Image: Christian Marclay, Untitled, 1984

Originally posted on May 16th, 2008

Image and text source: Rhizome.org

“Stereo,” Christian Marclay’s first solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, surveys “concepts of doubling and echoes” across the American artist’s career. Since the mid-1970s, Marclay has uniquely navigated the visual and sonic realms, exploring the materiality of equipment like the gramophone, turntables and record through processes that foreground what the artist calls the “unwanted sounds” of the mediums: the clicks, pops, scratches and deterioration that hold “expressive power” in themselves. In the past decade, Marclay has extended his position as cultural archivist with acclaimed installations like Video Quartet (2001) and Crossfire (2007), respectively comprising sequences of musical performance and gunshots assembled from dozens of feature-films.

Consisting of twenty-five works — the majority of them two-dimensional — “Stereo” offers a timely retrospective of a side of Marclay’s practice not always given due attention relative to his video and audio-based work. For Yin and Yang (1983), from his Recycled Records (1980-1986) series, Marclay cuts and reassembles two records according to the yin-yang design, rendering an unplayable product that also signifies turntable culture’s collage ethos. This approach can also be observed in paper works like Untitled (1984) and Double Tuba (1992), both of which find the artist producing fanciful modifications to instruments and equipment through paper collage. Seen within the broader scope of Marclay’s body of work, these objects offer examples of how visual art can provide conceptual space to reimagine sound and sound technology. — Tyler Coburn