Feature: Christian Marclay’s Early Performances
Listen to a sound recording of Christian Marclay performing at Roulette in New York City on Saturday, March 14, 1987.
Platter wiz spins, flips, shuffles, shakes, pops, and scratches the history of music on multiple turntables…
Roulette is a major New York City venue for contemporary music and intermedia art. Opened in 1978 at the height of the downtown experimental arts revolution, Roulette quickly emerged as “a landmark for New York’s downtown new music composers.” In the decades since, it has presented work by scores of pioneering artists and garnered international acclaim as a center for musical innovation. Learn more about Roulette here.
“Christian Marclay’s work has an immediacy and a sense of connectedness rarely seen in that of purely visual artists. I first saw him perform in the early 1980s with John Zorn at Roulette and was instantly captivated by his bizarre DJ technique. He was surrounded by instructional turntables and thrift-store records with objects attached to them. There was an inherent theatricality to his performance, which he brought off with a Zen-like concentration. At that time the DJ as performer was still a new phenomenon in early hip-hop; Marclay was transforming the concept of the DJ even as it was emerging. [Since then], the turntable has matched the electric guitar in its significance as a means of musical expression. DJ culture has brought sampling and appropriation into prominence, calling into question fundamental concepts of originality, musical performance and intellectual property. Recognized now as a visionary in the DJ medium, Marclay has been emulated by many younger DJs, some of whom he has subsequently included in his own projects.”
— Ben Neill, Bomb Magazine, 2003.
Watch Christian Marclay’s video work Ghost (I don’t live today), 1985 — 5 minutes, unlimited edition.
The video will be available to stream from Friday, July 24 through Friday, July 31.
Created by the artist in 1982 for his performance with dancer and choreographer Yoshiko Chuma, titled Guitar Crash, Christian Marclay used the phonoguitar in his solo shows through 1985. The video Ghost (I don't live today) was first a performance which Marclay did at The Kitchen in 1983. It was documented and made into a video in 1985. In the performance, Marclay straps a turntable with the Jimi Hendrix album Are You Experienced onto his body, spinning the record. The artist channels the legendary rock guitarist by recreating Hendrix's body movements in the way he plays the LP, also creating moments of audio feedback the way Hendrix often did with his electric guitar.
“The music came out of performance art. In the late 1970s I was very interested in what Joseph Beuys and Dan Graham were doing. Punk rock music was also very important to my development. To me there was a strong connection between performance artists such as Vito Acconci and the punk rock movement—not just because a lot of punk came out of art schools, but because of that staged physicality, the raw energy and the interest in the performing body and its relation to an audience. I came to New York in 1977, as a visiting student at Cooper Union, and I spent a lot of time on the club scene. When I went back to finish my BA at Massachusetts College of Art, I started performing—not so much with the idea of making music, but to get away from making objects.
[…] At first I just wanted to make a movie, a short experimental musical, to write songs for it and find someone to write the music. I ended up singing the songs myself, while the film never happened. But it was the beginning of a band that was very visual: we used films, slide projections and props. And so, slowly, out of this kind of activity, I became more and more interested in music. That’s when I started using the records onstage, making them skip to form background loops as rhythmic accompaniment. Before that I recorded the loops on cassette tapes to accompany the performances, but then I realized that it was more interesting to bring the turntables onstage and show the abuse to the records. The turntables added a visual dimension that was more real than background slide projections, which felt like an added element [… ] I was recently looking back at some old datebooks and realized that in the early ’80s I was performing several times a week. It was amazing—going on tours, doing projects with John Zorn and David Moss and my own projects such as Tower of Babel and Dead Stories.”
— Christian Marclay, Bomb Magazine, 2003.