Time—that most intangible and mysterious of things—is the very stuff of modern culture. What else is a film but time captured and condensed onto celluloid? What is a musical album but the fleeting ephemerality of sound, now etched into permanence? Christian Marclay has devoted his career to exploring the processes of transformation that render the immaterial into a concrete and saleable commodity. From vinyl records and cassette tapes to Hollywood films, the artist deconstructs familiar formats. “I’m constantly dealing with the contradiction between the material reality of the art object as a thing and its potential immateriality,” Marclay explains.
Using performance, collage, and an understated sense of humor, Marclay returns recorded media to the unpredictable flux of time. He founded several avant-garde bands in the 1980s, including the Marcel Duchamp–inspired group The Bachelors, Even, playing turntables alongside a guitarist. He then began modifying the records themselves. For Record Without a Cover (1985), Marclay turned the concept of a musical album on its head. Instead of faithfully archiving a musical performance, this album changes with every listen. Because Marclay specified that the record should be stored without a protective sleeve, its vinyl surface inevitably accumulates scratches and deformations that are audible when played. “The record is supposed to be a stable reproduction of time, but it’s not,” he has said. “Time and sound become elusive again through the mechanical failure.”
Musical albums and other popular media are also cultural artifacts, and Marclay playfully dissects their stylistic patterns. “I often think of the record as sculpture,” he has said. “A record is a three-dimensional object—a representation of sound.” Marclay “samples” album covers and remixes them into something new. In Sergeant Pepper (1990), for example, he alters the famous Beatles album cover by imprinting upon it an image created by the grooves in the vinyl. This is one of the artist’s many works that focus on how sonic experience can be invoked through a visual language.
Like musical albums, films are structured by rules of style that may only become evident when brought into a new context. Beginning in the 1990s, Marclay began a series of works composed of appropriated film footage that he combined to create new collages of moving images. Telephones (1995) shows dozens of scenes in which movie characters interact with a telephone: answering an unexpected ring, speaking and stammering with joy or anger, hearing and mishearing responses over a crackly line. The whole drama of human experience, Marclay shows, is funneled through the telephone handset. By bringing together so many parallel scenes, Telephones presents a lexicon of cinematic moments that both reflect and influence our own daily experiences of telephone conversations.
The Clock (2010) stands out as a singular example of Marclay’s cinematic collage works. To make it, he edited together 24 hours of scenes, taken from thousands of different movies. The time on-screen corresponds to the real time of day wherever it is screened. In this work, Marclay reverses the processes of transformation that have fascinated him from the beginning of his career: he returns cinematic temporality to the 24-hour cycle from which it is taken. That the result should be so captivating, drawing long lines of visitors, is a testament to the power of what is both most familiar and most enigmatic—the passing moments of each day, registered as hours and minutes by a clock’s ticking hands. Movie magic, it seems, is made from that which we already know best.
Mitchell Herrmann, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Media and Performance, 2024
