A surrealistic fourteen minutes
Video Quartet (2002)
by Christian Marclay (born 1955)
Four screen projections, thousands of different scenes from various movies, one piece of art.
For his work Video Quartet the New York based artist and experimental musician Christian Marclay collected thousands of film clips with musical instruments, singing, dancing and other forms of sound. He amazingly edited these clips together, resulting in a surrealistic 14 minutes.
Four different screens next to each other play four different scenes at the same time, quickly alternating, sometimes returning, but for the full 14 minutes it almost seems like these scenes were meant to be together. Scenes of famous and less famous movies from the whole century, instruments varying from the piano and guitar to the saw, genres from Jimi Hendrix to Maria Callas, combined with other sounds like humming, tap-dancing and screaming connect surprisingly well. Two or three instruments become an orchestra, with a singer they form a band, all sounds become one and even the images seem to relate to each other as if all movie makers, actors and musicians have been working together in this project.
Video Quartet is displayed in Tate Modern, London, in the wing “States of Flux.” This wing is devoted to early twentieth-century movements like Cubism and Futurism, which “broke with traditional ideas of picture making, seeking a more dynamic and fractured visual language to represent the complex reality of modern life and the machine age.” (http://www.tate.org.uk/) The work of Christian Marclay is an example of contemporary artists that have been influenced by these earlier movements. It shows the different layers of a movie, it mixes several cultural genres and it shows the relationship between sound and vision, between music and daily life.
by Christian Marclay (born 1955)
Four screen projections, thousands of different scenes from various movies, one piece of art.
For his work Video Quartet the New York based artist and experimental musician Christian Marclay collected thousands of film clips with musical instruments, singing, dancing and other forms of sound. He amazingly edited these clips together, resulting in a surrealistic 14 minutes.
Four different screens next to each other play four different scenes at the same time, quickly alternating, sometimes returning, but for the full 14 minutes it almost seems like these scenes were meant to be together. Scenes of famous and less famous movies from the whole century, instruments varying from the piano and guitar to the saw, genres from Jimi Hendrix to Maria Callas, combined with other sounds like humming, tap-dancing and screaming connect surprisingly well. Two or three instruments become an orchestra, with a singer they form a band, all sounds become one and even the images seem to relate to each other as if all movie makers, actors and musicians have been working together in this project.
Video Quartet is displayed in Tate Modern, London, in the wing “States of Flux.” This wing is devoted to early twentieth-century movements like Cubism and Futurism, which “broke with traditional ideas of picture making, seeking a more dynamic and fractured visual language to represent the complex reality of modern life and the machine age.” (http://www.tate.org.uk/) The work of Christian Marclay is an example of contemporary artists that have been influenced by these earlier movements. It shows the different layers of a movie, it mixes several cultural genres and it shows the relationship between sound and vision, between music and daily life.
posted by Let @ 10:09 pm
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