DJALCHEMI

Christian Marclay at Tate Modern

Here are a couple of grainy longshots taken with my so-last-year's-model camera phone at last night's Christian Marclay gig at the Tate Modern. The gig was tied into Marclay's Sounds of Christmas project, which is showing at the Tate until Christmas.

Marclay is another example of an artist who presents his collections as art: in this case, his collection of over 1,200 Christmas records, gleaned from charity shops over the years (though I spotted at least one Christmas record missing from the collection — perhaps beyond the pale of kitsch?).

Marclay is also a pioneer of remix culture, and likes to amplify the physicality of media and instruments to celebrate their distortion and 'corruption' — most famously in his Record Without a Cover (which was just that: ensuring that every copy was unique because it would be scratched in different ways) and his Guitar Drag video. So it was tempting, perhaps, to imagine that he should have embraced the fact that his sound system kept cutting out during his performance. Tempting but misleading, in the same way that it betrays a particular kind of small-mindedness to castigate a vegetarian for wearing leather, or an astrologer for not foreseeing something.

Christian Marclay next plays in London on 22 March 02005 at St Luke's, just three minutes from my door!