Christian Marclay - Quotes

Old records have the quality of time passed, this sense of loss. I am trying to bring it back to life through my art.
Marclay, Christian.

With the Ready Made, the decision to remove oneself from the election process is close to improvisation. When you're improvising you try to be as innocent, as spontaneous as possible, although you can't help but put in everything you know.
Marclay, Christian.

Sound informs image so much. It really influences the image completely and reinforces the illusion. The soundtrack in a film is always more subliminal.
Marclay, Christian.

Music is material. Recording technology has turned music into an object, and a lot of my work is about that object as much as it is about the music. […] One doesn't necessarily think of music as a physical reality, but it has physical manifestations. It can also be an illustration, a painting, a drawing.
Marclay, Christian.

… There's something about scratching a record that has become so glamorized, so photogenic that it's a cool thing to do. Maybe 'cool' is really the word because it's so detached and so distant in relation to live music …
Marclay, Christian.

I want my work to be about the aural, but it doesn't necessarily have to be about music.
Marclay, Christian.

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.

I was more interested in the music scene than the art galleries and museums. I thought there was more energy in new music scenes and for me new music was punk rock, it what I knew, what I had discovered in NY.
Marclay, Christian.

In film, the narrative structure comes first and the music underlines the narrative and emotion, but sometimes they cut, they jumpcut. In film editing, change is very radical from one scene to the next, rather than a kind of transition that more traditional music would require. So if you just listen to the film, you know…. if you close your eyes and become more aware of a kind of quick change in the sound.
Marclay, Christian.

I could only afford records in thrift stores. Then you could find wonderful things, but now everything is a collectible. I like the recycling idea - using the stuff that people don't want anymore, and make new music out of it. There was an element of looking back and listening to your parents' records and doing something with that stuff. Sort of acknowledging the past while rejecting it at the same time.
Marclay, Christian.

These records often have different sets of references for different people, because most memories are personal and subjective. Whatever happens in their mind is something that I can't control, I can't control what they think about what I'm doing. It's like silent audience participation.
Marclay, Christian.

[…] People hear music mostly through recordings, the recording becomes the reference, the template. Musicians try to reproduce their CD's on stage, the audience already knows the music through the recording and that's what they are expecting to hear.
Marclay, Christian.

When I listen to live recordings of my performances, I become very critical, a recording is not a live concert, it requires a different listening, and it changes with multiple plays. When you're performing live, you're really responding to the moment. A section may feel good live, but as a recording it drags, it doesn't have the same intensity it did when you were present because you're missing the visual, the process.
Marclay, Christian.

In my work the process is very important, to be able to see it and hear it. I'm using these records and you can see how I manipulate them and abuse them. Everything, the pace that the records get changed, how long they stay on the turntables, what kind of shape they're in, the manipulations, etc. All these actions inform the listening. I use the recording studio very differently. When you're not on stage, you can go back and try again and edit. The studio is another instrument. I don't want the listener to forget it is a recording.
Marclay, Christian.

The great thing about hip-hop is that it really made DJ'ing more of an accepted craft. MTV also helped in giving the scratched sound a gesture, showing the hand of the DJ back spinning, it became such a cool gesture and now everybody wants to scratch. I see kids now air-scratching while walking around with their walkman. That sound and the way it was used in hip-hop, scratching a beat and hearing the record go back and forth has become so natural in the pop music landscape. Now it's a staple sample on most keyboards. It's a normal sound now, but it was a revolutionary sound in the 80's - it really made the use of found sounds acceptable in pop music.
Marclay, Christian.

Some people just listen to music others just look at art, some do both but they don't do it in the same place. It's sad that a lot of people can't be open-minded enough to be curious about something they don't understand. … Everybody experiences music one way or another, music is usually more democratic than art, so I feel I can touch more people with it, even if I make a piece that doesn't make any sound, but deal with notions of perception of sound. We take a lot of our sound experiences for granted. We don't question sounds as much as images.
Marclay, Christian.

So its seems that to be famous you either have to make pop music or get sued by pop music. It's great work because it doesn't fit into any clean little box and it's very political. They are critical of the music industry but they're also totally dependent on these machines that the industry puts out like samplers and tape recorders. There's a contradiction between what's out there - available machines to record and remix - and the legal system. I don't have a clear answer to the copyright issue but there's this huge contradiction between what artists are doing and what the law wants to set up. Sony corporation makes the machines but they'll sue you for using them.
Marclay, Christian.

It's good to get away from the editing suite. It's very unhealthy to be sitting in front of the screen for too long.
Marclay, Christian, Georgia Dehn (Interview). "Christian Marclay: Playing with rock and roll." in: Telegraph. March 1, 2008. (English).

You start with an idea but then so many things can happen.
Marclay, Christian, Georgia Dehn (Interview). "Christian Marclay: Playing with rock and roll." in: Telegraph. March 1, 2008. (English).

The process of editing is what I enjoy most - putting the pieces together and making sense out of them. During the shoot there was a lot of improvisation. Tree might do a great movement or something interesting that was unexpected. Now that I'm editing I have to be open to what happens. It's always evolving.
Marclay, Christian, Georgia Dehn (Interview). "Christian Marclay: Playing with rock and roll." in: Telegraph. March 1, 2008. (English).

I'm looking at the guitar as an anthropomorphic instrument.It's a phallic symbol but it also has a feminine body…and rock stars use it. When Elvis started performing, people were shocked by the way he suggestively used his hips. Guitars have since been used in a lot more explicit ways.
Marclay, Christian, Georgia Dehn (Interview). "Christian Marclay: Playing with rock and roll." in: Telegraph. March 1, 2008. (English).

Tree interacts with the guitar in a very sexual way.
Marclay, Christian, Georgia Dehn (Interview). "Christian Marclay: Playing with rock and roll." in: Telegraph. March 1, 2008. (English).

It's very interesting how culturally at certain times you can do things that at other times you can't. If you think back to when Duchamp painted his nude descending a staircase, and it was a scandal, you wonder why.
Marclay, Christian, Georgia Dehn (Interview). "Christian Marclay: Playing with rock and roll." in: Telegraph. March 1, 2008. (English).

I'll invest in different technologies just ... because they best express what I'm trying to do. Be it a video, sound recording, performance, or sculpture or even a painting. That's fine. So even though my work may very much appear stuck on that one groove, that one sound, I allow myself very much freedom.
Marclay, Christian. "Christian Marclay: Talking Art." in: Tate. November 2007. (English).

I don't want to be pigeon-holed as a video artist for instance ... it just happens that video allows me to have an image at the same time as sound... everybody there thinks I am a video artist because that's all they see.
Marclay, Christian. "Christian Marclay: Talking Art." in: Tate. November 2007. (English).

People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.
Marclay, Christian, Young, Rob (Interview). "Don't sleeve me this way." in: The Guardian. February 14, 2005. (English).

Record Without A Cover was about allowing the medium to come through...making a record that was not a document of a performance but a record that could change with time, and would be different from one copy to the next.
Marclay, Christian, Young, Rob (Interview). "Don't sleeve me this way." in: The Guardian. February 14, 2005. (English).

You can get so many sounds out of one record. Every record can be used in some way. If the music in a groove fits with what you're playing, then play it; if not, then you can play it backwards. If that doesn't work, you try it at a different speed. If it really doesn't work you just break it. The whole ritual to put a record on a turntable just to listen to it, I don't do that too often.
Marclay, Christian, Young, Rob (Interview). "Don't sleeve me this way." in: The Guardian. February 14, 2005. (English).

The cut itself is a sound, unwanted sound. I tried to integrate these sounds that were created by this damage, by this patina of time.
Marclay, Christian, Young, Rob (Interview). "Don't sleeve me this way." in: The Guardian. February 14, 2005. (English).

I've never learned how to compose, so I had to invent ways to create these social events - basically these gatherings of musicians and audience - and see what would happen.
Marclay, Christian, Young, Rob (Interview). "Don't sleeve me this way." in: The Guardian. February 14, 2005. (English).

In the late 70's, first I was interested in minimal arts, and then performance arts became very interesting to me at that time, and I was going back and forward between NY and Boston to see performances. I was more interested in the music scene than the art galleries and museums ... So it was a sort of mixture between these interests and music, very raw energy, unskilled, you didn't need to study years and years to become a punk rocker. You can just do it, so that was very liberating. It meant, I could also make music.
Marclay, Christian. "Interview." in: The Void. 2000. (English).

It was great. It was new for me. What was great about being able to go through the process of playing with this piece was to meet so many musicians. John Zorn introduced to me a lot of musicians. I was able to put my technique, my way of making music in the context of real musicians. That experience was really interesting. I leant a lot. I leant to how to improvise more, because I used to do more structural sets, I used to practice, to number my records and compositions , I tried to do it. So I leaned improvisation and heard how to collaborate. It was a very good experience for me.
Marclay, Christian. "Interview." in: The Void. 2000. (English).

Yeah, if you close your eyes and become more aware of a kind of quick change in the sound. Also there is a long tradition of cutting sound because tape makes that possible just like film, the cut pieces by Jon Cage, and a lot of people throughout the 60's did a lot of tape collage. ...But I don't know that was a question you were asking...
Marclay, Christian. "Interview." in: The Void. 2000. (English).

I came to New York in '78 on an exchange program at Cooper Union, and when I went back to Boston I started performing as a duo with guitarist Kurt Henry. I didn't have an instrument so I sang and made these background tapes for the performances. We didn't have a drummer so that's why I started using skipping records and things like that, to produce these rhythm tracks that we'd perform along with. We also used film loops from cartoons and sex films as audio-visual rhythm tracks. It was as much performance art as it was music.
Marclay, Christian and Jason Gross (Interview). "Interview." in: Perfect Sound Magazine. March 1998.

I never spent more than a dollar on a record. It was just junk, and I would stick things on them to make them loop. I even used an old wind-up gramophone that I found in the garbage.
Marclay, Christian and Jason Gross (Interview). "Interview." in: Perfect Sound Magazine. March 1998.

I don't consciously make music to trigger memory but it happens naturally. Music has such powers in triggering memory, collective memory and private memory. What I consciously try to do is to use the widest variety of music.
Marclay, Christian and Jason Gross (Interview). "Interview." in: Perfect Sound Magazine. March 1998.

Sometimes people will hear something, and they'll ask 'did you play this' when I actually didn't. It's interesting that audiences have this need to identify the source material. Once different unrelated records are combined, they sometimes have the power to trigger the memory of a tune.
Marclay, Christian and Jason Gross (Interview). "Interview." in: Perfect Sound Magazine. March 1998.

When I listened to a record, there were all these unwanted sounds, clicks and pops, because of the deterioration of the record, the surface noise, scratches. Instead of rejecting these residual sounds, I've tried to use them, bringing them to the foreground to make people aware that they're listening to a recording and not live music. These sounds make people aware of the medium, of the vinyl, a cheap slab of plastic. It's something so important because it's the way that we relate to music most of the time, through recordings. We usually make abstractions of the medium. For me, it was important to have this awareness and underline it, to give it a voice. It has an expressive power in itself. When something goes wrong, like when the needle skips, something unpredictable happens, that wasn't the intention of the recording artist. In that incident, something new and exciting happens. For me, it has creative potential.
Marclay, Christian and Jason Gross (Interview). "Interview." in: Perfect Sound Magazine. March 1998.

CD's are part of a different technology. They're not as simple and mechanical as records and turntables. … But you can't physically scratch a CD or cut it in half and expect the machine to still play it. And performing with a CD on-stage is not very exciting visually.
Marclay, Christian and Jason Gross (Interview). "Interview." in: Perfect Sound Magazine. March 1998.