Christian Marclay: Translating

“It may seem like a contradiction, but I’m interested in sound not just for how it sounds, but also for how it looks.”
Christian Marclay, THE WIRE, issue 195, May 2000.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is pleased to present the first large-scale museum exhibition in Japan of the acclaimed artist Christian Marclay, whose innovative practice lies at the crossroads of art and music.

Christian Marclay Translating is the first large-scale solo exhibition of the artist’s work in a Japanese museum and aims to introduce his diverse and eclectic practice to audiences. Sampling his oeuvre, it includes early works, influenced by conceptual art and punk music, large-scale installations built from samples of image and sound information, and more recent works that reflect upon the anxieties permeating our contemporary world.

Marclay Translating
This exhibition employs the term “Translating” in reference to Marclay’s unique approach that attempts to find an equivalence between the visual and auditory experience and to decipher the world by using one sense for another.

Born in California and raised in Geneva, Marclay grew up traveling between the different linguistic and cultural spheres of Switzerland and the United States, an experience that informed his decision to become an artist: “I didn’t trust language that much and I was more interested in other types of communication, like visual language or music, things that rely on different signs or perceptions.”*

Marclay’s technique of sampling, evident in many of his works, entails extracting and repurposing existing images and sounds, and can be considered an act of “translation” from one realm to the other, offering an alternative to language. Whether using the materiality of recorded sound to create images, as in his celebrated series of photograms, or translating image back into sound, as with the creation of “graphic scores” in which images from our day-to-day environment are given over to musicians as scores from which to create music, Marclay’s practice exists at the intersection of these two cultural forms. The exhibition will also include works that feature onomatopoeia, appropriated from manga comics originally published in Japan and translated into English, such as Manga Scroll (2010) which is a vocal “graphic score”. Shifting back and forth between sound and vision, everyday objects and art, information and matter, as well as different cultures, Marclay’s practice explores the creative possibilities and contradictions inherent in translation. With a keen eye (and ear) and understated humor, he draws attention to the sensations and perceptions we take for granted while revealing the precariousness of human communication.

Translating Marclay
Evolving with the passage of time, Marclay’s work is ‘translated’ by the viewer and/or the listener into a myriad of open-ended experiences. His early masterpiece Record Without a Cover (1985), for example, is an LP record without any protective packaging which allows for damage from shipping, storing, and playing the vinyl to become part of the recording.

During the exhibition, a public programme of events will feature performances of Marclay’s graphic scores by musicians living in Japan.

Events
Multiple events will be held over the course of the exhibition period. ∈Y∋, Otomo Yoshihide, KOM_I, Makigami Koichi, Fuyuki Yamakawa and others will perform Christian Marclay’s graphic scores, marking a new chapter in the history of his special and on-going relationship with Japan’s experimental music scene which began during his first visit to the country in 1986. A band led by Jim O’Rourke will also be formed for this performance (Jim O’Rourke [guitar], Tatsuhisa Yamamoto [drums], Marty Holoubek [bass], Eiko Ishibashi [flute], and Kei Matsumaru [saxophone]). 
Click here for more details.

Organized by Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo operated by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture.

Curated by Tomoko Yabumae (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo).

*Jan Estep, “Words and Music: Interview with Christian Marclay,” New Art Examiner, Sept./Oct. 2001, pp. 78-83.