Christian Marclay - Fluxus Leftovers- INTERVIEWS

BRING THE REWIND

You have never heard art like this before – a survey of pioneering turntablist, musician and video artist CHRISTIAN MARCLAY is a summer exhibition highlight, PAUL ANDREW writes.

Herald of the punk revolution Patti Smith once described

the legendary New York rock venue CBGB as more than

just a club; she said it was a state of mind. 

During its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s that seedy dive with sticky carpet on The Bowery was the crucible for sonic revolutionaries like The Ramones,Talking Heads,
Blondie, Television and for Smith herself who

transformed rock into hypnotic chaos. It was also the

stamping ground for video artist and musician Christian

Marclay.

Punk was the quantum shift that helped us to hear

music differently, and it is through this same state of

mind that Marclay helps us to see and feel music differently. He has orchestrated an extraordinary body of work comprising

turntable performances, videos and music sampling

spanning three decades. Magically fusing music and image,

whether it’s spinning discs, destroying discs, videoing discs

or making a symphony from gunshots.

According to the artist, “MTV is dead.” 

Marclay himself draws from art history, rather than pop music when it comes to “seeing sound”. He counts the Fluxus artists like Joseph Beuys and performance artists John Cage, Laurie

Anderson, Dan Graham and godfather of video art Nam June Paik among his key influences.

As a young art student with a passion for collecting vinyl

Marclay relocated from Switzerland to New York with

his parents during the mid 1970s. The punk scene was

nascent. He cut his teeth at new music venues like CBGB,

preferring the raw energy of iconoclastic beats in small dark

clubs rather than the staid white tenor of traditional art

venues, museums and galleries.

“To me the new music at this time was punk. Seeing

people making music and sounds happen in small clubs

and experiencing music through their bodies. It gave me

the opportunity to make music myself, I thought, if these

people can make music, I can make music too. You didn’t

have to repeat the music of your parents; you could turn

rock‘n’roll upside down. It wasn’t the fashion, it was the

sounds. I never had a Mohawk or safety pins; I could go to

clubs like CBGB, DNA, and MARS and see bands.

“When I started using video I was interested in the way

that sounds could look, I used turntables to cut up sounds,

used samples from films. I used vinyl records as objects

that could make sounds themselves, not just the sounds

recorded. Breaking them, smashing them, walking on

them, bending them. And video allowed me to document

these sounds.”

“After I moved to New York I was surprised at the amount

of vinyl I could find very cheaply, at thrift shops, absolute mountains of it. I had grown up with records, collected them treasured them, they were sacred to me. Yet in the States no

one seemed to want them anymore. Vinyl was disposable. So

I started collecting. I used vinyl in my performances and

video. It was a time when music was being mass-produced,

and vinyl seemed to be losing its sacred, magic quality.

In 1979 when I smashed vinyl it was a big thing, it said

something big. Not so much now.”

Fluxmix (2005) is a recent work that plays on this idea of

breathing life into objects. And Marclay is chuffed that it

has been included in the Melbourne exhibition. “There

wasn’t enough room for this huge piece in the recent Paris

version of Replay. It’s very large scale, 160 objects, 16

monitors in a circle, like a ceremonial circle."

“I had the opportunity to work with the leftovers from Fluxus

performance art preserved at the Walker Art Centre. But

in this museum situation, I had to use white gloves to

handle all these objects, which were now fragile, precious

and behind glass. Commodities rather than inexpensive,

everyday objects they once were. He says humbly, “I was

able to make sounds from these things, and for a moment

put some new life into them”.

Replay is on at ACMI until 3rd February

Exhibition Finished

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VmXoeZir7A