Christian Marclay is always mixing up the visual and the aural—dubbing the soundtrack from Brian De Palma's Blow Out over the film that inspired it, Antonioni's Blowup; or creating a Tape Fall by sending tape with the sound of water trickling on it falling down from a reel set high on a ladder.

Candle (1988), now on display as part of the Henry's temporary excavation of its permanent collection—nice to see you!—is a phonograph horn two ways.

One way, it's a readymade—pretty much ready to be used for its intended purpose, to project sound into the room, but remaining silent and disconnected. The other way, set perpendicular, the phonograph horn is cast as a candle waiting to burn away, a meditation on the ephemerality of sound, and on the disappearance of wax—that early material used to capture and keep sound on records.

The shape of the horn visualizes the way the sound would move through it. And meanwhile the positioning of the candle—sitting on its bell—suggests, terribly, a snuffing out of that sound.

Marclay's having a constantly changing, constantly-being-performed show at the Whitney in New York right now (it's called, aptly, Festival); an art critic and a music critic talk about it from each of their viewpoints here.