VISUAL LANGUAGE - LINE BRIEF - RAYOGRAPHS

Above is 'Cyanotypes' a piece of work by Christian Marclay.

Cyanotypes are unique photographic prints created by placing objects on a photosensitive surface. This early cameraless photographic process was developed in the1840s, and, much like a photogram, results in a silhouetted image varying in darkness based on the transparency of the object exposed to light. Commonly known as “blueprints” because of their distinctive Prussian blue color, this process was famously put to use by the 19th-century botanist Anna Atkins, and later used by architects and engineers as a method of reproducing drawings using only tracing paper and sunlight.

Continuing his exploration of the resonance between the visual and the sonic, Marclay’s cyanotypes capture the abstract tangles made by unspooled cassette tapes. Like party streamers, these lines of audiotape pulled loose from their plastic cassettes variously coil and twist, hang in catenary arches, or stretch across the surface of the prints. If the audio cassette has been rendered nearly obsolete by the evolution of technology, Marclay has reclaimed it as a tool for visual abstraction. Marclay has been called a “Dadaist DJ,” and these works recall early 20th-century avant-garde practices as well as Abstract Expressionist strategies for composition.

Marclay’s body of work – which spans video, sculpture, music, photography and collage – often examines various forms of the record, mining them for their technological contingencies and possibilities. In this new series, he exposes a sympathy between two outmoded kinds of recordings, the cyanotype and the cassette. These technologies intersect around ideas about sound and sight, reproduction and mediation, and an artistic practice of making, breaking, manipulating and keeping records.

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CHRISTIAN MARCLAY