Marclay or the art of destroying to build better

The exhibition currently devoted to him at the Centre Pompidou is a major one. It is impossible this time to remain insensitive to the creative universe of the musician, composer and visual artist Christian Marclay, as there are so many doors to enter it, whether through one end or another. Between his paintings representing improbable intersexed characters using assemblages of vinyl record sleeves, his spectacular and zany sculptures of musical instruments that are as stretched as they are unusable, his knitting of magnetic tapes to make a cushion out of the Beatles' music, the fragments of American comics and Japanese manga assembled into giant and vociferous broken faces, his completely hypnotic film The Doors, produced for the exhibition, which bears witness to his Machiavellian talent for editing... - and so on - one comes away transfixed by so much imagination and inventiveness.

Christian Marclay's work of art, which is as plural as it is inspiring, is thus at last widely presented in an exhibition in Paris, and no longer only through the end of one spyglass or another, as when nine of his video installations were presented at the Cité de la Musique in 2007, when his photographic activity was exhibited in Rennes in 2008, or when his famous clock The Clock, a video work broadcast in 24-hour loops, was projected in 2010 at Beaubourg. "It has therefore been hoped for some time that a global overview of the artist's prolific work would be presented in France. So the exhibition with the simple patronymic title presented at the Centre Pompidou is a twofold event: as an expected appointment, and as a very rare recapitulative form in Marclay's international trajectory, as he has always favoured circumscribed and thematic selections of his work," writes Valérie Mavridorakis for Artpress, the contemporary art magazine published this January.

The "Christian Marclay" exhibition, which is not designed to follow a chronological path but rather a network of affinities and echoes that unfold the logic of the multimedia artist, combines diversions and metamorphoses in a journey that occupies the largest of the Centre Pompidou's art galleries, which has become a labyrinth, and brings together more than 220 artworks. The artist, who believes that memory is our oldest recording system, became fascinated with the world of sound very early on. And about the best way to represent it. Born in California in 1955, the Swiss-American living in London did not escape art studies, but soon found himself on stage with musician Kurt Henry, combining sound and live images in concerts that were already true artistic performances. The two musicians called their duo The Bachelors, even, after the title of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, even (1915-1923).

From the early 1980s onwards, Christian Marclay embarked on a solo career as a visual artist, but he always creates his artworks for sale "from elements drawn from the world of sound, the world of recording, the world of pop culture", as Jean-Pierre Criqui, curator of the exhibition, explains. "He uses records, 33 or 45 rpm vinyls, or their covers. The re in recommencer, refaire, répéter is the emblem of all Christian Marclay's work. Re, in old French, was found in a word that no longer exists, which is record, which meant memory and remembrance. The word was in common use until the 17th century and recorder meant not to record, but to remember, to recall. Memory as the oldest recording system.

The artist will always position himself at the crossroads of the scholarly and popular arts, music and visual arts, in all media. "The first part of the exhibition generously traces the origins of the artist's career as a platinum player and collagist of LPs and record sleeves at the turn of the 1980s. We will summarise here the most salient features of the work since, stunned, we evaded the crossfire of the Crossfire video in 2008 or reluctantly extirpated ourselves from one of the sofas of The Clock in 2010," writes Valérie Mavridorakis, a professor of contemporary art history and a specialist in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, for Artpress. The author Clément Chéroux of "Photo-phonographie de Christian Marclay", published in 2009, did not fail to point out: "The dialectical tension that is constantly at work in Marclay's work has something profoundly playful about it.

And it is this playful aspect that makes a work of contemporary art that is, all in all, very conceptual into a work of popular art accessible to the greatest number. Hats off to the artist.

"This playful dimension, which makes Marclay's work so attractive even though it is demanding, has been confirmed in recent years through the intensive use of comics, an inexhaustible reservoir of motifs and sounds," observes Valérie Mavridorakis. "However, the play of intersexual, even teratological hybrids, which already characterised the collages of record sleeves, is now tinged with an ambiguity that reflects the spirit of the times. It was to use the means at hand during the confinement that Christian Marclay began tearing and cutting up countless comic books to create collages of howling creatures. Combining the traditional technique of xylogravure with sophisticated electronic technology that allows it to be applied to large formats, the artist finds himself echoing "the distant echoes of the woodcuts of the Brücke artists (? ) in these Frankensteinian works, which nevertheless find their inspiration in the lithograph of Edvard Munch's Scream (1895), where the famous head twisted with anguish is inscribed on a network of lines similar to wood fibres", notes Valérie Mavridorakis. "Marclay's silent works have never been so loud.

What is great about this Christian Marclay exhibition is precisely that. The extraordinary mille-feuilles of possible interpretations, from the simple instinctive feeling in front of the work of art of which one immediately understands something, even if, as Artpress affirms, "the sensory pleasures of Marclay's work are never innocent"... to his vertiginous analysis calling upon innumerable references in art history. With Marclay, all doors speak.