Memento (Soul II Soul)
Christian Marclay American
Not on view
Over the past three decades Marclay has carved out a unique place in contemporary art, making visual art from the material culture of music-album-cover collages, sculptures made from accordions and electric guitars, and, most recently, photograms made by cracking open commercial cassettes and scattering the unspooled audiotapes in droopy skeins across the image surface. The scale and allover composition of these works recall canvases by Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Twombly, while the medium-cyanotype-harks back to the dawn of photography. With their festive yet melancholy compositions, Marclay's pictures stand as stunning memento mori for two antiquated mediums: the cyanotype of the 1840s and the cassette tape of the 1970s and 1980s. For this composition, Marclay sacrificed his cassettes of the late 1980s British dance band Soul II Soul.
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