Wednesday, July 13, 2011

seductive and repulsive at the same time



Since Christian Marclay won the The Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale this year, I'm following up with some more of my notes and observations on his work.   Conveniently, too, working in sound and video, he handily gets Rolling Stop's emphasis on time-arts off the ground.  

Revealed in his final products, Marclay’s process is a repeated impulse to break things down into parts, separating them for examination then recombining them, presenting something new. Initially working with sound, Marclay first became known as the ‘turn-table guy.’  His direct technique of chopping up bits and reassembling them is most accessible and arguably most successful when he includes video.  

Watch this video of Marclay on Roulette TV for an introduction to his work and his process.  As a bonus the host of the show is an otherworldly (for lack of a better word), multi-format performance artist Phoebe Legere.

 


An early video piece by Marclay, Guitar Drag (2000) is arguably Marclay’s most American Punk expression.  An amplified Fender Stratocaster guitar is dragged behind a moving truck. The fourteen-minute video has multiple references starting with abusing an instrument to a creative end, like when rock musicians smash guitars in performances. Filmed over roads in Texas, it also has elements that echo road movies and westerns. It is "about violence in general and more specifically about the lynching of James Byrd Jr. who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck. I want the video to have these multiple layers and trigger people's imagination in contradictory ways. The piece ends up being seductive and repulsive at the same time." (Quoted text from Marclay on a YouTube upload of the complete video that has since been removed.)  

Before anything else Marclay succeeds as a deconstructionist. In a precursor to his piece featured in Venice (The Clock), he masterfully integrated moving image and sound in Video Quartet (2002).  He appropriated clips from piles of existing films – each clip involving music either with instruments being played or vocalists singing.  The separated bits, each with their own original sound accompaniment, are then edited together to create a composition of the sounds and their images projected across four screens. The installation nudges the viewer/listener to think and experience the sounds and images collectively, and opens the possibly to make new associations of meaning, like a large moving collage.  Like Guitar Drag, moments of Video Quartet are again “seductive and repulsive at the same time.” (In the bibliography below, find a link to an unauthorized video excerpt of Video Quartet in the Tate Modern in 2006 to get a glimpse of the installation.)

Using video adds a layer of intricacy but also accessibility to Marclay’s work. With four screens playing different clips in Video Quartet, the visual and musical instruments multiply significantly, making the composition complex and intense. The reconstruction of film bits, times four, suspends much expectation of a conventional narrative, yet the composition functions with a beginning, middle and end with visual performances that coordinate to heighten the progression and sense of a conceptual ‘story’, with suspense in the action, conflicts and a climax.  Even when a strain to hear it, the deconstruction of the familiar film bits gets reconstructed into something easily followed and ‘understood’ by our senses.  So in a way, because it’s easy on the eyes, it’s easier on the ears. 

Where we have a chance to get lost in the structure is also where we have a chance to connect. We feel the gap between orchestration and cacophony as well as the gap between an audience’s intuitive expectation of a story and the separation of moving images from their original context. Yet, when combined, the structure allows new opportunities to build meaning.  Naturally anticipating tension and intimacy, viewers are pulled into moments of accord, lulled by familiar characters and left to build a story or interpretive experience based partly on our individual memory. Amidst the racket, moments tug on our memory of existing films. The familiarity comforts us, includes us, and gives a simple, powerful foothold into the work. We are distracted into listening differently, to reinterpret, to be open. The experience of these moments is fleeting and richly individual. The greatest challenge as well as reward, this gap is where the viewer/listener comes into the work the most.  Or if it is missed, they simply don’t. 

The disorientation of familiar scenes and collage nature of Marclay’s work seriously demands a willingness to suspend our normal expectations from a movie and to wait for and find moments to connect. The memory of movie scenes combines with our brain’s habit to construct meaning and story to encourage us to listen differently than we do normally and hear sounds we’ve heard before with new ears. Instinctively we, as humans, see past the breaks in order to solve a puzzle. 

Video Quartet and The Clock each operate under an impression that they are composed and have order, but the moments of confusion make it also feel accidental and unintentional.  As the ‘composer’ did Marclay plan for ascending beats and falling rhythms?  Historically, the artist’s process draws on accident as much as an imposed order when it comes to meaning-making in his work. For example, he appropriated two films to make Up and Out.  In it the images of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow Up” start at the same time that the audio from Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” starts. He does nothing else – no other manipulation - to either film. The resulting piece layers the quests of two characters, a photographer in one and a sound effects specialist in the other.  The moments of conceptual synchronization are uncanny happy accidents and while we typically judge artists to control and direct such moments, in Marclay’s work the unplanned connections are part of the beauty of the work. The mostly readymade piece holds up as one of Marclay’s most elegant nods to his greatest influence, Marcel Duchamp. 

Marclay successfully plays with the tension between consonance and dissonance, deconstruction and re-assemblage while awakening our memories and senses.  He also plainly undermines our expectations in his process. While a viewer/listener can passively watch and hear what happens, the works require extra time – more than a single viewing – and an analytical teasing to glean the details. The limit of Marclay’s works is its need to command so much attention for a viewer to connect more deeply with it. However, the limitation serves to maintain further tension in the experience of the art. His work at the Venice Biennale is consistent with this but deepens the stakes further. 

The Clock is a 24-hour video deconstruction of thousands of existing films into clips with references to and imagery of time.  While Award-winning, The Clock is also criticized for being a formulaic repeat of his previous works while gimmicking the appropriation of familiar films to excite popularity.  The piece shows in 'real' time on a single screen, meaning that when it's 4:07 PM on the screen, so it is in real life for the person in the gallery watching it.  Considering how Marclay pieced The Clock together, it is indeed another deconstructed readymade collage.  The order of many clips is determined literally by their reference to time in their content.  If a clock shows 9:00 AM in a film or a character says it in another, there it goes in the 24-hour structure of Marclay’s film.  The spaces between appear filled with dramatic action tense with anticipation or attention to the passing of time. Once again the sounds and imagery builds, memories of the films are brought forth, and the rhythm ebbs and flows, all of it combining to simultaneously repel and command one’s attention.  Yet, in this piece one’s attention is magnified by literally watching the work tick and tock visually and audibly for as long as you watch it.

The simple fact that viewers would need to commit 24 hours to watching it in its entirety poses an obvious challenge, but is not necessary to embrace it conceptually.  Weighing the decisions the artist made, like any other work of art, and how they hold up with his intent, will take longer to discern. The Clock has been compelling critics and populists alike to spend and watch time closely, feeling its nostalgia, its allure and its pressure. Some even return again to spend more time observing the scrutiny and passing of time.  I suspect that in time we will find that the work is consistent with Marclay’s other works taken a step further: a simple critique of how we perceive time on an epic scale physically and experientially.

****
Bonus Material:
Marclay participates in a group called Text of Light, formed in 2001. They perform improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage and other members of the American Cinema avante-garde of the 1950s-60s. Members of the group include Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht (gtrs/devices), Christian Marclay and DJ Olive (turntables), William Hooker (drums/perc), Ulrich Krieger (sax/electronics), and most recently Tim Barnes (drums/perc).


Text Of Light: Live at the Latvian House Toronto 2007 from jol thomson on Vimeo.
   

Sources and more to read or watch on Christian Marclay:
* means I recommend it.
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