Christian Marclay in "London"

The artist and composer Christian Marclay works with the interplay of sound and images through a variety of media, ranging from performance to printmaking, video, and collage. Marclay recounts his artistic beginnings as an experimental DJ and musician without formal training, when he was influenced by conceptualism, musique concrète, punk rock, and the work of John Cage. These early experiments with sound and collaborations with artists from a diversity of backgrounds laid the foundation for Marclay’s “graphic scores,” his works that visualize sound through drawing, prints, and video and then transform those visuals back to audio experiences and performances. The segment surveys the extraordinary scope of an artist for whom “a lack of rigid rules is really important,” including an interactive installation composed of Snapchat videos, graphic depictions of onomatopoeias that are performed vocally, and a musical performance created by replicating pianists’ hand postures seen in photos. Unexpected, playful, and often challenging, Marclay’s work is an investigation into our contemporary visual and audio culture.

Featured artists

About the artists