That ringing in your ears isn’t a hallucination. It’s merely one of mixed-media artist Christian Marclay’s many appropriations. In this instance it’s a collage of phone conversations. His 1995 single-channel video “Telephones” excises clips of phone conversations in movies and rearranges them into a different montage. The narrative is edited in the usual progression—somebody dials a phone, another phone rings, somebody answers and says “Hello,” somebody listens, somebody says “Goodbye,” the phone is hung up—but over this seven-minute-and-15-second loop each shot sequence is broken up and spread out. In other words, when Marclay uses phone conversations involving James Stewart from Vertigo, the sequence doesn’t progress from dialing to hang up succinctly in the usual fashion. Disrupting the continuity of the sequence are clips from other movies, such that you may watch a whole series of stars—Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, etc.—dial a phone before you see a phone from Vertigo ring and get answered. “Telephones” is a simple but effective way of both pointing out the conventional film language of a phone conversation and subverting it, the sort of combination of low-tech/high-concept insouciance that permeates Marclay’s various works.

It’s also the mirthful spirit running through Goya Contemporary’s Fusion, a three-artist show of various recontextualizers. Marclay favors toying with the pathway connecting the eye and ear. Swiss artist Pia Fries works with various media and printing processes for her two-dimensional panels, while German sculptor Wilhelm Mundt makes industrial waste into shiny objects.

Really shiny objects. Mundt’s two pieces here—”Trashstone 494” and “Trashstone 500”—are about the size and shape of ordinary trailside boulders you might encounter while hiking around the Grand Canyon. They’re oblong and not perfect spheres or ovoids, with some edges more worn from wear than others. Only they’re brightly colored—“500” an eggshell white and “494” high-visibility yellow. At some of their edges the outer layer of color appears to have been sanded down, revealing rings of black and white underneath. It looks like what happens if you cover a sheet of paper with differently colored wax crayons, color over them with black, and then scrape off areas of black with a pair of safety scissors: a smear of other hues hiding just below the surface.

Mundt began making these Trashstones in the late 1980s and early ’90s, for which an accumulation of studio debris and personal effects are amassed, covered in fiberglass, and then smoothed and polished. Their gentle curves and seated blobbiness fall someplace between Henry Moore’s casual modernism, Robert Rauschenberg’s autobiographical assemblages, and Franz West’s rakish wit—though with none of the performative challenge. Looking at them, you’re not sure if you’re supposed to be seduced by their reflective surfaces, as shiny as a car on a showroom floor, or be a little put off that you’re feeling a little curious about an artist’s polished rubbish.

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