CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

Christian Marclay is a long established multi discipline artist but perhaps most well know for his installation and audio visual work. Marclay was born in California in 1955, raised in Switzerland and now lives in London and has exhibited widely. He has long explored the relationships between sound and image in a galley and fine art setting and themes of pop culture, music and its iconography are repeated themes and constants in a lot of his work. Therefore he is someone who I feel I could learn a lot from especially for my Amen Brother piece.

RECYCLED RECORDS (1980-86)
Recycled Records was an early series of pieces by Marclay made from building records from fragmented and then reassembled vinyl records he created hybrid objects that could be played, complete with abrupt leaps in tone and sound. Marclay loved the scratches, the jumps, jolts and irregularity of this process and the combination of sounds that occurred when he made them. He apparently is responsible for the advent of the term "turntablist". Today is the name taken by skilled DJ's in the Hip Hop genre who create new cohesive, flowing music out of records turntables, laptops and mixers but the principle is the same. Marclay's approach was not this fluidity though but the collision of sounds the flow being secondary to this. Marclay is viewed as a follower of Fluxus the multi practice avant garde collective and network of artists who had a DIY attitude and collaboration. A central figure in this movement was avant garde composer John Cage and undertones of Cage's themes and methodology run into Marclay's own work. He used this work and indeed took it further with his "turntablist" performances. Using multiple records on multiple record players rather than the broken and then reassembled record made from different ones he created new music from concurrently played different records.



I loved the idea of recycled records and of the DIY attitude of combining different elements to create something new. I have a passion for Hip Hop music and the sampling of other records used to create something new at its core. It was this passion that proved a gateway into many other forms of music by tracking down the original records used in the Hip Hop tracks and then realising how fantastic the original source songs were too. This in time led to an appreciation of "The break" and the most famous of all The Amen Break.

My own Amen piece I am currently working on follows a similar them to this idea and indeed that of a lot of Marclay's work that of creating something new from lots of other elements. at it's core this is appropriation sampling call it what you want. What I want to do also though is use this to communicate a message not just challenge our perceptions of what music could and should be and its construction.

VIDEO QUARTET (2002)

 

Video Quartet is a large, four-screen projection featuring hundreds of clips from old Hollywood films, with actors and musicians making sound or playing instruments. It extends his ideas further from Recycled records by recycling film clips to create an elaborate audio-visual collage that evokes pop culture, appropriation art and sampling. The themes, methodology and concept is extremely similar to Recycled Records above but film clips are his source material this time. From his turntablist work and the combining of records playing at the same to create a new piece of music he has simply evolved this into using clips from film and the audio from them so he gets pictures to accompany the work. The sound combines and creates a much more fluid approach and cohesiveness though than some of his turntablist works. Vocals work with instrumentation from guitar, piano and harps to create a surreal ever changing band with a jazz like quality the music continually inventing a re-inventing itself.




Whilst the piece in clever, technically skilled and interesting both visually and aurally like much of Marclay's work though it is hard to put your finger on what exactly he is trying to say. As a work of technical competency and execution it works well and it is certainly clever but it is a little bit of a one liner. As I have mentioned before technique unless it serves a purpose is just that a clever technique and the piece lacks a little in substance. It has obvious links to the Amen piece I am developing though with clips and sound combined to create an installation but just not at the same time although this may be worth trying. Hopefully what my work will do it to have a strong underlying theme and ideology that shines through and not just be a what seems like a clever technical exercise. A very enjoyable one but in the end I was left wanting a little more.

THE CLOCK (2010)
The Clock is created from thousands of edited film clips and fragments, from a vast range of films to create a 24-hour, single-channel video that is shown on one screen. It examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching The Clock experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once. It is also a great rolling enigma particularly for cineastes in trying to work out the films that the clips used in the piece are sourced from.



My feelings about the clock are very similar to those I had for Video Quartet. Whilst their is absolutely no denying huge undertaking of the the work, research and time put into creating it and the clever idea behind it there is not much more than that to it. Marclay is more like a librarian sifting through clips to find the ones he wants and then simply letting them follow one after the other. Technically it is not a wonderful piece of work the exceptional archiving and researching is where the cleverness lies. It is a one line idea, stunt and concept that probably countless people had discussed in the pub but Marclay just had the time, resources and initiative to actually do it. All that aside it is really enjoyable piece to consume as an audience member but lacks the depth messages and ideology to elevate it to much more than clever entertainment. You could argue it questions time, movie history, narrative progression and structure or how we use time to navigate our day ritualistically but I feel that would be reading too much into it.

Again the use multiple clips to tell a story has links to my Amen piece and it is a great example of fair usage policy as there is no way he would have sought clearance on all those clips and their length points to this. The way they are linked by time is similar to the linking of my Amen idea through the drum beats but I want to as mentioned earlier it to be more than a technical exercise. I want to make sure the ideology, messages and values of sampling, appropriation are crustal clear. I want the audience for my piece to leave it being informed, educated AND entertained and to acclaim the unsung hero and 6 seconds of genius that inspired over 2400 other artists. If I do not it will simply be  apiece of clever entertainment at best like Marclay's The Clock!