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Marclay, Christian
Klaus Ottmann
(b San Rafael, CA, Jan 11, 1955).
American sculptor, installation artist and musician. Marclay studied at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva and at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Influenced by Fluxus, the interdisciplinary art movement of the 1960s, the experimental music of John Cage, and the punk and art bands of the late 1970s, Marclay started to perform in clubs in New York, playing his own record collages, which he had made by cutting up vinyl records and gluing them back together in different configurations.
For Marclay, making objects is about altering objects in order to extract new meaning, as with his stitched-together record covers or his Record without a Cover (Recycled Records, 1985) that was distributed without a sleeve or cover to allow it to accumulate dust and scratches. In 1989 he created Footsteps, an installation at the Shedhalle in Zurich, by covering the floor of one of its galleries with 3500 vinyl records. Visitors had to step on the records to reach the other galleries. The scratched and stepped-on records, which featured the sounds of a tap dancer, were sold afterwards....