Artist #7 - 2.22.10 - Christian Marclay

During our meeting, Paul suggested I look at Christian Marclay. He was one of the first people to use turntables as an instrument, independently, but around the same time as hip-hop artists were beginning to do so as well. Most of his work deals with altering or destroying records to produce interesting music loops or soundscapes. My criticism is that he doesn't make music so much as he just makes noise, or "sound collages". I understand that he is an innovator of this sort of thing but my interest ends there. I suppose it's hard for me to grasp why you would want to make music sound bad. Of course this gets into the whole discussion of what 'good' music even is which could be a whole other blog post.

The method of using multiple musical samples to make something new reminds me of a lot of modern music. DJ Girl Talk is someone who is pushing the limits of this method but doing it in a much more musical way than Marclay. He takes parts of numerous hit songs and arranges them in such a way that they continuously and seamlessly play play with and mold into one another. Also on a less notable level, in the recent past it was the standard for hip-hop artists to make beats composed of sliced samples of old records and turntable scratching. Marclay's work reminds me of non-rhythmic hip-hop.

Marclay also does visual work although, like myself, his visual work seems inferior to his audio work(aside from his installations, which I like the most). Here are a few of those,

Christian Marclay, Stereo Volume, 1989

Christian Marclay, Guitar Drag, 2000

Christian Marclay, Ensemble, 2007

Christian Marclay, Ensemble, 2007



Christian Marclay, Video Quartet, 2002

I found an interview with him where he mentions something that reminds me a lot of myself, in it he says, "Being in art school and wanting to make music was not an obvious choice but I felt a lot more energy coming out of the music world than from the art world. When I was visiting New York on the weekends, I tended to gravitate more towards what was happening in music clubs than towards what was happening in museums and galleries." To be perfectly honest, I have little interest in the art world, but I could spend hours in the basement at Plan 9. It's not that I don't like art, I just don't like what art is these days. So instead of looking for visual artists, I usually spend more time looking for new musical artists. It seems like other artists keep up with artists the way I keep up with musicians, looking for their new work or where they are showing next. I came to school to learn how to be a photographer, not necessarily a fine art photographer. But since that's what I'm doing, I feel like I can use music more expressively as art than I can photography.