Christian Marclay

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 2016 by the present owner

“The process of editing is what I enjoy most – putting the pieces together and making sense out of them.”

-Christian Marclay

One might describe him as a turntablist, disc-jockey or exclusively a visual artist, but Christian Marclay is devotedly an all-encompassing visual, musical and even conceptual artist. While a passionate record collector and listener, Marclay has used these physical objects as medium for his work in all forms - creating audio art by breaking records to create noise, as well as even melting, fragmenting and reassembling the physical objects to create an assemblage. 

In his early works from the 1980s, notably, Recycled Records, Marclay physically sliced vinyls and attached them in order to create a new sound once played, reminding his viewers and audience alike that sound and visual arts were inextricably linked. Throughout the 1990s, Marclay began to assess more closely the visual culture associated with the music at the core of his work, turning towards the vinyl jackets as his subject matter. In the present work, Incognita Exotica, Marclay even highlights the marketing surrounding the music industry and the desires of society. Linking together, most literally zippering together, publicly unidentifiable female faces of all cultures, Marclay critiques the goals of mass media and marketing, whether it is undermining the wants of culture or commenting on the visually primitive desires of society., Unlike many artists, Christian Marclay has dissected what has enthused himself the most throughout his life, forever weaving sound, visual arts, and culture as one conceptual work.