Christian Marclay is a multi-talented artist in audio production and video collage. He was born in San Rafael, CA on January 11, 1955, and was raised in Sweden. During his childhood and education he was heavily influenced by the Fluxus movement and Punk Rock genre. In 1979, he joined forces with guitar player Kurt Henry to form a band; since they were unable to hire a drummer, Marclay began manipulating records on turntables to create a beat over which Kurt would play.
Since then he has been creating music with what he calls "the lost sounds of the record"— the hiss of a turntable needle, the crackles and pops, skips on faultily-cut records, and even the sound of a record played off-center. Additionally, he tends to find cheap records in stores (in 1998 he bragged that he never paid more than $1USD for a record), cut them up and re-attach them to create specific rhythms or combinations of sound.
Music is a very popular experience that anybody can relate to. It's a lot more popular than painting. [And in any case, in] a performance you have the visual presence of someone producing sound. In my work I'm constantly dealing with the contradiction between the material reality of the art object as a thing and its potential immateriality. In a way immateriality is the perfect state, it is the natural outcome of the ephemeral. In music this aspect of immateriality is very liberating. Ideally I would like to make art that is invisible.
Marclay, Christian.
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