Christian Marclay

Blending Fluxus, Pop and performance art, Marclay has tested and reinvented the relationship between art and sound over the past four decades

Published on the occasion of Christian Marclay’s major survey at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this volume explores in depth his popular and influential multimedia art. From his early performances in the 1970s to his iconic Guitar Drag (2000) and large-scale video installations such as All Together (2018), Marclay has ranged freely across mediums—photography, modified musical instruments, videos, prints and paintings, objects and graphic scores—exploring auditory existence through strategies of sampling, shuffling and montage.
Designed by Zak Group and extensively illustrated, the publication gathers together new essays by writers Polly Barton and Nathalie Quintane, art historians Michel Gauthier and Marcella Lista, and design specialist Catherine de Smet. It also features a conversation with Marclay by the exhibition’s curator, Jean-Pierre Criqui, an anthology of texts from an international array of writers and art historians—Clément Chéroux, Dennis Cooper, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Wayne Koestenbaum and David Toop—and a comprehensive chronology by Annalisa Rimmaudo.
London- and New York–based visual artist and composer Christian Marclay (born 1955) was born in California, raised in Geneva, Switzerland, and studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the 54th Venice Biennale for his video The Clock and has had solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (1990); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2001); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002); and the Whitney Museum, New York (2010).