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Christian Marclay brings his DJ skills and visual art to the Hammer.

Christian Marclay went to art school to learn how to be a sculptor. However, he left the Massachusetts College of Art in 1980 as one of the early pioneers of turntablism.

“Art school only offered classes on painting and sculpting, but I was interested in live art or performance art,” Marclay said. “There’s no reason for separating music and art. I try to connect audio with visual.”

Both Marclay’s audio and visual art have been on display in a career-spanning exhibition this summer at the Hammer Museum. In the latest of a series of concerts, Marclay will join Tom Recchion, a leading member of the Los Angeles experimental music scene, and New York underground DJ Toshio Kajiwara in djTrio on Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

“The main principle of djTrio is to present DJs in a group context – as members in a band rather than solo artists,” Marclay said. “To react and improvise to sounds created by other people is a great challenge.”

With no background in any musical instruments, Marclay turned to the turntable and made it an acceptable performance medium. However, his music has never been about beats or putting party people on the dance floor like hip-hop does. Akin to artwork, Marclay’s recordings demonstrate a focus on collages. The avant-garde DJ blends incongruent sounds together similar to the way he sowed tapes of Beatles works into a pillow in 1989’s “The Beatles.”

It should not come as a surprise that hip-hop or electronica DJs are finding a niche in visual art institutions like the Hammer. Since the 1960s, more experimental electronic artists, including John Cage and Philip Glass, have found art houses to be the best venue to showcase their works, which incorporate both sounds and visuals that wouldn’t quite fit in a more traditional concert setting.

In fact, early electronic music first sprouted up in visual art institutions like Valencia’s California Institute of the Arts and has been fed with the creativity of art departments like those at UCLA and USC.

“Places like CalArts made for these free-flowing, super-creative environments,” said Recchion. “There was a lot of cross-pollination between musicians and artists that has been key in experimental and electronic music.”

Recchion epitomizes this cross-pollination. Though his passion is experimental electronic music, he began at CalArts as a painter and found great success as a graphic artist, designing album covers for acts like REM and Captain Beefheart.

But while the importance of visuals in electronic music is partly imbedded in the style’s experimental roots, part of it also comes from the DJ’s need to entertain.

While rock bands or rappers can move around the stage to get the crowd going, the DJ is stuck behind his equipment, which makes eye-catching visuals a crucial tool for performers.

“It’s not that interesting watching a guy load up samples on his laptop,” said DJ Destiny, who runs a DJ entertainment group and teaches turntablism at UC Davis. “You’re not gonna be like, ‘Oh, he just double-clicked there!.’”

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