Christian Marclay

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.

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.