From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
We are living through something of a golden age of iconoclasm. A century after the Suffragette Mary Richardson slashed the Rokeby Venus in London’s National Gallery, activists are once again launching attacks on artworks in service of a higher cause. When Black Lives Matter protests reached the UK in 2020, one flashpoint was the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, defaced with spray paint and chucked into Bristol Harbour. Just Stop Oil’s supporters have thrown soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and glued themselves to Constable’s The Hay Wain, among other acts intended to shock the public into action on climate change. In a statement posted on the Just Stop Oil website, the group point to the element of ‘cultural transgression’ in these actions. ‘Art is sacred in our culture – to attack it feels almost blasphemous.’
Few artists understand the tension inherent in acts of violence directed against cultural artefacts better than Christian Marclay. ‘It gets people very on edge,’ he says, as we speak over Zoom one afternoon. His film Made to be Destroyed (2016) collaged movie clips in which artworks get damaged – from Enrique Riveros smashing up a statue in Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète to Jack Nicholson’s gleeful assault on the Flugelheim Museum in Batman. But he tells me he feels ‘saddened’ by recent acts of activist iconoclasm. ‘Why attack an artwork that has nothing to do with your cause?’ he asks. Just Stop Oil, for instance, argue it’s to make use of the cognitive dissonance that arises when we find ourselves more outraged by a symbolic assault on a painting – they avoid harming the actual works, after all – than looming environmental disaster. But Marclay is unimpressed. ‘I think there’s a total lack of imagination on the part of these demonstrators,’ he says. ‘I’m glad that they’re starting to prosecute these people.’
Marclay is quick to stress that he’s ‘not criticising the causes’ on behalf of which such acts are committed. But, of course, there is a certain irony in his reproach. For much of his career, damaged or otherwise defaced works of art have been Marclay’s principal raw material. Since the start of his career in the 1980s, he has taken the pop culture smarts of his near contemporaries in the Pictures Generation and spiked them with a post-punk, post-Fluxus insurgent attitude. His films, performances and sculptures have an irreverence, a wild, destructive energy. Vinyl records and their sleeves, musical instruments and manuscript scores: all have fed a restless engine of destructive production, at once archly conceptual and slyly subversive. Which is as much as to say, things got broke.
It’s early October when we talk and Marclay is just recovering from a bad cold, wrapped up with a thick scarf around his neck. I’m just starting to come down with a cold myself. As a result, our conversation is punctuated by peals of coughing from each end, which the automatic noise reduction software built into the video conferencing app dutifully clips out of the transmission, like so many expletives deleted from a radio broadcast. Marclay cuts a severe figure, dressed all in black surrounded by the white walls of his London studio. With his dark, thick-rimmed glasses, intense stare and slightly cadaverous demeanour, I’m reminded a little of David Cronenberg – or, more specifically, Cronenberg playing the enigmatic Dr Kovich in Star Trek: Discovery. But for all the coolness of his mien, Marclay is good-humoured and personable in conversation, prone to irony, with a winning smile that he will allow, just occasionally, to break open the carefully drawn lines of his jaw.
It is now 14 years since Marclay’s landmark work The Clock (2010) was first screened at London’s White Cube gallery. Since then, the 24-hour-long film, which collages shots of timepieces from thousands of different films and TV shows to play in sync with the local time, has been shown on five continents. In Venice, it won the Golden Lion in 2011. It has been called one of the most important artworks of the 2010s (by ArtNews) and earned its creator a spot on the Time 100. This winter it returns to MoMA in New York, where 12 years ago it racked up more than 40,000 visitors. But when I bring it up, Marclay groans. ‘Yeah, I was afraid we were going to talk about The Clock…’
Still from The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay. Courtesy White Cube, London/Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; © Christian Marclay
He continues: ‘It’s like in music, having a big hit and at every show they want you to sing it.’ But Marclay is intrigued to see how people who saw it a decade ago might regard it today. ‘The piece exists through each of us differently,’ he says. ‘We enter the space whenever we can, we leave whenever we have to. It’s a different experience if you see it at 3 a.m. or at 3 p.m. As a viewer you become another actor in this installation.’ Marclay knows of two separate couples who met because of The Clock. More than most works of art, it inveigles its way into people’s lives.
Born in 1955 in Marin County, California, Marclay grew up in Switzerland, after his family moved to Geneva while he was still an infant. He attended a strict boarding school run by priests in Lausanne, where music was effectively forbidden. In 1975, he enrolled at the School of Visual Art in Geneva (now the University of Art and Design, or HEAD, as it is known locally), but after a summer course at Harvard, where he met the conceptual artists Lowry Burgess and Donald Burgy, he decided to apply to Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, where both men taught during term time. In Switzerland, he’d been building quasi-minimalist installations out of old cardboard boxes in a Caran d’Ache pencil factory, but it was in America, where he moved in 1977, that the focus of his interest switched to music.
Walking to college one day, about a block from his apartment in Brookline, he found a Batman story record lying on the ground, trampled on and several times run over. For the kid who went to Catholic school in Switzerland, discovering something as precious as a vinyl record dumped in the street seemed to encapsulate New World excess. For the art student who loved John Cage and Joseph Beuys, the record held the allure of a ‘found object’, a potential readymade artwork full of sounds that bear the traces of a history that didn’t stop when it left the pressing plant. Thinking back to the find today, it’s the sound effects on the record he remembers – all those lurid biff, boom, kapow noises that would later make their way into collage works on paper like Skrakk (2006–13) and Fire (2020). ‘A scratched record will skip and sometimes it would skip on these interesting sound effects,’ Marclay recalls. ‘That was what got me interested in using records.’
At the time, Marclay had been working on a musical, ‘an all singing and dancing kind of kitschy thing’, as he put it to me. A friend from college, Kurt Henry, had agreed to play guitar and help write the music. Henry persuaded Marclay he should sing (‘I’d never sung,’ he says, ‘and I still can’t sing but, you know, it was the punk era…’) so they decided to form a band called The Bachelors, Even, from the title of a work by Duchamp. There was just one problem. They needed a drummer.
‘It was while I was thinking about that that I found this record,’ Marclay says. ‘It suggested that maybe we could use some of these skipping records as rhythmic loops for the songs.’
Skrakk (2006–13), Christian Marclay. Photo: Ollie Hammick; © White Cube; © Christian Marclay
He started to amass piles of the discs from thrift stores for as little as 10 cents a pop. The dust and scratches that marked their surfaces only made them more suitable for the purpose he had in mind. The scratch, he realised, ‘creates a random element, a rhythmic element, a disruption in the playback. To me that offered many options.’ Once treasured, now discarded, still bearing the traces of their former existences, Marclay’s records bear comparison with the second-hand stuffed dolls that Mike Kelley was starting to collect and incorporate into his work around the same time. They were objects with their own lives, demotic icons from the fag end of the consumerist dream.
The Bachelors, Even did not last long. They were once invited by Bruce Conner to perform with an installation of his found footage films at a San Francisco dive bar. One of their tracks, ‘Tes Lolos Tremolos’, a stuttering affair with a crunchy no wave guitar line over a rhythm built of spasmodic sampled voices, was featured on a compilation released by Los Angeles Free Music Society in 1981. That was about it. But the group gave Marclay the confidence to strike out on his own.
By that time, he was living in New York, in the East Village. He had seen the Beuys exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1979 and Richard Prince’s show at Metro Pictures in 1981. He took improv classes with the choreographer Simone Forti and even ended up in one of her performances. He designed costumes for his friend Karole Armitage’s first show and made music for Yoshiko Chuma’s School of Hard Knocks. For the latter, he found a way of rigging up a record player so he could strap it around his shoulder like a Fender Stratocaster, allowing him to move about the stage and interact with the dancers. The ‘Phonoguitar’ was born and would become a staple of his performances for years to come.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Marclay would continue to play live with vinyl records, developing a frantic, improvisatory style in which damaged, drawn-on and taped-up discs would be mined for bursts of sound and then jettisoned nonchalantly into the crowd. The sleeves, he kept. Many of them would turn up in later works of visual art, such as Guitar Neck (1992) and the Body Mix series (1991–93), collaged and combined into witty and sometimes provocative new assemblages.
Even some of the records themselves, scratched and taped or painted over, sometimes snapped in half and recombined with another disc, would come to be exhibited as sculptural objects. In 1987, he covered the floor of PS1’s Clocktower Gallery with old records for visitors to walk over. In 1989, when he held his first solo show at Tom Cugliani’s New York gallery, he built a tribute to Brâncuși’s Endless Column out of hundreds of vinyl discs stacked on top of each other on a spindle like a three-metre tall, pitch-black doner kebab.
Guitar Neck (1992), Christian Marclay. Private collection. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery; © Christian Marclay
Today, however, Marclay is done with records. ‘I was doing some commentary on the recording industry, but it has changed so much that records are just a nostalgic object,’ he says. ‘And I didn’t want to be another DJ. You can’t go to anything any more without a DJ ruining your evening.’ All his old discs are in storage back in New York. He no longer performs with turntables – or any amplification at all. ‘My hearing was starting to suffer,’ he explains. ‘As much as I used to love loud music, I can’t tolerate it any more.’ It’s a decision he’s stuck to for a little over a decade now.
A quarter of a century ago, Marclay produced a work called Time Line (1999). It was a modest enough thing, certainly in comparison to the epic scale of later works like The Clock. But in a way it summed up the peculiar tightrope Marclay finds himself tiptoeing across. It started with another found object, waiting to be defaced: a printed timeline of the births and deaths of famous artists – painters, architects, sculptors – between the years 1780 and 1960, of the sort you might find stencilled onto the wall of a museum. Onto this list, Marclay has scrawled in felt-tip an additional set of births and deaths: Ludwig van Beethoven, John Coltrane, Pierre Henry, Mauricio Kagel and 36 other musicians and composers. A wildcat corrective, inserting via graffiti the significant moments in music that the official history of art had tried to pretend did not exist.
‘What I was pointing to at the time was how these histories are looked at in parallel, not as integrated,’ Marclay says when I bring up the work. ‘Contemporary art and music have always had links, but I think historically they’re treated as completely different entities. The drawing was a reaction to that.’
Over the 25 years since Marclay made Time Line, sound art has become a staple of the contemporary exhibition circuit. Works are often created by established musicians like Ryoji Ikeda or Carsten Nicolai, while Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize in 2010 for an essentially musical piece. Then there’s Marclay’s own spectacular career. But he still feels a disconnect.
‘It hasn’t changed much,’ he says. ‘I’ve always been in between, straddling these two fields. Some people know me as a musician, others know me as a visual artist. The two worlds are so different!’ Never fully one thing nor the other, Marclay remains impossible to pin down, bestride the line itself, coursing through time.
Installation view of The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay at Tate Modern, London. Photo: Ben Westoby; © White Cube; © Christian Marclay
‘Christian Marclay: The Clock’ is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 10 November until spring 2025.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.