Now Playing: Marclay. Cecilia Andersson

Christian Marclay
Barbican Art Gallery, London
From February 17th till May 2nd 2005

It was a misunderstanding. I had been meant to interview Christian Marclay over the telephone. I would call him from Liverpool at 3pm, and he would pick up in New York at 10am. I was excited and had my first question prepared; it was about his obsession with telephones. But when at 3pm, he picked up the phone, he didn’t want to be interviewed. He had informed the press person at the Barbican in London about this, only she hadn’t told me. So we spoke briefly and hung up. But I forgot to ask him about his obsession with the telephone. At the Barbican where a major retrospective of his work is currently on display, 750 plaster casts of telephone receivers are strewn out on the floor in what is reminiscent of a mass grave. The cordless white receivers are stripped of their connections and now lie in silent tribute to numerous past conversations. Boneyard (1990) is only one of the works in the exhibition where telephones appear as a recurrent theme.