboard. 

The highlight of the program was a performance of Prêt-à-Porter, a score based on Marclay’s collection of clothing decorated with musical notes. The children’s laughter filled the gallery as the performers dressed and undressed themselves in the skirts, shirts, and bathing suits and sometimes struck silly poses to better display the notes. With each change of clothes, the musicians played their instruments, sight reading the musical notations, responding to the movement of the dancers and the shape of the clothing, and improvising their own interpretations of the score. To see artists performing Marclay’s work, go to Watch and Listen.

By Alix Finkelstein, Education Intern