Christian Marclay — manipulated vinyl and sound sculpture

1981

Artists: Christian Marclay · Year: 1981 · Medium: Manipulated vinyl records — physical-material composition treating records as sculptural and sonic material · Substrate: Vinyl records, turntables, custom cutting and layering · Place: Boston / New York / London · Institution: Independent; White Cube (current gallery) Christian Marclay's Records is less a single work than a twenty-year practice begun in 1979–81 of treating the long-playing vinyl record as a sculptural and performance material. By 1981 Marclay had begun his career-defining habit of cutting records into pieces, re-gluing them into new records with segments of different originals joined into a new grooved surface, and playing the resulting Frankenstein vinyl at his live performances on a turntable setup. A Beethoven quartet would resolve into a fragment of James Brown; a Maria Callas aria into television static. The joins were audible as rhythmic pops and jumps. The surface of the record was the composition. Marclay had come to this practice from two directions. He had studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art in the late 1970s, where Boston's aggressive punk and no-wave scene had given him a taste for cheap, immediate, intentionally ugly production values. He was also a DJ — he had played turntables at Boston clubs — and had begun to think about the turntable as an instrument rather than a playback device. In 1979 he encountered the work of the Bay Area sound artist The Residents and of the New York no-wave composers, and by 1981 had begun staging turntable performances at small venues in downtown Manhattan. What makes Records belong in this archive is that it is the single cleanest pre-digital argument for sampling as a primary artistic method. The hip-hop DJs of the South Bronx were, at almost exactly the same moment, doing a closely related thing with twin turntables, but their project was rhythm. Marclay's project was collage, in the sense that John Heartfield or Hannah Höch had used the word — the juxtaposition of fragments as a form of argument. Marclay went on to make major work in film (The Clock, 2010, a twenty-four-hour single-channel film collaging clips in which clocks appear, synchronized to real time), but the vinyl work of the 1980s is his foundational method. He still makes it. A 2023 Guggenheim retrospective placed the early records at the center of his trajectory. Lore Marclay sourced his early records from the dollar bins of New York thrift stores — Salvation Army, Goodwill, the sidewalk sales of the Lower East Side — buying records by the crate for under a dollar each. He cut them on a bandsaw borrowed from a sculptor friend. The sliced pieces were glued back into discs with two-part epoxy, the seams sanded flat, the resulting record played on a consumer turntable with a cheap needle that he expected to wear out. He would burn through three or four needles in a single performance. He once said, in a 1998 interview, that he had thrown away more vinyl than most record stores had ever stocked. His archive — at the Whitney — contains several hundred of the cut records, most of which can no longer be played because the needles sanded through the glue over the decades. Sources • Marclay, Christian — Records 1981–1989 (edition of cut-record documentation, 1990). • Guggenheim Museum — Christian Marclay (exh. cat. 2023). • Whitney Museum — Christian Marclay archive.