Shuffle
Christian Marclay
New York: Aperture. Box and 75 cards. $29.95.

For more than 20 years, Christian Marclay has created work that straddles the worlds of visual art and music, and has received increasing recognition from cognoscenti in both disciplines; this spring, a survey of his visual art premiered at the Musée de la Musique in Paris. Like an off-kilter synesthete, he seems to "see" music and "hear" art, and his practice is indebted equally to Dadaists, downtown improv legends, Fluxus performers, and John Cage. His modus operandi might best be described as the suave marshalling of chance and circumstance (a phrase used by dancer Carolyn Brown to title her recent memoir of Cage and Merce Cunningham) into evocative objects and events.

Housed in a box bearing six lines of terse instruction, each of the 75 large-scale playing cards in Shuffle reproduces a photograph Marclay has taken of musical notation in a public place. Some are correctly drawn and conceivably playable on instruments; others are musical nonsense, graphic placeholders connoting "music." Shop windows, clothing items, manhole covers, a toilet paper roll, and a Mylar balloon all make appearances. Shuffle the deck, divvy up the cards, and play your hand; in Marclay's words, "Sounds may be generated or simply imagined." This is a game perhaps best enjoyed with close friends—like karaoke, it might leave you susceptible to embarrassing fun. Exposure to this visual oeuvre has its effects: Once, in London, I found myself walking out of my way in order to photograph a guitar and some oversize musical notation I had noticed in a second-floor shop window. As Marclay might say, awareness is everything.