Christian Marclay. Doors

About

Marclay has fused fine art and audio cultures for over four decades, working across sculpture, video, photography, collage and performance to transform sound and music into a visible, physical form that challenges our preconceptions. The artist tests the perceptual limits of sound and examines the increasing prevalence of sonic mediation that results from technology such as digital recording, mass reproduction, and telecommunication.

For ten years, Marclay collected film clips in which a door opens or closes. He edited these sequences so that we see the actors walking through the door to enter another space. This passage marks the editing point, thus the transition from one film to another and from one soundscape to another. Both audio and visual, the resulting virtuoso montage suggests a labyrinthine wandering, a space in which the characters get lost and find themselves again, echoing the movements of the visitors in the exhibition. ‘The door is of course very symbolic, but I see it more as sculptural,’ says the artist. ‘My video is a sort of mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in.’