NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a new multimonitor installation by Christian Marclay, entitled Shake Rattle and Roll (fluxmix). The piece was originally created at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where Marclay was an artist-in-residence in 2004. The installation emerged from the artist’s curiosity about the Walker’s important collection of objects related to the international Fluxus movement–some 500 works by artists including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, and Yoko Ono–and its significant collection of multiples by the German artist Joseph Beuys.

Marclay’s visual art practice, which combines video installations, sculpture, photography, and collage, addresses the overlapping of aural and visual realms, reflecting on how sound and image are related. His work is full of nods to popular culture, but he also plays on the tradition of avant-garde music inherited from composers like John Cage. In addition to his work as an artist, Marclay is also a prolific musician (and a pioneer of ‘turntablism’), who has performed internationally with collaborators as diverse as John Zorn, the Kronos Quartet, and Sonic Youth.

Much of the Fluxus and Beuys materials that Marclay researched for his video installation exist as mail ephemera, instructions, posters, and newspapers, and also as boxes that include a medley of objects by many different artists: wooden toys and games, puzzles, and nonsensical items. Marclay wanted to bring these eccentric, historic objects back to life by exploring their sonic possibilities. Shake Rattle and Roll (fluxmix) presents them in a surprising new light as he frees them from storage to create a clamorous symphony of images, a portfolio of sounds.

Shake Rattle and Roll (fluxmix) premiered at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, on June 26, 2004.

Also included in the exhibition is a new series of color photograms, which further explore the intersection of performance and visual practice. While creating these photograms, Marclay worked in total darkness, improvising with light and movement to leave visual imprints of the records and their handling. In other, more abstract photograms, Marclay held a record up to a photo enlarger, leaving an impression of the discs’ grooves onto the paper.

Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael, California) grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel. In 1977, he moved to Boston and attended the Massachusetts College of Art, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Marclay’s work has been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Venice Biennale; the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva; the Kunsthaus in Zürich; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His retrospective exhibition organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, is currently on an international tour. This one-person exhibition is Marclay’s third with the Paula Cooper Gallery. He lives and works in New York City.

The exhibition will be on view from January 8 through February 7, 2005, at 534 West 21st Street.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com