Christian MarclayWhite Cube

1980

Crossfire4

Crossfire

EXHIBITION:

20211120 – 2022223
(2022110221 ) (122811 )111
10:00-18:00
1F

From Exhibition information:
Since the early 1980s, Marclay has been developing a distinctive body of work that explores the relationships between sound and image. Renowned for his exuberant and witty collages, Marclay has made use of everything from record covers to film clips to construct pictures, objects and installations.

The video installation ‘Crossfire’ creates a charged, physical space in which the viewer is surrounded by four large projections playing a rapid montage of guns and gunfire. The gun is perhaps the most iconic image in the media, a constant presence in everything from newscasts about faraway wars and local crimes to its persistent role as a narrative device in movies. While guns always foreshadow violence, they also offer a false promise of safety from an outside threat. Marclay plays with this twin sense of dread and fascination. ‘Crossfire’ features characters handling a variety of guns, from small pistols to unruly rifles a man pulls back his jacket to reveal a thick handgun in a holster, fingers caress a steely gun barrel as if stroking a fetish object, a thumb pushes bullets into the cylinder of a revolver. When the shooting begins, the viewer is engulfed by a cadenced, pulsating violence that diminishes and intensifies with mesmerising rhythm. Although the viewer is under a continuous assault, Marclays precise arrangement of sound and image allows the gunfire to become a kind of percussion instrument, and Crossfire coaxes a strange music from the Westerns, gangster flicks and war movies that the artist has used as raw material.