Where worlds collide

For years, the artist and musician Christian Marclay had a fondness for long-playing record albums that verged on the unnatural.

He hoarded LPs scarred with nicks and scratches and snatched up covers featuring overwrought conductors or cavorting party gals. Then he melted records and wadded them into little balls, or smashed them into small pieces, or painted on their covers, or took a scissors to them, or bounced needles all over them while admiring club crowds reveled in the resulting found sounds.

Now he’s grown out of that, to a degree: He messes with movies and their soundtracks, with musical instruments, with photographs, with just about any material that points toward the great seam that lies between what we hear and what we see.

In fact, the New York-based Marclay has built a career around the creative abuse of records, audiotape, musical instruments and the like. Through Aug. 31, the UCLA Hammer Museum will feature a retrospective exhibition of his work, from recycled records to photographs to adulterated musical instruments and beyond.

“It’s really strange to see these things,” said Marclay, pacing the museum’s rooms on the morning after his arrival to help with installation. “I haven’t seen some of these in years, and I’ve never seen them together.”

To a newcomer, they’re likely to look strange enough by themselves.

His 1989 work “The Beatles” is a brown pillow stuffed with the collected works of the Beatles on quarter-inch tape. Look a bit closer and you realize: This pillow isn’t just stuffed with Beatles tapes, it’s crocheted from them. The pillow’s brown “fabric” is actually audiotape, something you’re more accustomed to hearing than seeing.

For a 1988 work in the exhibition’s first room, Marclay simply took a photo of the widely popular old Simon and Garfunkel single, “The Sound of Silence,” and mounted the image of the record on the wall. In the absence of sound, Marclay was sure, the beholder would nevertheless hear a sort of echo of the record -- that is, a song describing a sort of silence. (And if that reading of the work seems insufficiently layered, consider that during installation, a boombox sat beneath “The Sound of Silence,” radio blaring.)

New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has praised Marclay’s “elegance, surgical precision and wit.” Some of his pieces may be “one-liners,” wrote Art in America’s Anastasia Aukeman in a review of a Marclay gallery show two years ago, “but they’re brilliant.” The Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Knight took a less admiring view in a recent review of the retrospective. Though Marclay’s frequently punning works can be charming, Knight wrote, they often are “thin or redundant.”

A slim, soft-spoken man who was raised during the vinyl bonanza years of the 1960s and ‘70s and educated in art schools in Switzerland and Massachusetts, Marclay doesn’t draw or read music or play a traditional instrument. But since art school, he has been thinking hard about sound and sight.

Nothing is more fascinating than sound, Marclay’s work asserts, unless it’s the gyrations we go through to make, preserve, categorize and sell an entity that is naturally invisible and impermanent. In one room of the UCLA Hammer show stands a 25-foot-long accordion (titled “Virtuoso,” 2000), part of a recent series of deliberately unplayable musical instruments that also includes horns that can’t be blown, a pair of glass drumsticks and a drum set whose cymbals tower more than 10 feet above the floor.

In another room is a 1989 piece called “Tape Fall.” For that, Marclay devised an audio waterfall in which the recorded sounds of falling water spool through a reel-to-reel player. But the machine has no take-up reel, so the spent tape “splashes” down on the floor. In his essay for the exhibition catalog, Hammer chief curator Russell Ferguson calls the piece “a monumental sculpture that memorializes nothing more than the passage of time, and destroys its own materials in the process of creating itself.”

Ferguson, who has followed Marclay’s work since the time of the artist’s first New York gallery shows about 15 years ago, enlisted Marclay in this project about two years ago. The show includes about 60 works -- none of which might be here if Marclay had gotten a good, early start studying the piano.

Born in 1955 in San Rafael, Calif., Marclay got much of his education at a boarding school in Switzerland. At 14, he said, “I took a few piano lessons, but I got right-away discouraged. The teacher said I was too old.”

But there was art to study, and then came punk rock, which “opened up possibilities for me. I realized you could make music without studying music,” said Marclay.

He also came to New York on a student-exchange program involving Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and dug into the history of 20th century cross-pollinization between musicians and artists. He also studied the work of performance art pioneers, from Vito Acconci and Laurie Anderson to the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, who designed the minimalist cover of the Beatles’ “White Album” in 1968.

By the late 1970s, Marclay was conducting experiments with turntables and adulterated records and studying at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Soon the same young artist who reveled in making music without training was peppering his projects with references to art history.

Inspired by the French dadaist Marcel Duchamp’s playful works (especially his signature abstract work from 1915-23, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”), Marclay formed a group called the Bachelors, Even. His partner, Kurt Henry, played the guitar while he sang, played percussion and cued up projected playbacks of old cartoons and other film clips. Before long, he was “playing” one or more altered turntables, a practice that has endured despite the advent of the CD.

In many quarters, in fact, Marclay is better known as a musician. Having used the turntable as an instrument before plenty of popular DJs were born, he has worked with such avant-garde composers and performers as John Zorn, Merce Cunningham, the Kronos Quartet and Sonic Youth. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, he paid most of his bills by touring as a performer, and has released a handful of recordings.

During the retrospective exhibition’s run, Marclay and the museum have planned a series of performances with various collaborators.

In recent years, Marclay has cut his performance schedule back substantially, but the travel continues, now often in service of gallery and museum work.

Along the way, Marclay’s preoccupations have flipped frequently from phonographs to photography -- not a surprise, he notes, given the similar timelines and revolutionary effects of the two innovations.

In 2000, Marclay did a 14-minute video installation called “Guitar Drag,” in which he dragged an electric guitar behind a truck on a country road in Texas with videotape and audiotape rolling. This spectacle was designed to resound literally: The guitar, connected to an amplifier in the truck bed, made a terrific racket that may remind some of the stage antics of Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend.

But Marclay aimed for figurative resonance as well. The scene and sounds are meant to hint at the crimes against blacks that were part of the Southern landscape that gave birth to the blues. More specifically, he began work on the piece soon after the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to death behind a truck in Texas.

Marclay’s “Video Quartet,” completed last year on commission by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is similarly ambitious. The piece includes four adjacent movie screens, which play (via DVD projection) brief music-related scenes from hundreds of films. The four soundtracks overlap, producing harmonies, collisions and coincidences over about 15 minutes.

The idea behind “Video Quartet” had been in his head for about a decade, Marclay said, but until now there wasn’t adequate technology.

Speaking of which: Now that CDs have largely replaced records in most homes, has Marclay’s work moved that way too?

In a word, no. Though Marclay has made some artworks with CDs, none of those works is included in the UCLA Hammer show. And at bottom, said the artist, a CD just doesn’t quicken his pulse the way a record does.

“There’s something simple about a record and a turntable,” he said. “You see the grooves. You see the needle.”

*

Christian Marclay

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: Tuesday, Saturday-Sunday, noon-7 p.m.; Wednesday-Friday, noon-9 p.m.

Ends: Aug. 31

Price: $3-$5; 17 and younger, free

Contact: (310) 443-7000