Christian Marclay Seattle Art Museum, 654-3100
Through April 25.
The rather large exhibition of Christian Marclay’s work, currently at the Seattle Art Museum, is, with three exceptions, entirely silent.
This, on the one hand, is the point. Curator Russell Ferguson, who assembled this show for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is making a point about the artist’s emphasis on embedded noise, on the possibility of noise raised by silent objects. It’s a very interesting idea, much more so than the usual synesthetic propositions made by artists who work with both sound and visual components. Instead of trying to capture the ephemeral nature of the sounded note (think of all the terrible jazz-style painting that has resulted from such experiments), Marclay traps the noise in the object by making the noise impossible. Hence the melted, balled-up records, the CD with a padlock threaded through the middle. It’s a Duchampian strategy, the absurd handicapping of an object in order to see it away from its usual connotations. You can’t look at Boneyard, an installation of hundreds of bright white cast telephone handsets strewn about a gallery floor, without thinking of all of them ringing. It makes, in its way, quite a din.
On the other hand, Marclay is at least as well known for his performance art and music as for his art objects; seeing his painted and altered vinyl albums displayed (and mute) is nice, but one should be reminded (by way of video or audio clips) that Marclay used them in performance, and delighted in the irregularity of the sounds produced by the compromised surfaces (in the late ’70s he was among the first turntablists, sampling and scratching albums in search of percussive possibilities). In the absence of such context, some of these objects struck me, God forgive the pun, as rather one-note. Speakers painted over in primary colors! Instruments that can’t be played: woo-hoo! True, the drum set is arranged like an urban cityscape, with the height of each element keyed to its pitch (with the bass lowest and the cymbals highest), and the accordion is as long as an extended breath, but neither contains the attractive complexity of My Weight in Records, a set of boxes cleverly/artlessly tucked by a fire exit, which contain the artist’s weight as measured out by his own materials, and Tape Fall, a reel-to-reel recorder placed at the top of a high, steep set of rollaway stairs. One of the reels is missing, so that as the recorder plays the tape (of gurgling, watery sounds), the tape falls to the floor, where it gathers in a synthetic, glossy heap (museum workers put in a new reel every two hours). Here is the perfect match of idea and material: the melancholy embodiment of sound’s ephemerality, where the sound of water literally creates the visual.
Then there’s Video Quartet, a 15-minute four-channel video that you should drop everything and run over to the museum and see immediately. In this piece, Marclay has cut bits from films and documentaries and assembled a musical work from them, with fragments of music played by musicians or by actors playing musicians and some nonmusical moments that are just sublime, such as a car screeching around a corner that, in Marclay’s hands, is as precise a bit of orchestration as Harpo Marx playing his harp, or Barbra Streisand snapping open a fan. Make sure you see this video from the beginning, and sit through it a few times. It’s worth it to close your eyes occasionally and compare the visual fragmentation to the surprisingly streamlined composition of sampled music. Quartet also contains some of Marclay’s embedded sounds, such as a brief clip of Diana Ross silently bringing her finger to her lips, and moments of convergence that are all visual–like a quick set of frames that are all about curtains (even though Frank Sinatra happens to be behind one)–but somehow have the quality of sound.
After Video Quartet, the formal qualities of a drum set suddenly seemed worth seeing. Which is what brings me back to this decision–wrongheaded, I think–to keep this exhibition mostly to silent objects. Marclay’s art practice is informed by performance and music, and it is performance and music that give his silent objects a kind of focus, and a tingling resonance–an overused word I try very hard to avoid, although here it seems exactly right: The objects begin to vibrate with sound.