Telephones

While studying painting in New York in 1978, Christian Marclay became interested in the punk, hip-hop, performance art, and experimental music scenes and decided to make works where they intersect. As he didn’t play an instrument, Marclay developed ingenious alternatives such as strapping on a turntable and scratching records, or making disjunctive new records out of pieces of recordings of Beethoven, the Beatles, and nursery rhymes. He has since created a diverse body of work that explores the relationship between sound and vision, the space between what we see and what we hear.

In his videos, he mines readily identifiable films that are part of a shared cultural history. Telephones is made up of movie clips from the 1930s to the 1990s. It begins with a lengthy series of very short snippets of people dialing phones, followed by sequences of phones ringing, being answered, and then hung up. Through the clips he has chosen and the editing process, Marclay produced a video that builds tension and then offers some release within each of those sections. It is an evocative and accessible example of the effectiveness and power of editing. Telephones is also visually engaging, funny, and quirky. Featuring a wide array of actors, such as Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Stanwyck, Sean Connery, Heather Locklear, and Humphrey Bogart, starring in films ranging from The Birds to Sleepless in Seattle, the video captivates viewers through moments of humor and loosely constructed narrative.