Decades before Deadmau5 or Marshmello ever donned a mascot head on stage, Christian Marclay was exploring how music and video could create a multi-sensory art experience.

As a visiting student at Cooper Union, Marclay fell in love with the club scene that dominated New York in the late ‘70s. As an art student, he understood DJ performances in a different way. Rather than just a way to play music to a crowd, Marclay discovered the explosive possibilities that lie in the relationship between the audio and visual arts. Marclay was definitely not one to get on stage and just hit play, though. But when a DJ takes inspiration from Joseph Beuys, things are bound to get weird.

In art school, Marclay gravitated toward the work of Marcel Duchamp. Marclay was particularly inspired by Duchamp’s use of found objects, which Marclay ingeniously incorporated into his own musical and artistic practices. An early proponent of using a turntable as an instrument, Marclay differed from the burgeoning hip hop scene in a unique way. Unlike artists like Grandmaster Flash who used turntables to bridge different songs together to create new tunes, Marclay mined records for unique sounds that he could pull out and use in new ways. In doing so, Marclay brought a Dada sensibility to his artistic practice, calling his earliest musical performances a “theater of found sound.”

Although Marclay may have first made his mark in music, he never lost his fine art roots. Marclay also makes paintings, video art, and cyanotypes. However, music is never too far off. Marclay’s paintings often use onomatopoeias to incorporate the idea of sound, and even his cyanotypes evoke music by way of featuring white outlines of cassettes and tape on the medium’s ghostly blue backgrounds. He is best known for his 2010 work The Clock, a twenty-four hour long artwork that tells time through audio and visuals and stole the Golden Lion, the highest prize awarded to film, at the 2011 Venice Biennale.