Christian Marclay | Biography, Art, The Clock, & Facts

Christian Marclay (born January 11, 1955, San Rafael, California, U.S.) is a Swiss American visual artist and composer whose multidisciplinary work encompasses performance, sculpture, and video. Much of his art imaginatively explores the physical and cultural intersections between sound and image, often through the deconstruction and recontextualization of recorded media and its associated materials.

Marclay, whose father was Swiss and mother was American, grew up in Geneva, where he studied (1975–77) at the School of Visual Art (now the Geneva University of Art and Design). While continuing his education in the United States, primarily at the Massachusetts College of Art (now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design; B.F.A., 1980), he collaborated on various musical projects, finding inspiration in the playful energy of both performance art and punk rock.

In performance Marclay frequently incorporated the prerecorded and mechanical sounds produced by vinyl records played on turntables, and such noisy experimentation soon became the central focus of his art. Although record players had been employed in the creation of new music by composers such as John Cage and by early hip-hop deejays, the extremity of Marclay’s manipulations—for his Recycled Records (1980–86) series, he sliced apart vinyl and reassembled the shards to form new sequences of sound—was considered innovative. As an avant-garde deejay (or “turntablist”) in New York City in the 1980s, he collaborated with such musicians as John Zorn and the band Sonic Youth, and he occasionally released recordings, some of which were later compiled on Records 1981–1989 (1997).

By the late 1980s Marclay had also begun creating a wide range of art objects, collages, and installations for which music and the technologies involved in its production served as primary subjects. In Tape Fall (1989), for instance, a reel-to-reel tape player mounted on a stepladder plays a recording of dripping water while the spent tape falls and amasses on the floor. In his Body Mix series (1991–92), a sly comment on the commodification of popular music, various album covers on which human bodies are displayed are stitched together to form mutant figures. The influence of Marcel Duchamp was particularly evident in Marclay’s whimsically transfigured musical instruments, such as Lip Lock (2000), for which he impractically fused the mouthpieces of a tuba and a trumpet.

Although such works were well received, Marclay ultimately gained more attention for his video art, which he first pursued in the 1990s. For Telephones (1995), he artfully assembled a seven-minute montage of clips from Hollywood films that feature characters using telephones; the work’s aural and visual repetitions served in part to defamiliarize such stock scenes. Marclay’s facility with audio editing and mixing found further application on the 14-minute Video Quartet (2002), a four-screen mashup of musical performances and other sounds on film. In 2010 he reached a career apex with the completion of The Clock, a 24-hour video made up of cinematic clips—at least one for every minute of the day—that reference the current diegetic time, primarily through dialogue or visual depictions of timepieces. Marclay arranged the clips in order of the minute each one marked, and in exhibition the work was synchronized with the actual local time. For its virtuosic composition and its mesmerizing effect on viewers, The Clock was widely celebrated, and its presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2011 earned Marclay the Golden Lion for best artist.

Meanwhile, Marclay continued to consider the objects and ideas associated with sound in thoughtful and often amusing ways. A series of photogravures document the varied patterns of intercom systems in Sound Holes (2007), while cyanotypes (a precursor to modern photography) reveal the insides of cassettes in Automatic Drawings (2008). Marclay explored the humour and limits of onomatopoeia through print, painting, and collage in such works as Ring Ring Ring (2006), Skssh Clang Whssh (2011), and Orange and Purple Ploosh (2014). In 2017 he was appointed composer in residence by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in England. As part of the residency, he created a new musical piece for 20 pianos (Investigations) using images as musical scores. Marclay took on a more disquieting tone in a series of prints and collages centring on open mouths and featuring such titles as Scream (Bloodcurdling Shards) (2019) and Untitled (Torn) (2020).