Christian Marclay at the Toledo Museum of Art
Christian Marclay
Telephone dvd installation
Untitled (Small Circle) mixed media on canvas
Recent Acquisitions by the Toledo Museum of Art
www.toledomuseum.org
Though both are pieces of visual art, these works clearly reflect artist and avant garde turntablist Christian Marclay’s obsession with how people interact with sound. In Telephone, Marclay creates a seven and a half minute collage of clips from Hollywood films of famous faces interacting with that most irreplaceable of modern instruments – the telephone. Beginning with fedora-hatted men deploying dimes in telephone booths, the clips take us through black boxes with fist-sized speakers and microphones to the ill-advised world of ‘80’s design where high-tech white contrasts with the fire-engine red of Geena Davis’s hair. As one watches, the actual purpose of the phone begins to recede and one simply sees the mannerisms, reactions, and gestures that people use when using the phone – a visual vocabulary naturally lost on the auditor on the other end. The effect reminds us of the power of audible communication while simultaneously distancing us from that communication.
For Untitled (Small Circle), Marclay arranges twenty album covers to show only the smile on the face of the performer, faces that cover the full sleeve. By using album covers from a variety of genres, Marclay reminds us that these visuals serve only to identify the product, like brands, and that, even in as visual a culture as ours, it is ultimately the sounds that a consumer seeks here. These smiles – generic, unambiguous – also serve as an alienated observation on the fact that the smiling faces of Donovan and Janet Jackson on record sleeves (and, by extension, all record company advertising) represent the smiling face of the entertainment industry.
The purchase of these works makes clear that, under the new leadership of Don Bacigalupi, the Toledo Museum of Art isn’t afraid to make purchases that represent developing ideas. The TMA is to be credited to moving beyond generalism and making this commitment to more modern works.
And it’s at the end of my block, for christ’s sake.
-Keith McCrea
Reviews Editor