Christian Marclay was born in 1955 in San Rafael, California and was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied at the Ecole Superieure d’Art Visuel prior to attending the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. He has lived in New York since 1980. His work has been shown and performed at museums all over the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Saint Louis Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since 1979 he has, in addition to his visual arts practice, performed and recorded musical pieces by mixing altered records on multiple turntables. As a musician he has collaborated with many other performers including Butch Morris, John Zorn and Sonic Youth.

Michael Snow was born in 1929 in Toronto. He studied at the Ontario College of Art and had his first solo exhibition in 1957. Since then his work has appeared at exhibitions in every major art center in Europe and North America, and his films have been shown at retrospectives and film festivals in the United States, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Austria, and Italy. Snow has executed several prominent and popular public commissions that include Reflections, his photo mural at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, and The Audience, his sculptured frieze at Torontois SkyDome. He has received many awards and honors, including the Order of Canada, Chevalier de liordre des arts et lettres, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Los Angeles Film Criticsi Association Award, and honorary degrees from the University of Victoria, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and Brock University. He lives and works in Toronto.

This book, conceived by Anri Sala and Christine Macel, is first and foremost intended to be a research tool, and to provide the reader with an entry point to the issues that the artist was exploring in the process of creating Ravel Ravel Unravel. A range of different texts offer a variety of perspectives, which complement and enter into dialogue with each other in order to convey a complex reality: on the one hand, we have the historic statements by Maurice Ravel, Paul Wittgenstein and Marguerite Long (a famous pianist and friend of Ravel’s), texts taken from novels by Alexander Waugh (a Wittgenstein specialist) and Jean Echenoz (extracts from his novel Ravel), a text about John Cage and the Harvard anechoic chamber by Dana Samuel or about the left hand musical technique written by Hans Brofeldt, and finally essays by Laurent Pfister (on the notion of copyright in different countries), by Peter Szendy (a musicologist and philosopher) and Christine Macel (commissioner of the French Pavilion). Similarly, the illustrations stem from, and illustrate, various different aspects of the project: archive images and illustrations, preparatory drawings by the artist and images from the films he produced for the Biennale. Quentin Walesch’s design for the book coveys a sense of movement, of a discrepancy between the musical tempi: the pages are given a sense of rhythm by vertical black strips that run across the entire publication, the fore edge slides from the back to the front cover. This books is just as much an informative work as an artist’s book, and offers both an immersion into the eventful story of a piece of music and into Anri Sala’s mind as he conceives a work and develops its main themes and principles.