Christian Marclay: Cyanotypes

Cyanotypes documents six series of cyanotypes by artist, performer and composer Christian Marclay. In the course of his career Marclay has often repurposed older or defunct audio technologies as works of collage, sculpture, installation, photography, video and performance. Here he reclaims and combines two near-obsolete technologies at once—the audio cassette and the cyanotype. Invented in the 1840s, and commonly known as a “blueprint” because of its distinctive Prussian blue color, the cyanotype is created by a cameraless photographic process in which objects are placed directly onto a photosensitive surface, producing a silhouetted image similar to a photogram. Marclay’s cyanotypes, made in collaboration with Graphicstudio, record the abstract tangles made by cassette tapes unspooled onto the print surface, resulting in images and tones that equally evoke the paintings of Jackson Pollock and the monochromes of Yves Klein.