Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay

Exhibition: Dec 9, 1999 – Jan 16, 2000


At Artpace, Marclay has generated new bodies of work, which continue his investigations of the role music plays in culture. The artist has looked to Artpace’s immediate neighbor as a location for exhibiting his new work. Alamo Music Center, a store selling musical instruments, is the site for viewing custom-made instruments of Marclay’s design; a drum set that has been altered with cymbals and drums positioned at heights corresponding to their tonal qualities and a customized 12 -foot long accordion. These “instruments” are displayed in the store’s showroom.

Marclay’s work presented at Artpace consists of Christmas music records collected from San Antonio thrift shops and used record stores. The collection of a thousand albums, which range from Perry Como and Dolly Parton to a collection of promotional records distributed by True Value Hardware Stores form, an “archives-cum-lounge” of discs which Marclay has invited local DJs to spin. The gallery is set up as a lounge, with turntables and a sound system ready to mix schmaltzy holiday melodies into an unpredictable cacophony of abstract music.

The involvement of San Antonio’s music community is a crucial part of Marclay’s production at Artpace. By shifting functions of spaces and institutions, Marclay blurs the lines between the music and art disciplines. As media saturates our cultural landscape and image and sound are increasingly combined, Marclay offers a pause to consider how music is visualized and how the visual becomes sonic.

Artist

Christian Marclay

London, UK / New York, New York, USA

London and New York-based Christian Marclay was born in 1955 in San Rafael, California and grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied art, eventually moving to the United States to complete his BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art.
The relationship between sound and image is central to Marclay’s work. He often incorporates music and musical instruments and has made sculptures from discarded CDs, melted vinyl records, sewn record covers together to create mixed media works, and created installations featuring musical instruments from museum collections. Performing and recording music is also an integral part of Marclay’s work. Using phonograph records as his “musical instruments,” he mixes altered records on multiple turntables in a display of precise manipulations. He has performed throughout Europe, Japan, Canada and the United States and has collaborated with many composers and musicians including Elliott Sharp, John Zorn, the Kronos Quartet, and Sonic Youth.
Marclay’s sculptures and installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and The Clocktower/PS 1, New York.

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Curators

Amada Cruz

Los Angeles, CA
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Kellie Jones

New York, NY
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Nancy Rubins

Topanga, California, USA

Born in 1952 in Naples, Texas, Californian Nancy Rubins received her MFA from the University of California, Davis. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including shows at Paul Kasmin Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Venice Biennale Aperto. Rubins’ work was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ Helter Skelter exhibit in 1992. Rubins teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Art Department. She has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Annette DiMeo Carlozzi

Austin, TX

Independent curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi has built an expansive practice across the US as a curator of modern and contemporary art, focusing on ideas and experiences, artists and audiences. Raised in Boston and trained at the Walker Art Center, she has served in a variety of foundational roles: as the first curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now The Contemporary Austin); executive director of the Aspen Art Museum and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Visual Arts Producer for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta; and in multiple positions—ranging from founding modern and contemporary curator to Deputy Director for Art and Programs to Curator at Large—at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Committed to expanding the canon, she has created notable exhibitions (Luis Jiménez, Paul Chan, Michael Smith, Deborah Hay, Negotiating Small TruthsAmerica/AmericasDesire), produced important commissions (Nancy Holt, Siah Armajani, Betye Saar, Vito Acconci, Byron Kim, Teresita Fernández), and acquired major works by a wide range of international artists. Carlozzi has had a long relationship with Artpace, having served as an early advisor, artist interviewer, and program panelist, member of the 1998 artist selection panel and 2001–03 Board of Visitors. In 2015 she curated Immersed from Linda Pace’s art collection, now called Ruby City.

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Dan Cameron

Newport Beach, California

From 2012 to 2015 he was Chief Curator at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California. In 2006, Dan Cameron founded the Biennial Prospect New Orleans, where he worked at until 2011. From 1995 to 2005 he was Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, where he developed numerous group exhibitions, such as East Village USA and Living inside the Grid, and several individual shows dedicated to the artists Martin Wong, William Kentridge, Carolee Schneemann, Carroll Dunham, Doris Salcedo, José Antonio Hernández Diez, among others.
As independent curator he has organized many exhibitions that brought him international attention, such as El arte y su doble (Fundación Caixa, Madrid, 1987); El jardín salvaje (Fundación Caixa, Barcelona, 1991); Cocido y crudo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1995), among many others. In 2003, he was the Artistic Director of the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and in 2006, Co-curator of the 5th Taipei Biennial.
He has published hundreds of texts in books, catalogues and magazines, and has given numerous talks and conferences at museums and universities around the world, also carrying out an important teaching activity in New York.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist

London, England

Hans Ulrich-Obrist is the Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London, positions created for Ulrich-Obrist in April 2006. As a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France since 2000, among many other exhibitions he organized solo shows with Jonas Mekas (2003), Anri Sala (2004), and Cerith Wyn Evans (2006). Before this position Ulrich-Obrist was an independent curator for a decade, organizing the group show Take Me I’m Yours at the Serpentine (1995) and Retrace Your Steps: Remember at the John Soane Museum (1999), also in London, England. Ulrich-Obrist was a panelist in 1998 for the 1999-2000 year of artists, and was invited to be a speaker at the 2003 symposium, but was unable to come due to illness.
Photo by Dominik Gigler

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