NEW YORK.- The Museum of Modern Art presents Christian Marclay: Graffiti Composition, a performance of a musical score by Christian Marclay, on September 13, at 6:30 p.m. in The Roy and Niuta Titus 1 Theater. The performance is offered in conjunction with Out of Time: A Contemporary View (August 30, 2006-April 9, 2007), an exhibition of works from the collection that investigates the variety of ways that contemporary artists have expressed the experience of time in their work.

Marclay’s score Graffiti Compositions (2002), a portfolio in the Museum’s collection, is on view in Out of Time. In 1996 the artist plastered more than 5,000 blank musical notation sheets in public places throughout Berlin during a month-long sound festival, thus randomly enabling the public to fill them freely with musical notations, scribblings, or anything else. Marclay photographed the graffitied sheets, selected 150 from the group, and compiled them into a portfolio that is meant to be used by musicians to perform. Graffiti Composition has been interpreted by a variety of musical ensembles in the last few years, including at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2001, the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans in 2002, and the Barbican Centre, London, in 2005. For this one-time performance, composer/producer/sound artist Elliott Sharp leads a musical ensemble comprising five renowned guitar players-Melvin Gibbs, Mary Halvorson, Lee Ranaldo, Vernon Reid, and Sharp-who will interpret the musical score.

Performance is a time-based ephemeral medium that complements the theme of temporality explored in Out of Time. Performance art, due to its very ephemerality, offers the most extreme example of an art that is quintessentially about time and memory-an art whose substance is time, and that disappears with time. Graffiti Composition relates to the ideas of repetition and temporality examined in the collection installation.

Christian Marclay (American, b. 1955) is well known for his work in a wide range of media, including sculpture, video, collage, prints, and performance. For more than 20 years, Marclay has been engaged in an exploration of the the visual and the audible, and creates work in which these two distinct sensibilities enrich and challenge each other. Marclay has pioneered an experimental use of records and turntables in performances since the 1970s, performing alone and in collaboration with musicians, including guitarist Elliott Sharp, composer John Zorn, and the band

Sonic Youth, among many others. His earliest performances featured the artist mixing records on multiple turntables in his band, named The Bachelors, even in homage to Marcel Duchamp. Marclay is informed as much by Duchamp as by John Cage, Vito Acconci, the Sex Pistols, the happenings of the Fluxus group, and Laurie Anderson. Like Cage, Marclay strives in his performances to open the process of composition to external influences and chance.

Elliott Sharp leads the musical projects Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane. Sharp tours extensively throughout the world as a composer-in-residence, as a soloist with his own projects and ensembles, as an installation artist, and as part of various collaborations performing at festivals, museums, theatres, galleries, and clubs. He has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and biological metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His compositions have been performed by the Symphony of the Hessischer Rundfunk, The Ensemble Modern, Continuum, Kronos Quartet, Ensemble Resonanz, and Zeitkratzer and collaborators have included singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, playwright Dael Orlandersmith, cello innovator Frances-Marie Uitti, writers Jack Womack and Lucius Shepard; musicians Hubert Sumlin, Sonny Sharrock, Jack deJohnette, and Oliver Lake. Sharp's composition "EmPyre" will premiere at the 2006 Venice Bienale.

Bassist Melvin Gibbs has worked with artists such as the guitarist Sonny Sharrock and Arto Lindsay's avant-pop group the Ambitious Lovers, was a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition with his band Eye, and was nominated for a Grammy award for songwriting as a member of the Henry Rollins Band. He formed the band Harriet Tubman with guitarist/singer Brandon Ross and drummer J.T. Lewis, playing at major European jazz festivals and recording two albums. As a bassist Gibbs has performed with a wide variety of artists including David Byrne, Caetano Veloso and Marisa Monte, Vitamin C, Will Downing, Femi Kuti), and Dead Prez.

Guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson has performed regularly in New York with various groups and toured Europe and the U.S. with the Anthony Braxton Quintet and Trevor Dunn's Trio-Convulsant. Her current projects include the avant-rock band People and a chamber music duo with violist Jessica Pavone. She also plays in ensembles led by Taylor Ho Bynum, Ted Reichman, Peter Evans, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jason Cady, Matthew Welch, Brian Chase and Curtis Hasselbring.

Lee Ranaldo is an original member of the group Sonic Youth, formed in 1981 in New York City, with whom he has performed around the world and has recorded albums, including the 2006 album Ripped. Recent solo recordings include The Celestial Answer (with William Hooker), Tonic December 30 2004 (with Birchville Cat Motel), and Music for Stage and Screen. A three-CD metal boxed set by Text of Light-an improvisational group that includes Christian Marclay, Alan Licht, William Hooker, and others, will be released this fall. His works of art have been shown at the Mercer Union, Toronto; Gigantic Art Space, NYC; Hayward Gallery, London; The Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Vienna Kunsthalle.

Guitarist, composer, and producer Vernon Reid is best known for leading the rock group Living Colour, which has sold over four million records worldwide and has won numerous awards, including two Grammy awards and two MTV Music Video awards. Reid has appeared as a guest guitarist on the recordings of Jack DeJohnette, Public Enemy, B.B. King, Arto Lindsay, The Ramones, Mariah Carey, Mick Jagger, Tracy Chapman, Carlos Santana and others. He is also a composer for film, television, and dance, including "Here," a piece for Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, which premiered at the Next Wave Festival at BAM in November 1994, and compositions for choreographers Ralph Lemon and Donald Byrd. Reid has also produced two Grammy nominated albums: Papa by the African singer Salif Keita and Memphis Blood: The Sun Studio Sessions by James “Blood” Ulmer. His album with Masque (his instrumental group), entitled Own True Self, was released earlier this year on Favored Nations records.

Tickets for Christian Marclay: Graffiti Composition are $10 for adults; $8 for senior citizens, 65 years and over with I.D.; and $5 for full-time students with current I.D., and may be purchased the Museum lobby information desk and at the Film and Media desk, or online at www.moma.org/thinkmodern.