Christian Marclay | Telephones

Telephones, the latest artist’s book within the LiberArs series, has been created in collaboration with Swiss artist Christian Marclay.

This book is an adaptation of Christian Marclay’s film Telephones (1995), precursor to his following video collages, such as Video Quartet (2002), Crossfire (2007), The Clock (2010), 48 War Movies (2019), Subtitled (2019) and Doors (2022). Scenes were sampled from films rented at video stores in VHS format and edited into a seven-minute-long montage. The structure of the video was simple; the cut-up scenes follow the course of a phone conversation from beginning to end. It revealed a clash of technologies, behavioural patterns, sound effects and cultural references associated with audio and visual communication, expressed through various dramatic genres that characterise our collective memory of cinema.

Almost thirty years later, its relevance has grown, largely because it emerged at the very moment that mobile phones appeared in popular culture and digital technology overtook analogue film. This publication shows how a moving image work can translate into book format. The collage quality of the book allows readers to mix and match images, much like the original film. Telephones is part of the ongoing LiberArs series, and brings together stills of the visual track, a transcription of the soundtrack and a conversation between Christian Marclay and Yuval Etgar during the 2020 lockdown—befittingly, over the phone.