Sound effects
Seeing – and hearing – is believing with Christian Marclay's latest installation.

By Glen Helfand

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY SEEMS to have his fingers on the keyboard of contemporary life. His conceptual, pop music-referencing projects – which lend multiple layers of meaning to sounds and images in an age of overstimulating multimedia expression – have been popping up all over lately. His Guitar Drag is one of the most powerful pieces in the mournful "Rock My World: Recent Art and the Memory of Rock 'n' Roll" exhibition at California College of Arts and Crafts' Logan Galleries (through Sat/11); it's a 1999 videotape in which an amped electric guitar dangles from the back of a moving pickup truck. The resulting wails fill the gallery with an urgent noise that references process art as well as the recent Jasper, Texas, act of racially motivated violence. Fraenkel Gallery recently showed Marclay's more playful, early body of work: record covers sewn together or reconfigured into altogether new entities. Marclay is also included in the Whitney Biennial, where he shows a stage set with instruments altered beyond use – guitars with limp necks, a drum kit with stands fit for a giant.

While all of those pieces exude smarts and incisive humor, none is quite as sublime as Video Quartet, a brand-new, 13-minute, four-DVD projection commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of "Sampling/Christian Marclay," on view through July 28. It's a masterpiece of laptop sound and image collage, a joyous fusion of the sonic and the cinematic.

The concept of the work seems simple enough. Marclay collected thousands of Hollywood movie clips featuring images of hands on keyboards, horns, and violins, as well as men and women singing, dancing, and engaging in various other acts of making emotional or accidental noise. The unaltered snippets, impeccably choreographed by the artist using an off-the-shelf computer program, are projected on four abutted screens whose multidimensional composition offers major pleasures to ears and eyes.

An epic-feeling piece, it has a narrative quality that follows musical structures. A tune-up introduction segues into sections devoted to specific instruments – piano, violins, voice – and then the piece builds to a stunning climax of cacophonous crashes before winding down to a calmer conclusion. It's more than 10 minutes long, but most likely you'll sit through it more than once – there's so much to take in. As with a good pop song, it's hard to get enough. It helps that the four-screen format has an enthralling, super-CinemaScope quality. The massive pool of images, which include recognizable film fragments (Janet Leigh screaming in Psycho, the piano of The Piano sinking in the sea, Marilyn Monroe singing "No" in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), tap into a collective, cross-generational film consciousness, while the seamless collaging bumps this project up to the level of high art.

Throughout his career, Marclay has been interested in the constructed nature of how sound and image are combined. In particular, he seems to be intrigued by the way audiences accept the artifice of film sound tracks, which are made with various tools and tricks – an actor's voice being dubbed, the sound of a horse galloping being made by a Foley artist with coconut shells, John Williams's orchestral scores pumping up the family-style action.

Up and Out, a conceptually savvy film and sound piece that screened at SFMOMA last month (but it's almost as good in theory as it is in the experience), foregrounded this interest. In the 1998 work, Marclay shows Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 existential go-go classic, Blowup, a film concerned with the truthfulness of the image, only he replaces the audio with that of Brian De Palma's cheesy 1981 postmodern homage to Antonioni, Blow Out. Whereas the first firm deals with a fashion photographer who believes he's accidentally snapped a murder, the second follows John Travolta as a sound designer who records what sounds like an assassination. Marclay's gesture of merging the two is a bizarrely satisfying act of multitasking – the audience engages in a seriously post-postmodern 90 minutes as it takes in the original and the copy simultaneously. And while things don't always match, there are uncanny moments of synchronicity that resonate like a finely tuned violin.

So does Tape Fall, a simple and very effective 1989 Marclay installation shown concurrently with Video Quartet, in which sound is given physical dimensions. A reel-to-reel tape console is perched atop a high ladder, with a single, regularly replenished audio tape of the sound of gurgling water cascading to a mesmerizing, constantly growing "puddle" on the floor. It's the kind of meditative art that puts soul in the machine. Together with Video Quartet, it's the most universally satisfying, must-see, must-hear exhibition in town.

'Rock My World: Recent Art and the Memory of Rock 'n' Roll' is on view through Sat/11. Wed.-Thurs. and Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Tues. and Fri., 11 a.m.-8 p.m., California College of Arts and Crafts, Logan Galleries, 1111 Eighth St., S.F. (415) 551-9210. 'Sampling/Christian Marclay' is on view through June 28. Fri.-Tues., 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.-9 p.m., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., S.F. $10, $7 seniors, $6 students, free for 12 and under and members (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6-9 p.m.). (415) 357-4000.