Christian Marclay: Crossfire is one of the recipients of The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2007, awarded 2008.

Crossfire, published in conjunction with Christian Marclay’s 2007 Hoxton Square exhibition of the same name, imaginatively reproduces the exhibition in paper form. Blacked out glossy pages house a selection of stills from the eponymous moving image work, followed by reproduction of Marclay’s onomatopoeic collages. An essay by curator and writer Tom Morton reconciles the works further through an investigation into what these images of violence – clean, interspliced, out of context – signal to the viewer.

Illustrated throughout with artwork reproductions and full-bleed details, Crossfire places the viewer in the centre of abstracted violence. Stills from the video installation comprising numerous gunfights, moving from page to page, serve to mirror the exhibition’s immersive quality. Morton’s essay considers how the onomatopoeic artworks take on the same cadence as the moving image; Marclay’s collages quite literally tear up their comic book referents. This, Morton sustains, creates a series of works in which the fragments take on more significance than any self-contained indication of sound.

Edited by Honey Luard
Text by Tom Morton
Designed by Laurent Benner
230 x 230 mm, softback
48 pages, illustrated throughout

ISBN 978-1-906072-01-8
Published by White Cube, 2007

Tom Morton is a curator, writer, and regular contributor to Frieze, ArtReview and Art Basel Stories. He has curated over 70 exhibitions, both as a curator at the Hayward Gallery, London, and Cubitt Gallery, London, and as an independent curator. His recent and forthcoming exhibitions include 'A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now' at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2025), and 'You Must Change Your Life' at Grimm, New York (2026).