Shuffle

Christian Marclay is known for using a range of media--video, sculpture, installation and performance--in his artwork to address the ways that music and sound impact our experience of the world. While he frequently uses photograms and found images in his work, most people don't realize the extent to which photography has become a tool of choice for this subtle but influential artist. For this project, a limited-edition boxed card set, "Shuffle," Marclay photographed the appearance of musical notation in his everyday wanderings--finding examples on shop awnings, chocolate tins, T-shirts, underwear and other unexpected places. This body of work reveals Marclay to be an obsessive photographic note-taker with a flair for uncovering musical "clues" hidden in the landscape and adorning our world--musical notes just waiting to be called into action. Each of the 75 images collected here is presented on an oversized playing card, and the entire deck is enclosed in a distinctive package. Part Fluxus box, part John Cage-ian "chance operation" or "Eames House of Cards," this highly collectible edition offers a compelling, serendipity-driven visual experience, as well as the components for a spontaneous musical score: a player need only shuffle the deck and let the cards fall where they may in order to produce a unique, experimental sequence. With text and instructions by Marclay.

Number of pages: 75
Publication date: 2007-06-01
Measurements: 5.28 x 7.02 x 1.4 inches
ISBN: 9781597110389

Christian Marclay was born in 1955 in San Rafael, California and was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied at the Ecole Superieure d’Art Visuel prior to attending the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. He has lived in New York since 1980. His work has been shown and performed at museums all over the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since 1979 he has, in addition to his visual arts practice, performed and recorded musical pieces by mixing altered records on multiple turntables. As a musician he has collaborated with many other performers including Butch Morris, John Zorn and Sonic Youth.