CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

Visual artist and musician, Christian Marclay should be considered a virtuoso of collages utilizing sound, noise, cinema, photography, and other forms. Even in the 70s, long before the era of hip hop and DJs, he used turntables as musical instruments to create sounds and beats through heterodox manipulation of a needle on vinyl records. His collages can be brilliant, technological, and realistic all at the same time: this year he won the Golden Lion at the 54^th Venice Biennale for The Clock, a 24-hour film made up of thousands of film clips, many of which are classics.

Every scene contains a frame of a clock which is edited so they flow in synch with the real-time. These distinctive features of the Californian artist found their application in 80 East 11th Street, whose title is inspired by one of Marcel Duchamp’s studios in New York. The installation consists of a wooden door and frame and a long hi-fi recording of sounds and voices of actors. Upon nearing the door you can hear, as if in another room, people arguing, fighting, having sex, or involved in normal daily activities. Eavesdropping from the door is a clear reference to society’s mediatic voyeurism, observed without moralism but rather with a cold and sidereal detachment.

Christian Marclay (San Rafael, California, 1955), American artist and composer, lives and works in New York. He studied at the Ecole Supérieur d’Art Visuel in Geneva and at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. His performances utilize records and music media that are manipulated and deformed in order to obtain specific sounds. He has collaborated with musicians and artists such as John Zorn, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, William Hooker, Otomo Yoshihide and Okkyung Lee, Günter Müller, Flo Kaufmann.