‘Telephones’ by Christian Marclay presented in New York

Last Saturday 14 September, the book ‘Telephones’ by Christian Marclay was presented at 192 Books, New York. The event consisted in an screening, a conversation and a book signing with Christian Marclay and Wayne Koestenbaum.

‘Telephones’ is the latest artist’s book within the LiberArs series, 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.

Available here.