Kunst wird Partitur - Christian Marclay: Graphic Scores

In a highly playful manner, Christian Marclay samples comic and manga motifs to create extensive scores, that are then interpreted by singers and musicians as performative instructions. The artist here, among other things, follows the principle of onomatopoeia, the sound of a word being its meaning. The beholder of such works is also tempted to sing along before his inner eye, in order to give rhythm and sound to these pulsat-ing, dancing word chains. With the help of a cut-and-paste technique quite familiar from popular culture, Marclay remixes our present, for in-stance with picture details and film extracts, comics or graffiti. For his work Zoom Zoom he took photographs, over several years, of everyday scenes containing melodious and musically associative word combinations in inscriptions and logos on packaging, printed matter, or other objects. In a digital slide projection, edited live by the artist, the individual images become the rhythmic live space, scenically commented on by the New York vocal artist Shelley Hirsch. The random sequence in which these found images are shown, which knows no beginning and no end, also refers back to the manga scroll, which, in the manner of the old Japanese picture scrolls of twenty metres length, is unrolled before the vocal inter-preter's eyes section by section. A new work of his, in which found frag-ments of comics are assembled into a score collage in the shape of a conventional printed comic, Marclay has asked the Swiss ensemBle baBel to set to music. With his audible cartoons Marclay provides one of the main themes of this year's festival.
Karin Pernegger