PARIS.- The first French exhibition of Christian Marclay's work since 2007, this major retrospective is designed as a network of affinities and echoes, reflecting the artist’s logic and combining subversion and metamorphoses.

Born in San Rafael (California) in 1955, Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American multimedia artist whose work focuses on the world of sound, which he started exploring in the late 1970s while collaborating on multiple musical projects that led to his predilection for vinyl records and turntables as instruments of choice.

One the very first pioneers of scratching, Christian Marclay first made a name for himself through multiple recordings with musicians from a wide range of backgrounds and concerts/performances all over the world.

Based largely on a combination of collage and montage, the scope of his work has broadened over time to take in all facets of visual art: assemblages of objects, installations, photographs, prints, paintings and films form an open ensemble in which the auditory dimension is omnipresent, whether literally or silently represented.

As a leading exponent of reproduction and its dispersion, Christian Marclay playfully confronts us with the paradoxes of difference and repetition. Drawing frequently on the visual and sonic repertoire of “popular” culture, he carefully creates a world that reconfigures the motifs of postmodern everyday life. His oeuvre, influenced by John Cage and Andy Warhol but also by cartoons and the punk aesthetic, offers us the most acute and stimulating take on the pop spirit today.

This exhibition presents a scattering of the artist's major installations: Surround Sounds
(2014-2015), a whirlwind immersion in the onomatopoeias of comic books and manga; Subtitled (2019), a silent combination of subtitles from different films, and All Together (2018), created using Snapchat and presented on smartphones. The exhibition also includes Christian Marclay’s classic works Guitar Drag (2000), in which violence and destruction are tinged with political commentary, and Video Quartet (2002), a tribute to music in cinema through four films projected simultaneously.

In addition, a video installation currently in production – Doors (2022) – will be premiered at the exhibition. Photographs of all sizes, assemblages of record covers, modified musical instruments, prints, collages and paintings compose the body of this choral, polymorphous and unique exhibition.

The exhibition route

Recycled Records

As early as 1979, Christian Marclay worked on vinyl records which he used during his performances, attaching markers for scratches, adhesive strips to create rhythmic jumps, indications of speed or type of music. By cutting the records into slices and reassembling them in the wrong order, he be-gan his series of Recycled Records, collages of fragments of vinyl records, carefully assembled while keeping their sound homogeneous. Being audible, they are sound as much as visual proposals. Some, made up of vinyl records of different sizes, 33 rpm and 45 rpm, can be listened to at different speeds.

Imaginary Records

Marclay experimented very early on with record covers. As our first contact with music, they are its direct visual interpretation. The surprise they create in relation to the music can be a source of en-thusiasm and disappointment. As early as 1981, the artist began to modify sleeves by pasting ele-ments cut out from other sleeves, combining and subverting images and titles. He thus created new packaging for imaginary and subjective music.

This vast production, made during the 1980s and 1990s, testifies to the synaesthetic research Marclay developed from the beginning.

Body Mix

Having manipulated thousands of records during his performances, Marclay began to consider the packaging clichés associated with musical genres. In 1990, he assembled several sleeves reproducing pinups in glamorous poses (Incognita), then orchestra conductors in heroic postures (Dictators). He then began to sew sleeves together to create Body Mix, first blending classical and pop, then all genres. This work of reconfiguration generated hybrid bodies in which fragments of stars were entangled.

Room « Graphic Scores »

The works presented in this room are "graphic scores" that can be played by musicians. Graffiti Composition (1996-2002) constitutes a "musical portrait" of Berlin: during the summer of 1996, Marclay pasted 5,000 posters on the walls of the city with blank sheet music, which the resi-dents progressively covered with graffiti and advertising, but also musical notes.




He photographed them, then selected 150 images. Assembled, they create a composition that can be played freely by one or several musicians.

During this period, Marclay collected and photographed everything that evokes sound. Shuffle (2007) is a card game using photos of places and objects marked by musical notes. By creating a sequence of cards, we obtain a musical score that can be played. Similarly, for Ephemera (2009), Marclay made a collage of notation motifs sampled over the years from a variety of packaging, ad-vertising and illustrations.

His photographs of onomatopoeia are assembled in the Zoom Zoom slide show, an interactive score created for New York singer Shelley Hirsch. During their performance, Marclay selects images and the singer responds with a vocal improvisation.

Marclay's work incorporated onomatopoeia as early as 1989. He samples them notably from comic strips and organises them to create a visual composition that is open to a sound interpretation. To Be Continued (2016) is a score made up of collages of comic strip drawings on which the ensemBle baBel was invited to improvise. Based on the same principle, No! (2019) brings together expressive characters cut out of comic strips, which soloists can interpret using their voices and body language.These works which transform signs and traces into sounds are in line with Earle Brown and John Cage's musical score research, but also the Fluxus movement, which encouraged play, participation and chance.

The Electric Chair
The Electric Chair series consists of screenprints on canvas in a reference to Andy Warhol’s Death and Disasters series. In his famous screenprints, the pop artist had taken the photograph of an execution chamber as a model, with an empty electric chair in the centre and in the background a door with a "Silence" sign over it, similar to the ones in recording studios and theatres inviting the audience to be silent. Marclay reframed the image, focussing on the door and the sign.

Retaining the rectangular format of the door, he painted it in different tones. He adopted Warholian formal procedures such as enlargement and serial repetition. In order to get as close as possible to Warhol's screenprint technique, Marclay collaborated with printer Donald Sheridan, one of Warhol's assistants from 1977 to 1982.

Video Quartet

Video Quartet is a musical and visual symphony consisting of some 700 excerpts from films, mostly Hollywood productions, dating from the 1920s to the early 21st century. The sequences show characters playing an instrument, singing or shouting, as well as actions with sound objects. Like a DJ, Mar- clay patiently assembled these excerpts to create his own composition, with a rhythm alternating between peaceful moments and dramatic counterpoints.

Guitar Drag

For this video shot in Texas, Christian Marclay connected an electric guitar to an amplifier and dragged it behind a pick-up truck. The resulting cacophonic sound evokes noise music and the de-struction of instruments at rock concerts and in Fluxus performances. The work refers more pre-cisely to a racist murder committed in 1998 not far from the film location –James Byrd Jr., an African American, was dragged by a truck for several kilometres. A dark page in the history of the United States overlays the musical and artistic influences, opening up the work to multiple perceptions.

Actions series

Since 1989, Christian Marclay has used onomatopoeias in his works, which constitute a particularly interesting tool for his research into visualising sound. For his Actions series, he chose onomatopoeias evoking fluid actions, that can reflect the act of painting. He began with a collage, which he enlarged and screenprinted on canvas. The collages are like musical scores that the artist reinterprets with his own pictorial gestures, his brush strokes, splashes and drips with vibrant colours.

This series constitutes a nod to the history of painting: to Pop Art by reappropriating the comic strip –we think of Roy Lichtenstein– and to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Helen Franken-thaler, based on gesture and its supposed immediacy. With lyricism and irony, Marclay continues his research on the links between sounds and images, as well as on the sampling of artistic ele-ments and popular culture.

Surround Sounds

Surround Sounds is a silent video installation in which animated onomatopoeia are projected onto four walls. Chris-tian Marclay cut out the words from comic strips and animated them so that they evoke their acoustic properties. "Whizz" runs across walls, "beep" flashes insistently, "thumps" falls systemati-cally to the floor. Although silent, the work immerses us in a mental musical composition, a sym-phony of illustrated noises. Visitors hear with their eyes and develop a personal sound narrative linked to their memory and their everyday experience of the sounds that surround them.

All Together

Previously on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), All Together draws on the sounds and images of everyday life found on Snapchat. The artwork features over 400 public Snaps, carefully sequenced by the artist to create a unique sound composition across 10 smartphones displayed on a curved wall. The small screens and their internal speakers create an intimate and spatial orchestra of synchronised found sounds and images, culled from the everyday moments publicly shared on Snapchat.

Cyanotypes
For his Memento, Allover et Mashup series, Christian Marclay used the cyanotype technique, an old photographic process which consists in placing objects on a light-sensitive surface, where they leave their imprint. He placed audio cas-settes with their magnetic tapes unrolled on the paper. The artist plays with the encounter be-tween obsolete recording techniques. Imprints of 20th century ruins, these works are both musical souvenirs and visual evocations, with nods to gestural painting, notably Jackson Pollock. They syn-thesise Marclay's work on the relationship between sound and the visual, and creation as manipulation and recycling.

Scream
For the Scream series, Christian Marclay first made collages using fragments of screaming charac-ters cut out of mangas and comics. They were then scanned, enlarged and engraved on large wood panels that were inked with colours and printed with a press. The knots and grain of the wood re-semble sound waves, reinforcing the expression of the scream, also amplified by the choice of the large format. Scream is a direct reference to the frightened figure in Edvard Munch’s famous work, The Scream (1895). In line with his onomatopoeic works, Marclay renews the manner in which a sound can be expressed visually.

Doors
Doors is presented for the first time in this exhibition. For ten years, Christian Marclay collected film excerpts featuring a door opening or closing. He edited these sequences so that we see the actors going through the door to enter another space. Going through the door marks the edit point, thus the passage from one film to another and from one soundscape to another. Both audio and visual, this virtuoso editing suggests a labyrinthine stroll, a mental architecture in which the characters get lost and find themselves again, echoing the movements of the visitors
in the exhibition.

Fourth of July
Fourth of July is made up of forty-four fragments of torn photographs, pieces of marching bands playing in the streets of Hyde Park, a small town north of New York, on 4 July 2005, the American national holiday. These works are derived from eight photographs taken by the artist, who tore them up, varying their size, shape and iconographic content. Some of these fragments, which emphasise a discon-tinuous effect, are scattered throughout the exhibition. The work illustrates the visual character of sound and is in line with the work Marclay has always conducted, focusing on the sound potential of images and vice versa.