For more than 40 years, Swiss American artist and composer Christian Marclay has created work spanning multiple media, including video, collage, performance, and sculpture, often exploring the intersections between image and sound with a political edge. Considered one of the founders of “turntablism,” he is among the first artists to use turntables and fragmented vinyl records to transform music into visual forms. Telephones, 1995, is a playful video work about social interactions via the telephone, tracing the performative nature of human behavior that surrounds the technology—dialing, picking up the phone, and then hanging up. The video takes viewers through the actions and highlights an aspect of communication often taken for granted.

–Gayle Berens, from the Glenstone Field Guide