Christian Marclay, Centre Pompidou review — how to remix modern life into engrossing art

In the half-century since it developed from experimental film in the 1960s, video art had an uneasy ride in museums, and not a single work attracted a truly popular following. That changed overnight in 2010, when Christian Marclay showed “The Clock”. Museum-goers have queued round the block in London, New York, Moscow and Melbourne to watch this mesmerising film of films, a 24-hour functioning timepiece composed of 12,000 clips marking every minute of the day, stitched together from more than a thousand movies.

“The Clock” won Golden Lion in Venice in 2011, and Marclay modestly thanked the jury for giving the work “15 minutes” of fame. The work has now been famous and beloved for a decade, but Marclay, a 67-year-old Californian-born, American-Swiss conceptual artist, is hardly known beyond it. This winter’s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou is therefore welcome and revelatory.

Beginning with his career as a DJ, cutting up records to play in scratchy, jumpy sequences from the late 1970s, and concluding with the premiere of “Doors” (2022), his most captivating piece since “The Clock”, the Pompidou explores the myriad idiosyncratic ways in which Marclay has attempted to bring music and the moving image into the museum, challenging ideas of what an exhibition can be.

He named his first music duo The Bachelors, Even, after Marcel Duchamp’s metaphor for erotic and creative frustration “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”, and in the bright “assisted ready-mades” dotted across the Pompidou’s ample galleries you immediately sense Duchamp’s influence.

A fantastical sculptural band includes drum kits set on stems too high to reach; “Prosthesis”, an impotent pink silicon guitar drooping its neck; and — an especially Duchampian thwarted image — “Lip Lock”, a trumpet and tuba with mouthpieces fused so that both are mute.

Marclay’s initial foray into splicing film, in 1995, was “Telephones”, which rings out here across a large open gallery, comic and insistent. A seven-minute montage of rapid-fire hellos and goodbyes, it features actors in Hollywood movies — Whoopi Goldberg with zebra-striped handset, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart — as they dial, hang up, stride to a phone booth, cradle or smash a receiver, stare longingly at one that won’t ring.

Whimsically charming, swinging between humour and tension, “Telephones” reduces narrative to absurdity, yet unites its shards and remnants of dialogue into one larger conversation, the ephemeral, ill-assorted characters connected by film’s tropes, gestures, gazes. The tone is nostalgic, intensified today by the focus on technologies so quickly obsolete — push-button and rotary dials, glossy Bakelite and brassy candlestick sets, the kiosk at the end of the lane, the scrabble for coins on reaching it.

The disparate voices of “Telephones” woven together into a tapestry of familiar babble inaugurated the method for all Marclay’s film collages, which together form a disjointed comédie humaine. Although each is technologically more complex than the last, all are based on the fragment, and the deconstructions read as a mirror of a fractured society, with a push towards harmony in the reconstructed sequences, however strident the separate parts.

You perceive “Video Quartet” (2002) at first as a cacophony of staccato clips where characters play an instrument, sing or shout, cars crash, tin cans hurtle down stairs and a roulette wheel whirrs loudly, declaring the element of chance. These noises, interspersed with pop, punk, jazz, classical melodies, Jimi Hendrix and Elvis, Ella Fitzgerald and Maria Callas, Sam playing it again in Casablanca, bounce between four screens to create an exuberantly dissonant musical-visual symphony. Marclay said he worked “like a DJ, but with sonic images”.

Mixing, mashing, teasing out relationships between sound and image, he chronicled the social media revolution from turntable to smartphone. The earliest collage is “Recycled Records”, sliced up vinyls from his DJ performances. “All Together” (2018) samples hundreds of Snapchats — footballs, fry-ups, fire engines. Image overload intensifies in the deliberately bewildering “Subtitled” (2019), a stack of subtitle strips, alternating with images, shuffled on a loop. Occasionally different body parts incongruously line up, as in the surrealist game exquisite corpse, or every section turns blue, or simultaneously bursts into flame.

“Playing Pompidou” (2022), an interactive augmented reality app, animates the building’s iconic facade into bright red, green, blue, turquoise strips. Each one corresponds to a coloured column on the app, sparking offstage sounds — cranking lift, squeaky doors — which Marclay calls “potential music”. If Duchamp is presiding godfather, experimental composer John Cage is just behind. “Playing Pompidou” is a virtual tribute to Cage’s composition 4’33”, consisting of ambient sounds in an otherwise silent concert hall.

It also pays homage to a building whose inside-out structure — multi-hued tubes, pipes, wires, escalators sweeping up the front — transformed museum architecture in the 1970s, declaring democratic, non-elitist intent. Marclay is at home in the Pompidou’s playful multimedia milieu. “I turned the museum into a musical instrument,” he says.

In this city of Baudelaire, Marclay emerges as a 21st-century flâneur, painting modern life as it is sampled, codified, memorialised on the instant. Displayed across ample high galleries boasting panoramic views of Paris, with turnings into dark cinemas for some of the films, the show is a wandering parcours of broad spaces, cul-de-sacs, attractions, distractions.

The two-dimensional works feel like street posters. The Actions series, sound words — splash, swoosh, slurp — screened on to gestural paintings, mimics both abstract expressionism and pop. The woodcuts of the Scream series reprise Munch’s figure in scraps assembled from manga and cartoons, the shrieking mouth amplified by the wood’s growth rings, like sound waves.

Less inventive than the film pieces, these nonetheless contribute to the “theatre of found sound” which enfolds us as we stroll across Marclay city. The effect is immersive, seductive, yet here’s the wonder of the thing: “The Clock” isn’t there. And the Pompidou owns one of its six editions. It’s a significant omission, grievously denying the scope of Marclay’s achievement.

Compensation? “Doors” is the show’s jewel. Drawing largely on 1960s classics — Alphaville, The Damned, Rosemary’s Baby — it collages moments when characters open or close doors into an hour-long drama of transience and transitions. The passage through the door is the cutting point between each film; actors rush through or slowly peer out, hesitantly finger the lock or fling themselves against the frame, and presto! — another person and setting appears on the other side. As in “The Clock”, there’s a fluid dynamism, a hypnotic illusion of continuity wrought from the disruptions, here with an edge of dread — the panic of the closing door, the nightmare of corridors and staircases leading nowhere.

Marclay explains that he wanted to “build in people’s minds an architecture in which to get lost”. He has entirely succeeded in this engrossing labyrinth of an exhibition.

To February 27, centrepompidou.fr