Christian Ernest Marclay (born January 11, 1955) is a visual artist and composer. He holds both American and Swiss nationality.
I’ve worked with collage a lot. And there’s this chance thing that happens-you don’t always control things. Why did you find this today and not this? But you’ve got this thing, and you make it work. It’s the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.
I have never been much of a painter.
I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.
[Photography] can be tiny, on your phone, or it can be a billboard, or a film-sized projection, or printed in a magazine. I don't think we've been in a time before when so much photography is available in so many formats, when everybody is a photographer.
Since I was a child I have always been cutting things out and gluing them together rather than drawing them.
It's good to get away from the editing suite. It's very unhealthy to be sitting in front of the screen for too long.
Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer. . . . I often see things after the fact. This revelatory quality includes a sense of playfulness, because you're not sure what the consequences are going to be.
As an artist, you're always somewhat obscure. We're not talking Hollywood.
It's the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.
If the music in a groove fits with what you're playing, then play it; if not, then you can play it backwards. If that doesn't work, you try it at a different speed. If it really doesn't work you just break it. The whole ritual to put a record on a turntable just to listen to it, I don't do that too often.
Art is all in the details.
The process of editing is what I enjoy most - putting the pieces together and making sense out of them.
When you take something apart, you get a great sense of what it took to originally put it together.
You start with an idea but then so many things can happen.
You can get so many sounds out of one record. Every record can be used in some way.
Most of my pictures are really small statements. There's a banality to them.