Imagine the ultimate synthesis of Girl Talk's aural pop-culture sampling, John Cage's high-art experimental sense and an MGM movie highlight reel. Fans of any of the above will be enthralled by Christian Marclay's epic 14-minute media work, Video Quartet, on display now at the Nasher Museum of Art.
Video Quartet is, quite simply, overwhelming. Over 700 video clips from film and culture flash across four adjacent screens. Their corresponding audio mingles and overlaps to form a deftly-composed experimental symphony.
Confronted with the symbiotic mélange of sound and image and the looping repetitions that form the basic skeleton of the piece, one can decipher the traces of Marclay's earlier artistic experiments with turntables and records. An art student in the late 1970s, Marclay was heavily influenced by the burgeoning punk movement. Unable to play an instrument, he set about manipulating records, fascinated by their oft-maligned potential for skips and ambient noise.
Out of this interest rose his sound collages: records cut apart and glued back together in interesting configurations that distorted the sound or allowed him to mix sounds from different records. Because he was creating these sound objects long before hip-hop's popularity made record manipulation a thing of contemporary culture, Marclay is often lauded as a pioneer of sound appropriation-an influence that is fully evolved in his 2002 work, Video Quartet.
The work is on one level a wry commentary of how we visualize sound and those who produce it. Jumbled together are actors playing musicians, musicians playing musicians and real musicians just playing their instruments, constantly calling into question the foggy line between popular performance and performance art. Thrown in are seemingly random sounds-glass bottles breaking, loose change clanging against a hard floor, cinematic explosions-that further challenge notions of acceptable musical expression.
Part of the work's attraction lies not only in its obvious appeal to artistic sensibilities, but in its ability to excite viewers via a myriad of pop-culture references. Sightings of Dick Van Dyke as the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins, archival footage of Bob Dylan entertaining friends with his harmonica and a clip of Sandra Bullock in a dirndl all augment the piece's seductive power. Add the fact that the four screens make it virtually impossible to catch every fleeting reference, and it becomes impossible to justify seeing Video Quartet only once.
Video Quartet is on display now through July 26 at the Nasher Museum of Art.
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