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Christian Marclay

Cascade, 1989

Description

Maker

Title

Cascade

Year

1989

Medium

Magnetic tape

Materials/Techniques

Materials

Dimensions

294.6 x 68.6 cm (116 x 27 inches) Variable, depends on the height of the installation.

Place

Western

Type

Credit

Mary B. Jackson Fund

Object Number

2006.2

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Everyday Things

April 13, 2012 - February 24, 2013

Encompassing sculpture, performance, print editions, and video, Christian Marclay’s work is distinguished by its focus on music and sound. In making Cascade, Marclay unspooled yards and yards of reel-to-reel audiotape and gathered it into a tumbling mass to be suspended from the ceiling. The tape was manufactured to record and play back sound, but in destroying its functionality to make this sculpture Marclay calls attention to the physical characteristics of the electromagnetic material itself: the thin, delicate strands shifting slightly with any air current, and the warm brown surfaces shimmering and glistening, spilling like a waterfall to the floor.

Nature/Artifice

April 25, 2009 - February 28, 2010

Christan Marclay works in diverse genres including sculpture, performance, collage, photography, and video. He often appropriates found materials and musical vocabulary to investigate the possibility of giving audio a concrete, visible form. In Cascade, Marclay suspended unspooled audio tapes in a knotted mass, eliminating the functionality of the magnetic tape to reveal instead the thin, delicate tape strands’ physical qualities. Moving slightly with air currents, the tape glistens, spilling to the floor like a waterfall.

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Cascade with the accession number of 2006.2. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.