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The art world is enjoying an extended fling with pop music--Fischerspooner and Lansing-Dreiden balance smart songcraft with multimedia presentations, while Black Dice fill galleries with squalls of feedback--and sound art is booming, most recently in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou's exhibition "Sons & Lumieres: A History of Sound in 20th Century Art." But few have done more to fuse fine art and audio culture than Christian Marclay. Since the late 1970s he has used elements of collage, sculpture, readymades, painting, photography, video, and installation, and done pioneering work in the field of experimental turntablism--which he developed in parallel to hip-hop's own rise in the early '80s--to render the history of recorded music as a vast, endlessly remixable archive full of unexpected harmonies and uncanny counterpoints.

In his latest project, Shake Rattle and Roll (fluxmix), the 50-year-old Marclay plunders the Walker Art Center's substantial collection of Fluxus objects, presenting a 16-channel audio- and video installation in which his white-gloved hands shake, rattle, and roll (and tap, thump, and thwack) dozens of items by George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and their peers. Along with Duchamp and John Cage, these artists are important influences for Marclay's own whimsical, meaning-rich work, and his multimedia mix tape fittingly rescues Fluxus's art of everyday life from secure storage and restores its dynamism. Rather than a didactic presentation of mute objects, Marclay's presentation brings Fluxus to life by highlighting its musical inclinations.

PHILIP SHERBURNE: Let's talk about your recent show, "Shake Rattle and Roll (fluxmix)."

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY: It started with this idea I had of doing a project with the Swiss National Collection, taking objects--from an antique chest to an old bicycle--that the government or the historical society deemed worth saving, and using them for their sound. But that project never happened. When the Walker invited me to be an artist in residence I still had this idea kicking around in the back of my mind. And then, when I found out they had a large Fluxus collection, it all made sense because Fluxus was all about doing things in a nontraditional way, reacting to the whole art system of creating collectable objects. They were more iconoclastic, trying to make fun of the whole process, so there's a lot of humor in it. At the same time, there's a delight in the strangeness of objects. I, of course, couldn't just do anything I wanted with them, I had to wear white gloves.

PS: They made you do that?

CM: Well, that's museum policy. The appropriate way of handling objects is with white gloves. So it became this magic show. And that playfulness was so much in tune with what Fluxus was all about. In some cases there are nonmusical objects that I use musically, and sometimes there are musical objects that I use differently from their proper function. These are the kind of spoofing, iconoclastic, and Dadaist gestures that Fluxus was all about. And to see these objects in a museum, protected--embalmed almost--made no sense. It was contrary to the initial objective of the artists. A lot of art objects end up like that. You can't touch them, even if they're objects that were made to be interacted with. And so it was about critiquing the institutionalization of the art object, but in a very playful and humorous way.

PS: I'm surprised to hear that you thought of this project before you had access to the Fluxus collection. So much of it seems tied up in Fluxus, and there's so much of Fluxus in your work in terms of sound, in terms of play, and in the recycling of everyday objects. The show feels like an art mix tape. You're taking these things and throwing them into a mix. It's curatorial, but it's a performative spin on curation.

CM: Creating an exhibition in a nonmuseological way has always been something I have been interested in. I did a project in 1995 in Geneva at the Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, which used everything in the collection that had anything to do with music. It's a historical museum filled with everything from antiquities to contemporary art, and I just selected anything that had to do with music to create these flea market-like installations. Then I did another installation at the Kunsthaus in Zurich where I was playing with the museum's collection. So, again, these shows are not didactic. They don't inform the viewer about the art object and its historical value; it's more about using the art objects like raw material in very playful ways, and it makes you look at the objects differently.

PS: When did you first become aware of the Fluxus movement?

CM: I discovered Fluxus in the mid-seventies when I was an art student in Geneva, Switzerland, through John Armleder and his group Ecart. This group of artists was working in sort of a post-Fluxus mode and restaging some of the performances by Fluxus artists. What struck me about these performances was that many had something to do with sound, but they were more about making fun of the classical music rituals and the traditional relationship with the audience. That early exposure to Fluxus was important in my development and was an influence on my later interests in performance art.

PS: What do you think about the current vogue for so-called sound art?

CM: I'd like to think it sort of came out of the whole performance-art movement. Maybe it started in 1958 with John Cage teaching at the New School, and it's just growing out of there through punk and hip-hop. The art world had embraced punk at some point, and now there's a need for sound again. The art world is always eager to find new blood and something else to stifle.

PS: All the major museums and galleries have shows devoted to it.

CM: Well, I think it's great that there is this interest in sound and music, but the overall art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented. We still think of museum galleries as 19th-century galleries, like "How do we hang this on the wall, how do we light it?" But nobody knows anything about sound--how you hang a speaker, how you EQ it to the room. There isn't that kind of knowledge and expertise within the museum world. More and more museums have a lounge-type listening room, but there are still a lot of changes that need to happen before the art world is ready to present sound as art. And, you know, it doesn't matter because there are so many ways for people to enjoy sound these days. Sound is so easily diffused, spread around through the Internet, downloaded to portable MP3 players and walkmans, you name it. Everything is so portable and so easy to share that you don't need an art institution to tell people what to listen to. I think it is in sound's nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and to go places where it's not supposed to go.

PS: I think sound is often best when it's unexpected in that sense. I heard "Amazing Grace" today in the subway, and I was really moved. I'm not religious or anything, but it was just one of those moments.

CM: Well, New York is such a source of unexpected visual and aural stimulation. It doesn't necessarily have to be art for it to touch or transport you. I mean, it is art, you know, an artist singing in the subway, but it doesn't have to be presented in a place where you have to go to get it.

PS: Most people know you for your work with records and with vinyl. Have you considered doing something about the download culture and digital distribution?

CM: Yeah, I would like to. I'm kind of low-tech, not very good with downloading, but what I like is how sound circulates and how you can produce things and put them on the Internet where it circulates and takes on a life of its own. It is an uncontrollable environment, which is very attractive.

PS: But you are such an object-oriented artist, and this new technology is all about dematerialization.

CM: The whole idea of it is fascinating, and I think that's a revolution in itself--just the fact that you don't really need these big vinyl records; you don't need a big radio with big knobs or all this heavy equipment. There's a speed and lightness to that world that is just fascinating and very liberating.

PS: Let's talk about djTRIO.

CM: djTRIO is always changing; it's a rotating trio. It's myself with two other DJs. It's very much about the idea of the DJ as an ensemble player rather than a soloist, which is how DJs usually are thought of.

PS: It's a very egotistical sort of position.