By Jennifer Glickel
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
UPPER EAST SIDE — While most museums don’t allow visitors to touch the walls, let alone the artwork, patrons of a new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art are encouraged to grab a piece of chalk and write all over the floor-to-ceiling wall of musical staff lines created by artist Christian Marclay for his latest piece.
In “Christian Marclay: Festival,” which opens Thursday at the Whitney, Marclay’s work as an artist known for fusing sound and image in his art are displayed in a variety of media — installation, photography, sculpture, video, and collage.
Since the late 1990s, Marclay has created “graphic scores” composed of photographs, videos, found images, and everyday objects. What results is a kind of art that departs entirely from traditional musical compositions. A central element of the Whitney’s exhibition is daily performances interpreting these graphic scores by approximately 50 different musicians.
“The fourth floor of the Whitney Museum has never looked like this before and probably will never look like this again,” the museum’s director Adam Weinberg said of the musical staff chalkboard wall as well as the various instruments throughout the gallery for Marclay’s show.
“Christian’s work is generous, it’s democratic, it’s open,” Weinberg added.
In this open participatory spirit, the collective musical score that visitors will create by drawing on the chalkboard wall will be interpreted and performed throughout the run of the show as Marclay’s newest piece, Chalkboard (2010).
Museum visitors can enjoy an interpretation of Marclay’s score Prêt-à-Porter (2010), in which models don the artist’s collection of clothes decorated with musical notations while musicians play the notes on the garments. The models, who effectively serve as living music stands, change, layer, and undress from the various shirts, dresses, hats, and scarves throughout the performance.
In addition to musicians playing music to interpret Marclay’s art, musicians will also use Marclay’s art pieces as instruments. Examples are Wind Up Guitar (1994), a custom-made guitar with twelve music boxes, and Sixty-Four Bells and a Bow (2009), Marclay’s collection of small decorative, dinner, and souvenir bells to be used as sound sources in a performance.
“Recently people have been asking me if the show is done,” Marclay said Wednesday of the exhibition’s completed installation.
“I tell them it’s not done, but that it’s really just starting today.”
"Christian Marclay: Festival" opens Thursday at the Whitney Museum of American Art and runs through Sept. 26. The museum is located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street.
