TitleTelephones
Artist
Christian Marclay
(b. 1955)
Date1995
MediumVideo, color, sound
DimensionsRun time: 7:30 minutes
SubmissionNA diploma presentation
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number2014.10
Label TextTelephones is a seven-minute video composed of clips taken from classic Hollywood films of actors using telephones - Michael Keaton, Humphrey Bogart, Tom Hanks, Katharine Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg, and others - shot in domestic settings, the workplace, and public telephone booths. Conjuring many of the increasingly obsolete accoutrements of phone technology, like the rotary dial, push button keypad, the phone receiver, and its cradle, Marclay’s video serves as an archive of the specific social cues associated with outmoded phone technology. The soundtrack comprises trilling telephone rings, receivers being picked up, greetings, brief verbal exchanges, goodbyes, and hanging up, and is intercut with views of telephones and their users. Emphasizing the importance of sound in this work, Marclay noted in a 1997 interview, “Absence is a void to be filled with one’s own stories …. Silence is the negative space that defines sound.”
