Christian Marclay Quotes

#1. Art is all in the details.

Christian Marclay

#2. These things I sample, or clip, are things that we share - music, films, sounds. It triggers a layer of participation from the audience as they recognize the material and remember it.

Christian Marclay

#3. As an artist, you're always somewhat obscure. We're not talking Hollywood.

Christian Marclay

#4. When you take something apart, you get a great sense of what it took to originally put it together.

Christian Marclay

#5. We go to the movies to forget about time, to be in a dream state. And it's entertainment, distraction, from the fact that everything is kind of crumbling in front of our eyes.

Christian Marclay

#6. People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.

Christian Marclay

#7. If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it.

Christian Marclay

#8. I've never been a big cinephile, which may be why I could treat 'The Clock' like a puzzle and force the pieces to fit together in odd ways.

Christian Marclay

#9. 'Record Without A Cover' was about allowing the medium to come through, making a record that was not a document of a performance but a record that could change with time, and would be different from one copy to the next.

Christian Marclay

#10. Unlike sitting at a computer screen, printing is very direct and hands-on.

Christian Marclay

#11. You start with an idea but then so many things can happen.

Christian Marclay

#12. Most of my pictures are really small statements. There's a banality to them.

Christian Marclay

#13. With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

Christian Marclay

#14. Every person's remembering will be different. That engagement is important, I think.

Christian Marclay

#15. You can get so many sounds out of one record. Every record can be used in some way.

Christian Marclay

#16. It's good to get away from the editing suite. It's very unhealthy to be sitting in front of the screen for too long.

Christian Marclay

#17. It's the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.

Christian Marclay

#18. The process of editing is what I enjoy most - putting the pieces together and making sense out of them.

Christian Marclay

#19. I have never been much of a painter.

Christian Marclay

#20. I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.

Christian Marclay

#21. [Photography] can be tiny, on your phone, or it can be a billboard, or a film-sized projection, or printed in a magazine. I don't think we've been in a time before when so much photography is available in so many formats, when everybody is a photographer.

Christian Marclay

#22. Since I was a child I have always been cutting things out and gluing them together rather than drawing them.

Christian Marclay