“Christian Marclay: Doors,” on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, presents the US debut of Marclay’s Doors, 2022, a surreal video collage that leads viewers on a mazelike journey through hundreds of doors, assembled from hundreds of film clips. In celebration of the exhibition, Artforum revisits Sabine B. Vogel’s feature essay on Marclay’s art, “In Record Time,” published in the magazine’s May 1991 issue. Marclay’s 1990 work Incognita appeared on the issue’s cover.
 
Vogel’s essay focuses on the artist’s use of vinyl records as both medium and subject. In works like Incognita, Marclay “utilizes the vinyl disk not only to reproduce the musical information it contains but also to produce objects, installations, and new records. This process transcends the gap between materiality and music, between direct and indirect, and between ‘thingliness’ and immateriality,” she argues. “Production within Marclay’s oeuvre signifies transformation—of one object into another, of sounds into other sounds, of one set of relationships into a multiplicity of others.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan