Mixism

Sampling Christian Marclay

A A A Comments (0) By Doug Harvey Thursday, May 29 2003

The literalist poetics of some of these pieces have disturbed some critics. But even skeptics who have dismissed Marclay’s work as one-liners couldn’t fail to be won over by his latest major work, the four-screen DVD projection Video Quartet, which is like nothing you’ve seen before: a video installation piece assembled from hundreds of fragments of Hollywood films, all showing the creation of some kind of sound — mostly music. At one point you’re able to witness Glenn Gould, Thelonious Monk and Groucho Marx simultaneously tinkling the ivories. Elsewhere, Michael J. Fox’s poorly received time-warped appropriation of Chuck Berry from Back to the Future segues into the “Dueling Banjos” sequence from Deliverance. Sinatra whistles, the Phantom of the Paradise screams, Pa Kettle sounds the jalopy horn, and quadruple Maria Callases hit the high C’s.

While this barrage of imagery is pretty sensational in and of itself, what makes V.Q. truly remarkable is that its organizing principle seems not to have been the numerous visual thematic synchronicities apparent in the array of imagery, but the soundtrack that results. With your eyes closed, Video Quartet is a masterful example of dizzy, dazzling aural pastiches made from hundreds of meticulous edits and only feasible in the era of digital technology. With your eyes open, it’s an entirely new order of entertainment, and a fleeting burst of fecundity that places Marclay’s more elegiac contemplations of ephemerality in a less bleak light. And you can dance to it.

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY | At UCLA HAMMER, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. | June 1–August 31