Munch meets manga in artist Christian Marclay’s new Hong Kong show Screams
Find out what makes the Swiss-American cut-and-paste artist behind award-winning The Clock tick
Since he was a child, growing up in Switzerland, the artist Christian Marclay has loved to cut and paste. Collage is his speciality: he forages for familiar images, splices them together and creates something other. Usually, sound is involved even if – sometimes especially if – you can’t actually hear it. He likes to combine the visual with the aural so that both senses feel dislocated.
One of his early projects, in 1985, was Record Without a Cover, which was exactly that: a vinyl record sold without the usual protection. Older readers will recall the physical gleam of those quaintly grooved objects. Marclay’s idea was
that, exposed to the world’s fingerprints and dustiness, a record would sound different over time. The record included a lengthy silence and customers – used to pristine packaging – found its unclad appearance visually jarring. That was, partly, the point.
A few years later, in December 1988, he recorded the sound of footsteps and mixed it with tap-dancing by Keiko Uenishi (who has done subsequent Marclay collaborations and describes herself as a “sound art-i-vist”). He had 3,500 LPs (that’s “long players”, kids) made and, the following summer, these were taped to one of the floors of the Shedhalle Galleries, in a Zurich industrial building.
According to subsequent accounts, visitors were “invited” to walk over them. The word suggests choice but anyone who wanted to access the adjacent galleries had no option but to step – gingerly or emphatically, according to temperament – on the LPs. The actual recording was never played during the show.
Afterwards, the damaged LPs were gathered up and 1,000 of them were sold under the title Footsteps. (At the time of writing, Amazon has a scuffed one on sale, still bearing scraps of the tape with which it was stuck to the floor – yours for US$350.) The installation was dedicated to Fred Astaire.
