Video Quartet

48 War Movies (2019) is a single-channel video that collapses conflicts from the Civil War to Iraq into a horrifying aggregate spectacle of war. Dramatizations are collaged into almost indistinguishable narratives and presented through concentric rectangles, like a flickering conveyor belt of popular cultural content. The forty-eight war films play simultaneously and continuously, and the accompanying soundtrack generates an indecipherable cacophony of wartime sounds.

A 24-hour compendium of time-themed film clips, all synched to the time that appears on the clocks and watches within.

The condensed filmic work of Abigail Child, borrowing strategies from found footage, Appropriation Art, Language Poetry and experimental music, stands a a landmark in the experimental cinema of the 1980's. The processing of interruption and fragmentation inform the series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?, reactivating the stakes of montage applied in different artistic practices.

For this video shot in Texas, Christian Marclay connected an electric guitar to an amplifier and dragged it behind a pick-up truck. The resulting cacophonic sound evokes noise music and the destruction of instruments at rock concerts and in Fluxus performances. The work refers more precisely to a racist murder committed in 1998 not far from the film location - James Byrd Jr. an African American, was dragged by a truck for several kilometers.

Screen Play is a video score by artist Christian Marclay in which found film footage is combined with computer animation to create a visual projection interpreted by live musicians. As Marclay says, “Moving images and graphics gives musicians visual cues suggesting emotion, energy, rhythm, pitch, volume, and duration. I believe in the power of images to evoke sound.”

"Subtitled" is an exquisite corpse of fleeting slivers, with fragments of dialogue and closed captions flitting between glimpses of body parts, car chases, sea storms, burning buildings and an overflow of other images.

For ten years, Christian Marclay collected film excerpts featuring a door opening or closing. He edited these sequences so that we see the actors going through the door to enter another space. Going through the door marks the edit point, thus the passage from one film to another and from one soundscape to another. Both audio and visual, this editing suggests a labyrinthine wandering, a mental architecture in which the characters get lost and find themselves again.

With MADE TO BE DESTROYED, Christian Marclay edits together a multitude of film clips in which artworks are destroyed. The minutia of the preliminary research and ensuing editing highlights a series of narrative and cultural patterns whereby art is the victim of violence. Whether sprayed (Batman, 1989), burnt (Equilibrium, 2002) or smashed (Le sang d’un poète, 1932 The Naked Gun, 1988), artworks are destroyed in moments that express rage against the self and others, the pain of loss, rebellion against a state or political power, or simply the perfect foil for a slapstick mishap.