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1 of 8Footsteps, Shedhalle, Zurich, June 4 – July 16, 1989 In 1989, Marclay created the installation Footsteps where visitors were invited to view and step on exposed vinyls containing recordings of footsteps. Following the six-week exhibition, the vinyls, damaged by the all of the foot-traffic, were removed and became recordings of new scratchy rhythms, which were then packaged with a poster of the show and sold as individual pieces.© Christian Marclay / Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Installation Photo: Werner Graf -
2 of 8Tape Fall, 1989 Sitting atop a ladder, a reel-to-reel recorder plays the sound of running water. The tape, instead of catching onto a second reel, cascades down the height of the ladder as it advances. The sculpture, which is continually reloaded with new tape, plays for the duration of the show and creates an ever-growing pile of ribbons.© Christian Marclay / Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York -
3 of 8Doorsiana, from the series Body Mix, 1991 Various body parts were often the subject of the images of album covers. In his series Body Mix, Marclay sewed together album covers to create single collages, as depicted above in Doorisana. The mixing of the images put together not only different parts of anatomy, but also people of different cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds.© Christian Marclay / Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York -
4 of 8Accordion, 1999 Connecting sound to visual experience is focal in Marclay's practice— Accordion, pictured here, is a sculpture comprising an altered piano accordion stretched to an almost hyperbolic length, reflecting the winding, breathy nature of the instrument's sound.© Christian Marclay / Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York -
5 of 8Christian Marclay performing, 1999, Festival Agora, IRCAM, Paris. A pioneer of the turntablist movement, Marclay's performative work has involved active mixing of sound through the use of turntables. His live performance transcends the latitude of just an auditory experience—as they frequently involve unconventional means of creating sound, such wearing the turntable on his body.© Christian Marclay / Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York -
6 of 8Guitar Drag (still frame), 2000. The video piece Guitar Drag, represented in this slideshow by the still frame above, speaks to an array of subject matter. The video alludes not only to the rock and roll ritual of smashing guitars and the Fluxus artists who destroyed instruments in the 1960s, but is, more specifically, a response to the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. In 1998, Byrd was fatally dragged to death while tied to a pickup truck. The haunting 14-minute video depicts a guitar being dragged behind a truck, creating an unbearably loud and cacophonous sound.© Christian Marclay / Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York -
7 of 8Untitled (Luciano Pavorotti, Halo and Four Mix Tapes II), 2008. Experimenting with two forms of media that have become obsolete, Marclay created large-scale cyanotypes of cassette tapes strewn and arranged in expressionist compositions.© Christian Marclay / Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York -
8 of 8Installation view of Chalkboard, 2010, at "Christian Marclay: Festival" at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Marclay organized an exhibition comprising performances by world-renowned musicians, video, and an array of highly interactive pieces which solicit visitor's interventions to create the work. Chalkboard, depicted in the image above, is a chalkboard ruled with musical staff lines— viewers we encouraged to mark up the wall to create a collective score for musicians to interpret.© Christian Marclay / Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Our annual TIME 100 magazine issue takes stock of the 100 most influential people of the year, and this year that list included Christian Marclay, the artist behind the highly-regarded video piece The Clock. That piece is only one highlight from the artist’s varied career— which extends itself in across an array of mediums, from sound and performance, to photography and sculpture—some of his other work is featured in the gallery above.
Geoff Dyer—whose many books include The Ongoing Moment, a series of essays about photography—wrote about Marclay for TIME:
Wherever it has been shown, Christian Marclay’s The Clock has been met with a rare combination of critical approval and public affection—love, even. The idea was audacious in its simplicity and herculean in execution: take moments in films when people are interacting with time—looking at their watches, hurrying to intercept the 3:10 to Yuma or hanging on to the hands of Big Ben—and splice them together in such a way that they unfold in real time over 24 hours, so that the whole thing becomes an accurate (to the minute) timepiece. During the film’s opening run in London, I had intended to stay long enough to get the gag—10 minutes?—before hurrying on to a lunch date. It was so hypnotic, so thrilling, that I ended up watching 20 hours over a month, arranging life and appointments (for which I was invariably late) in such a way as to catch previously unseen segments of that celluloid epic called a day.
Read more about this year’s most influential people in the TIME 100.
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- The Enduring Charm of John Grisham
- Who The Golden Bachelor Leaves Out
- Kerry Washington: The Story of My Abortion
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