Christian Marclay has often approached his work like a DJ would, remixing a diverse range of media drawn from popular culture to produce new meanings. For the last four decades, the artist has explored the afterlife of objects through obsolete technologies — old rotary phones, phonograph records, cassette tapes. He began working with film in the late 1990s, often creating a multilayered, false sense of continuity by conflating different moments from cinematic history. His more recent large-scale installations draw the viewer into deeply compelling, immersive samplings that manipulate sound and image. His body of work as a whole recalls a playful aphorism that he himself has occasionally invoked: “What you see is what you hear.”
Marclay’s solo exhibition at Paula Cooper opens with a number of recent paper and video collages that use graphic lettering and design to artfully tease out double meanings. Here, he reverses the hierarchy between image and sound by culling words and figures of speech from comic books and magazines in order to turn our attention to the visuality of language. For instance, in “Untitled (Last Sound)” (2024), phrases like “LAST WORD,” “ABSORPTION,” and “SILENT” read multi-directionally in bold type. In “Here” (2024), a series of magazine cutouts of ears frame the word “here” almost like parentheses, punning off its homonym. These works not only reveal Marclay’s fascination with the malleability of language, but also underscore his ability to shift our perception of how language functions when divorced from its usual context.
Many of these collaged works recall his 2015 silent 360-degree animation “Surround Sounds,” in which animated onomatopoeias like “SHEEEE,” “whizz,” and “zoom” sweep across the walls. In this exhibition, five new collages enclose small speech bubbles within a swirl of dark color, quietly singing phrases like: “Just close your eyes,” or, “What do I have? Time.” As viewers, we are prompted to consider how text fragments and subtitles might lose or gain semantic meaning under different kinds of framing, acting either as purely visual elements or suggestive of muffled conversation.
In the gallery’s main room, we encounter “Subtitled” (2019), a large-scale, radial juxtaposition of 22 cropped cinematic scenes that bring together the mundane and sublime. Shown on a monolithic, 20-foot-tall free-standing column, stacked scenes and fragments of dialogue surface intermittently, enveloping the viewer in glimpses of seascapes, expressions, burning buildings, and car chases. Distinctive color palettes begin to approach coherence before dissolving into abstraction, their movement pulling the viewer’s gaze into a restless search for symbolic continuity. The snippets offer cryptic, atmospheric clues to their origins, creating a flickering, fluid concrete poem.
Works such as this one signal his growing formal ambitions over the last decade, while maintaining a sense of wonder and playful contradiction. Marclay continuously reminds us of the eternal present of art, memory, and time. His work suspends us in the flow of time — whether in print, collage, or onscreen — calling attention to the scattered technologies that have defined so many frames of life, language, and experience.
Christian Marclay: Subtitled continues at Paula Cooper Gallery (534 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through October 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
