‘This is music without sound’: installation shot of Christian Marclay’s onomatopoeia animation at the White Cube, Bermondsey. Photograph: George Darrell/White Cube
The most exciting contemporary art show in town at the moment has to be Christian Marclay’s wonderful onomatopoeia at White Cube Bermondsey. It turns that enormous industrial warehouse into something like a metropolis, with a bustling main street that leads to an arthouse cinema, a gallery full of pictures and a concert hall where musicians will gather every weekend to conjure experimental sounds out of (among other things) a thousand glasses shelved around the space at the height of a convivial pub bar, each improvisation recorded and pressed in a portable vinyl factory for visitors to take home, to round off the pleasure. Marclay is expanding the very definition of what a show can be.
Images and sounds, and how they go together, turn out to be his theme. The show opens with a street of sounds – or, more properly, the sounds of the street – in the form of 11 video projections made on dawn walks through London’s East End on weekends, where yesterday’s empties huddle on the ground by bus stops, stand abandoned on windowsills or scatter in shards across the pavement. The artist, his hand-held camera loping along, coaxes a fragile soundtrack out of these glass vessels with a silver pen as he goes, so that the central avenue of the White Cube rings with strange music.
You fall in step, compelled by the pace of the films, only to find your shadow joining the throng before and after you so that the street now seems filled with strange figures too. Your presence, caught in the projector’s beams, multiplies the images just as your conversation ramifies the ambient sound. It is a mutual performance of sorts, and peculiarly vivid, as if one could enter and alter a film.
With the sound of glass in your head – tinkling, ringing, shattering, chinking, all those onomatopoeic words – you enter a gallery full of large high-chrome paintings where sound is represented in the form of letters: sploosh, squish, whupp! These graphic fragments of noise appear screenprinted in shadow fonts of all sorts, each representing the sound itself, and each pullulating on a richly painted surface so that each canvas appears to have some kind of extra dimension. Not quite prints, nor entirely paintings, these hybrids are quixotically effervescent. You read as you hear as you look.
Actions: Splaf Squish Splat (No.1), 2014.
Marclay, who was born in California in 1955, loves old US comics and some of these sounds are scissored straight from the pages of cartoons, while others appear to relate very precisely to the medium of painting itself. Plop, Splat, Splish, Glop, the sounds of paint spattering across a canvas invoke Jack the Dripper and the other action painters working the pigment round the surface. Marclay is bridging the gap between abstract expressionism and pop art.
Splooosh! A roiling Hokusai wave rises up in brush-swipes and frothy Benday dots out of Roy Lichtenstein. Blub blub blub… the phrase erupts in liquid bubbles as if the painting itself were sobbing. Splat is perfectly aimed, like a custard pie, at the centre of the canvas where it drips with the sticky raspberry drool of a melting ice-lolly.
Actions: Swoop Splosh Fwsh (No.2) 2013.
There is a strong wit at play in these fizzing pictures, with their homages to other image-makers. Best of all is Spurt Splat Thwump Splish where the word thwump hits a corner, crashing like Disney’s Tom into the side of the house as Jerry darts away laughing. The glassy letters seem to shatter like the cat’s teeth, tinkling one by one from his mouth.
Some of the musicians – including the London Sinfonietta – will perhaps go even further with these onomatopoeic sounds. Performances begin this weekend and Marclay has said that composer friends may be dropping by in the coming weeks; for many of his fans, Marclay is still first and foremost one of the DJs who pioneered scratching in the late 70s in New York clubs, long before digital editing became available and he started to produce the video-mashups for which he is more famous on the art gallery circuit.
World-famous, in fact, now that his magnum opus, The Clock, featuring clocks, watches and movie characters reacting to them in thousands of collaged snippets of film, has been shown in museums across four continents. That 24-hour marvel, somehow managing to find a clip for every minute, even the wee small hours, was synched to real time so that when Robert de Niro consulted his Rolex at 2.03pm it really was 2.03pm: the viewer was outside time and yet positioned within it, constantly reminded of its reality on screen.
The Clock took three years of studious discipline to make, not to mention the most refined calculations of timing. This show has such qualities too. There are quaint optical effects, as in the sheets of drinking songs framed behind dimpled bottle glass, the arrangements perfectly judged so that the right words swoon and stagger at exactly the right moments behind the distorting glass, words and music becoming comically woozy.
The crowning glory, however, is the animation gallery in which a lexicon of words – or sounds – from cartoons are collaged into one enormous all-together-now carnival of onomatopoeia. RUMBLE builds in shaking judders up the walls. SPPPIT explodes in sharp plosives. The letter S, sometimes twisting on itself to read Z, intermittently interrupted by the letter H, rains down in a coruscating son et lumiere that seems to change pace, direction and even temperature, like a monsoon. The visual and cognitive effects are stunning, and compulsively physical so that one cannot help making the sounds oneself, the final act of participation in a show that embraces us all in its openhearted creativity.
This is music without sound, a spectacle in which images generate the sound all around you – or rather, the sound you have made in your head.