Christian Marclay works across numerous visual media – sculpture, installation, performance, found object, and collage – alongside music and its artefacts, to create a unique, multidisciplinary art. Also a musician, composer and DJ, in his visual works he sometimes evokes the memory of music, such as The Beatles (1989), a pillow crocheted out of Beatles audiotapes. Elsewhere Marclay examines the clichéd images of music-making, for example those found on LP record covers: charismatic, classical music conductors; anonymous, smiling Easy Listening girls; sultry rock stars. These are then carefully sewn together to form hybrid, often humorous, ‘spliced’-together figures (Body Mix, 1980-ongoing).

A major travelling retrospective of the artist originated at the Hammer Museum, UCLA and travels to the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in February 2005. The highlight of this exhibition is Marclay’s tour de force Video Quartet (2003), a four-screen installation combining (mostly) Hollywood film clips associated with music, edited together with virtuoso precision.

A respected musician who has collaborated with John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, and others, Marclay has presented his unique sound-and-vision at the Whitney Biennial, New York, 1991 and 2002; the Venice Biennale, 1995 and 1999, among many key international exhibitions.

Jennifer Gonzalez (Survey) is Assistant Professor in the Art History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the recipient of a Humanities Research Institute Residency Fellowship for her work 'Confession and Conquest: Autobiography in the Americas'. She has written numerous articles, catalogue essays and reviews, including 'The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage' in Race in Cyberspace (1999), 'Installation Art', Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (1998). Author's Residence: Santa Cruz (California, USA) Kim Gordon (Interview) is the bass player and vocalist for the punk band Sonic Youth, which she founded in New York with Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. Originally an installation artist and critic, she now writes the lyrics for the band, which deal with feminist issues such as rape, sexual harassment, anorexia and the beauty culture. She is credited with inspiring the 'Riot Grrl' movement in the late 1980s and produced Hole's first album Pretty on the Inside (1991). Matthew Higgs (Focus) is a British artist, writer and curator based in Oakland, California. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art Monthly, Afterall and in numerous exhibition catalogues. He is currently the Curator at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Author's Residence: Oakland (California, USA) For his Artist's Choice Marclay has selected The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France, by Swiss poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars (1[zasłonięte]887-19). Liked the artist, Cendrars worked across various disciplines; the chosen text was a collaborative artists' work with Sophie Tauber-Arp. The Artist's Writings includes a cut-up of key conversations the artist has published since 1991, specially created with the artist for this volume. Artist's Residence: New York