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Christian Marclay: Playing with rock and roll
Artist Christian Marclay is inspired by popular-culture clichés. [ blah ], a fundraiser for the gallery's education programme.
Tree Carr and a Fender Stratocaster in Marclay's Solo
"It's good to get away from the editing suite," he says. "It's very unhealthy to be sitting in front of the screen for too long."
Two weeks ago, he filmed the actress Tree Carr playing a Fender Stratocaster electric guitar that will be signed by Marclay and auctioned at the Art Plus party. On the day I meet him, he is beginning to cut five hours of footage. The finished video will be only about 15 minutes.
"You start with an idea but then so many things can happen," he says.
"The process of editing is what I enjoy most - putting the pieces together and making sense out of them. During the shoot there was a lot of improvisation. Tree might do a great movement or something interesting that was unexpected. Now that I'm editing I have to be open to what happens. It's always evolving."
He stops to collect his thoughts. "I'm looking at the guitar as an anthropomorphic instrument," he continues.
"It's a phallic symbol but it also has a feminine body…and rock stars use it. When Elvis started performing, people were shocked by the way he suggestively used his hips. Guitars have since been used in a lot more explicit ways."
While he does not want to say how the finished piece will look, a vision of the girls with guitars from the video for Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love springs to mind.
'Tree interacts with the guitar in a very sexual way," he says.
"It's an idea I've had for some time but I don't think I could have done before. It would not have been politically correct, as a male artist, to deal with the strong sexual nature of an actress. But today it doesn't seem to be an issue. It's very interesting how culturally at certain times you can do things that at other times you can't. If you think back to when Duchamp painted his nude descending a staircase, and it was a scandal, you wonder why."
In the early Nineties, Marclay produced his Body Mixes series, which looked at how sex was used to sell pop music. Using images from record covers, he created collages of hybrid bodies, such as Michael Jackson "mixed" with the legs of a woman in knickers from a Sidney Barnes sleeve.
"I remember being attacked by some feminist women who gave me a hard time about it," he recalls.
"But I was just using what was there and reacting to culture and my environment. If you watch MTV it's all about sex. It's how they can keep people watching. You can't be a successful pop star without being overtly sexual on screen."
Throughout his career Marclay has developed a formidable set of improvisational skills that challenge the way we consider popular culture. He is an audio-visual maestro, exposing clichés, never failing to thrill or surprise. For Solo, he gave Carr little directorial advice, but wanted it to look like the first time she was touching a guitar.
He likes the fact that he doesn't know what's going to come out.
"Anything can happen," he says. "She's got the whole history of rock and roll to work with."
Solo has its première at TOD's Art Plus Film Party, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London E1 (020 7522 7888), on Thurs. Tickets are £125 each. Info: www.shitechapel/artxxxxAngelina Jolie's shoe issues strike a painful chord.
