Christian Marclay: Replay

Christian Marclay was born in 1955 in California, but he grew up in Geneva and didn't live in the U.S. again until he returned in 1977 to study art. By 1979, music was Marclay's material of choice. He has since turned a fascination with all aspects of popular recorded sound and cinema into a brilliant career as an artist. As a collector of audio and film, he harnesses his eclectic interests and expansive archive to a practice spanning aural and visual collage and performance, in a layering and sampling aesthetic that has come to be called, after the DJ's tool, turntablism. He has collaborated with musicians including John Zorn, the Kronos quartet, DJ Spooky and Sonic Youth, and appeared or shown his work at venues including The Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 in New York. Replay, the first book to focus on his moving image work, gathers his most important films and projections to date. If Marclay's craft of reconstruction is itself musical (the pauses and absences being as much part of the work as the shots and beats), his recompositions also follow a rich heritage of montage within cinema and experimental film.