christian marclay

BODY MIX

For the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay, “records are a form of memory.” In his Body Mix series (1991–92), he collected and cut up LP sleeves, then reassembled the pieces into  new works, creating witty and humorous hybrid figures. By interconnecting covers, Marclay produced a series of meta-album covers — artworks that reflect the convergence of musical and visual styles across decades. His work proved prophetic, anticipating the sweeping fusion and cross-pollination of musical genres that began in the 1990s and continues today.

Marclay is also a musician and a pioneer in using vinyl records and turntables as instruments for sound art. By cutting, reassembling, and playing different records, he developed a method he called “plunderphonics” — a sonic counterpart to William S. Burroughs’s literary “cut-up” technique.

His work reveals glamour as a monstrous bricolage — a collage of heterogeneous sources and images that produces hybrid creatures, half…