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Born in California in 1955 and raised in Geneva, London-based Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay has made sound the central leitmotif of his 40-year career. In those early college days of scratching records and sampling sex films as rhythm tracks for his band, Marclay fused his interests in punk and hip-hop with the performance work of Joseph Beuys and Vito Acconci. 

Buying cheap records in thrift stores and embracing their often distorted sounds, Marclay made new work by repurposing old material, something which has remained a constant theme in his practice ever since – you can totally see why Marclay’s work appealed to Hedi Slimane, who transformed the artist’s paintings and comic book collages into embroidered couture for his debut Celine collection.

Scratching records for example, something now widely synonymous with hip-hop, was nothing short of revolutionary at the time Marclay was experimenting with it, and his live DJ performances throughout the 80s helped pave the way for found sounds in mainstream music.

His 1985 work, Record Without a Cover, which was sold without protective packaging so that the damage from shipping, storing, and playing of the record became part of the music, embodied both Marclay’s attitude towards embracing accidental sound and giving music a physical form. 

Though sound has always occupied the forefront of his imagination, more recently, Marclay has experimented with different media, including sculpture, collage, installation, photography and film. Often he uses a combination of these forms, as with two of his most famous works, Crossfire (2007) and The Clock (2010). Both use collaged film clips as their building blocks, in the former, to create a barrage of gunfire that ricochets off four separate screens, while in the latter, to create a 24-hour video installation that is synchronised with the local time zone.

Both works typify Marclay’s expert handling of old material. Through a process of deconstruction and reconfiguration, he creates new, multi-sensory experiences 

Guitar Drag (2000)

Made during his time as artist-in-residence at Artspace in Connecticut, Guitar Drag is a thirteen-minute film that follows a Fender Stratocaster, plugged into an amp that is tethered to the back of a pickup, as it is dragged along the road in Texas.

The film begins with the artist tying a rope around the guitar’s neck and securely taping its amp cord before turning the ignition and moving off. The sound is, as you would imagine, scratchy and torturous, at times resembling the destruction of an angry beehive and at others an undeciphered drone from outer space. These sounds only intensify as the truck speeds up and the guitar slowly falls to pieces.

As well as paying tribute to his love of punk and its destructive traditions, the film is primarily a sombre metaphor for the brutal murder of James Byrd Jr in 1998. Byrd was murdered in Jasper, Texas, by three white supremacists, who dragged him by his ankles for three miles using a chain attached to their pickup truck until he was decapitated. Byrd is believed to have been alive for the majority of the ordeal.

With this information in mind, the reading of the piece is radically altered, and the sounds that were previously difficult to bear become a haunting witness to Byrd’s death, forcing us to relive the crime and witness the excruciating, graphic final moments of Byrd’s life.

Top image: Scream (Four Slices), Christian Marclay, 2017, woodcut, from SCREAMS exhibition at White Cube.

Top image: Scream (Four Slices), Christian Marclay, 2017, woodcut, White Cube