Christian Marclay, The Clock, and Guitar Drag

Christian Marclay is a contemporary artist whose work over the years has been an evolution of multi-media synthesis in innovative, and sometimes startling ways. Although born in California in 1955, he spent many of his formative years in Switzerland. Today he resides in New York. As a young man, he took interest in conceptual artists such as Joseph Beuys, and in the international emergence of the Fluxus movement of the 60s and 70s, sometimes referred to as a Neo-Dadaist trend. Fluxus artists were very much into blending various media and performance together.

Marclay was perhaps also influenced by the 'noise' performances of John Cage in the 50s, as well. He began playing with old scratchy records he would pick up at thrift stores and junk shops. A stuck groove in a record was a found backbeat, something to incorporate into a larger composition as though it were a drum track. In a way, Marclay was one of those pioneers who gave rise to the turntablism characteristic of the scratch and hip-hop we know today. Of course, he took the concept off in his own direction, using the record player as an instrument for creating film soundtracks.

In 2000, Marclay went to Texas, strapped an amplifier to the back of a flat bed truck, and dragged a Fender guitar around both on-road and off-road as a performance that easily brought to mind the guitar smashing tendencies of certain rockers. It also lent itself to a more subliminal reminiscence of the history of lynchings in the American south.

Most recently, his astonishing film 'The Clock' just had it's U.S. premiere in the U.S. While I haven't seen it, it is described as a masterpiece by many. The film is a 24 hour long collage/montage of thousands of film clips that cross genre and era. The clips, themselves, state the passing of time either through the spoken voice of an actor, or in cut-aways to a ticking clock, a glance to the face of a watch, a clock-tower, and so on. This occurs minute-by-minute for 24 hours. Additionally, when the film is shown in any venue it is synched with the real time of that particular city. If you went into the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York at 1:35pm, to watch the film, it would be 1:35 pm in the film as well. If you left at 4:30pm in the film, it would be 4:30pm as you stepped back out into the city. Filmic time becomes real time. Real time becomes cinematic. The two merge.

Below are two video clips. One is some news coverage regarding The Clock. The other, is about seven minutes of Marclay's Guitar Drag, 2000.

Regarding, The Clock: (double click on screen for full image)



Regarding, Guitar Drag, 2000: (double click on screen for full image)