Video Quartet

“This work is a four screen projection of found Hollywood film clips transferred to colour video and audio track. The duration of the
installation is 14 minutes long.” [1]

“Video Quartet is composed of hundreds of clips culled from Hollywood movies then and now (mostly then), edited together with Final Cut Pro software, and presented in real time on four side-by-side video screens. Marclay has carefully selected the clips, either retaining their original music or inserting some type of found sound, and created a mesmerizing audio-visual collage, a visible avant-noise epic. Considering that Video Quartet is created from wildly varying samples flickering across four screens, the consistency of mood, tone, and form Marclay manages to maintain is something of a minor miracle. On the screens: tentative taps on a piano; cockroaches falling onto a dusty piano; another piano playing by itself; a gong being struck; a car peeling out; metalheads rocking out; Hendrix jamming; Michael J.” [2]

video quartet [3]

[1]: http://artwelove.com/artwork/-id/4bda0898

[2]: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2003/04/music/christian-marclays-video-quartet

[3]: http://19.media.tumblr.com/8Bf64XqbE3nel3kguvHmf0Rw_500.jpg