On October 19–22, 1989, composer and visual artist Christian Marclay collaborated with visual and multimedia artist Perry Hoberman for the premiere of No Salesman Will Call, a self-proclaimed “sound/image/crisis/performance” commissioned by The Kitchen. 

 

For No Salesman Will Call, Marclay and Hoberman assembled a complex arrangement of sound and image using multiple screens, a variety of projection devices, controllers, turntables, hundreds of phonograph records, mirrors, relays, speakers, videos and slides. Operating all of these components in real time within a structured improvisation, the artists turned the entire stage into an “instrument that they played.”

 

The performance used artifacts of pop-culture including advertisements, B-movies, pop songs and instructional records. The artists then broke down these artifacts and reorganized, remixed, and layered them into a ceaseless flow of momentarily glimpsed micro-worlds.