Art Metropole

01 Jan. 2005

Slipmats A New Multiple by Christian Marclay

Artist

Christian Marclay

Art Metropole & Printed Matter, Inc. present a new fundraising edition.

Art Metropole is happy to announce the release of our latest Fundraising Edition: a new multiple by Christian Marclay entitled Slipmats. Co-published with Printed Matter Inc., Slipmats is a pair of custom-made slip mats. Left and right hand mats are each dye-printed with a photogram of the artist’s hands. The edition of 250, plus 50 signed and numbered sets, are available for purchase through our website and at our book and multiple shop.

Christian Marclay’s remarkable body of work exploring the space between what we hear and what we see has earned him acclaim both as a visual artist and as a musician in the United States and Europe. His concern with how sound is experienced, visualized, and translated into other forms leads him to work in a broad range of media. The slip mats are a beautiful distillation of his interdisciplinary approach, as they are made for DJs turntables – and so evoke the sounds associated with scratching and sampling – but they are clearly an artist’s edition, signed and numbered and featuring the hand of the artist. The mats also reference Marclay’s decades-long career as a DJ and experimental musician, and his use of the turntable – and other stereo components – as expressive tools.

Slipmats was published in 2005 by Printed Matter, Inc., New York and Art Metropole, Toronto in an edition of 250. Each pair comes packaged together in a clear vinyl sleeve and is priced at $58. Fifty copies of the special signed and numbered edition are priced at $320. Order yours today from Art Metropole’s web site, http://www.artmetropole.com.

American sculptor, installation artist and musician. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in the late 1970s, and whilst on an exchange programme to New York he began presenting performances involving experimental music. His early visual work played on his interest in music: his Record without a Cover, released in 1985 by Recycled Records in New York, was a recording of his music distributed to record shops in the normal manner but bearing the instructions that it should not be placed in any kind of sleeve or cover. The Beatles (1989; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 24) destroys the possibility of sound altogether, consisting as it does of a pillow crocheted from cassette tape of the entire Beatles back catalogue. The relationship between sound and non-sound, and between objects brought together in unexpected combinations, are central concerns in Marclay’s work. Black and White (1992; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 43) is one in a series of composite images made by sewing LP covers together to make hybrid figures, echoing the scratching and sampling of his earlier sound work. In the installation Echo and Narcissus (1992; Jerusalem, Israel Mus.), 14000 CDs cover the gallery floor so that the viewer walks over them, their purpose as music recordings warped into a shiny surface, with the only sound being the viewers’ footsteps. Marclay’s practice purposefully straddles both gallery-based visual art and pop music, exploring ways of disrupting our perceptions of sound and identity using techniques of collage, scratching, misplacement and surprise.

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Slipmats A New Multiple by Christian Marclay.

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