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Indepth Arts News:
"Currents 84: Christian Marclay"
2001-04-20 until 2001-06-24
Saint Louis Art Museum
St. Louis, MO,
USA
Christian Marclay's work explores various types of sounds as its subject. The artist focuses our
attention not only on audible qualities, but also on the way sounds are experienced, visualized, and
translated into other forms. Telephone conversations from movies, reviews of musical performances,
compact discs and cassette tapes, and album covers have provided sources of inspiration for his work.
In many pieces, what is seen and what is heard may be distorted, altered, or out of sync, and as a result
viewers experience a heightened awareness of the way information is received and processed.
Marclay
consistently draws viewers' attention to such themes as communication and translation, whether from
one language to another or from sound into words. He often samples and mixes sounds and images to
create engaging videos, collages, or performances. In his video Telephones, for example, Marclay
mixes clips from popular movies to recreate the structure of a telephone conversation.
Marclay has achieved critical acclaim both as a visual artist and as a musician and a performer in the
United States and Europe. Currents 84: Christian Marclay includes three video pieces, a modified
television, and a text piece made from the late 1990s to the present. In each of the five works he
explores relationships between sound and images by focusing on the way those elements create and
distort meaning. It is the first solo museum exhibition of the artist's work in the United States since
1990 and is organized by Rochelle Steiner, associate curator of contemporary art.
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