27 Quotes by Christian Marclay

People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.

If the music in a groove fits with what you're playing, then play it; if not, then you can play it backwards. If that doesn't work, you try it at a different speed. If it really doesn't work you just break it. The whole ritual to put a record on a turntable just to listen to it, I don't do that too often.

You start with an idea but then so many things can happen.

[Photography] can be tiny, on your phone, or it can be a billboard, or a film-sized projection, or printed in a magazine. I don't think we've been in a time before when so much photography is available in so many formats, when everybody is a photographer.

Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer.... I often see things after the fact. This revelatory quality includes a sense of playfulness, because you're not sure what the consequences are going to be.

Most of my pictures are really small statements. There's a banality to them.

It was part of a financial situation. I could only afford records in thrift stores. Then you could find wonderful things, but now everything is a collectible. I like the recycling idea --using the stuff that people don't want anymore, and make new music out of it. There was an element of looking back and listening to your parents' records and doing something with that stuff. Sort of acknowledging the past while rejecting it at the same time.

I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.

I’ve worked with collage a lot. And there’s this chance thing that happens-you don’t always control things. Why did you find this today and not this? But you’ve got this thing, and you make it work. It’s the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.