Christian Marclay is a contemporary artist who explores the connections between visual arts, film and mass-market musical culture. His artistic process seems to have roots in sight, sound, and all variations of recordings which includes visual or otherwise. His overall body of work spans sculpture, video, photography, music, performance and collage. He works in a way that his pieces transform sounds and music into visible, physical forms throughout all the mediums that were mentioned above. One quote from him is that he’s “always been interested in how sound is visualized” which explains and shows some inspiration behind his art.
Splashhh Splosh (No. 8), 2012
This one is great because of the way it uses onomatopoeia and words visually to create the art which is an example of content matching form. The use of bright color is also very aesthetically appealing in this one, too. There’s not a lot I can comment on with this, because it’s self-explanatory. The simplicity is part of it’s appeal for me.
, The process that was used to create these is what struck me the most. The idea of using tapes and then creating the cyanotype phantograms out of them is such a unique thing to do, also because of the labor involved in this process which also involved dissembling the tapes themselves. There is a series of these, and this one is my favorite because it’s not as specific as some of the other one’s which are titled with the tape name. This one though, is just a grid of so many different one’s it leaves it up to the viewer to wonder what the different cassettes were that Christian chose.
October 29, 1989. On music television show Night Music.
This is so intense and loud and wild. The use of already created music and combining all the different sounds in a way that is so indistinguishable is creative but also reckless in a weird way. The record scratching sounds and the mechanical outcomes of this to where it almost sounds like office technology gone wild. Then the transition, technically this is extremely impressive because of the seemingly precise use of each record and how he changes them out. It’s like science-fiction based with elements of mysticism in the phrases of melodies that he chooses to leave in tact before manipulating them in a jarring and dissonant way. I loved this in a way that it made me cringe but I was so entranced the whole time too.