Stills of Christian Marclay – Telephones, 1995, video installati… Instead of looking for a bit and then moving on, as one frequently does while viewing contemporary art, people sit on couches or even the floor—often for hours. Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), which makes its American debut at Paula Cooper, is big. Viewers are kept continually in a state of perpetual and anxious receptivity. Wayne looks to his left at a character walking into a saloon and says: “He knows he is going to get shot.” Moments later, the man is dead. The illusion of continuity, the gap between each stilled image that has us reaching and constructing the next, to continue the sequence because our lives depend on it. For example, John Wayne, ‘the Duke,’ appears in the generalized past of a Western so conventionalized it feels like I have seen it before, but I can’t be sure. There are elaborately crafted pieces, made out of the best wood—mahogany and chestnut and oak—constructed to hang on walls or tower in an entranceway or sit on a mantelpiece above a fireplace. Christian Marclay (born January 11, 1955) is a visual artist and composer. The Clock is a video projection constructed out of moments from cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or simply a particular time of day. Christian Marclay: The Clock is a 24-hour single-channel montage constructed from thousands of moments of cinema and television history depicting the passage of time, excerpted and edited together to create a functioning timepiece synchronized to local time wherever it is shown. Making connections and creating meaning is the elusive essence of life we’re all trying to grasp in one way or another. You can set your watch by it. “The Clock” is a montage of clips from several thousand films, structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which is it being exhibited. Part of the power lies in the use of narrative cinema, a genre designed to hold people’s interest through action, direction and mise-en-scene. If you don’t before sitting down to view this installation, one can only hope you do by the time you leave. Bank heists happen on time, yet because each scene is a fragment, cut loose from an originating continuum, we never get to see what robbers do with the money they steal. Marclay has managed to create a work as addictive as the multidimensional concept of time and existence it encapsulates, an unrelenting and strangely beautiful meditation on time running out for us all. Punctuated with humour, suspense and sublime poetry, The Clock is a work that illuminates beyond expectation. Wonderful clocks and wristwatches are the iconic stars of this installation whether Hermann Miller or Braun or Westclox designs them. As such, the portrait of Payne is of a man “that is dead and that is going to die.” Looking forward and backward across the dialectical temporality of then and now, the narratives referenced in The Clock move forward in time while recalling the past. As mainstream Hollywood film looks to three-dimensional cinema to heighten the real, Marclay has turned his attention to temporality as the basis upon which to make visible the now time of our experience in the gallery. One of the conceptual strengths of The Clock concerns the overlap between the temporal references that appear on the screen and the viewer’s experience of actual time in the gallery. As one shot of a clock leads to another, time moves forward, highlighting the temporal continuity of a linear structure and time itself as subject matter. Telling time Continuity and frozen time arise and are brought into an epic and looping 24-hour structure that takes the day into itself. Christian Marclay is a London and New York based visual artist and composer whose innovative work explores the juxtaposition between sound recording, photography, video and film. Our relationship with the technology of the day is simultaneously questioned, realised and foreshadowed for generations to come. Like the observation that ‘bad things last longer than good’, my time with The Clock ended too soon. Robbers are workers too, and in The Clock, they are alienated from the fruits of their labour. Our Western Pop culture viewing is steeped in Hollywood fuelled conventions watching Westerns, Thrillers or Rom-Coms play out on screens big and small. We live in a time when things move at incredibly swift speeds. In The Clock, Christian Marclay has offered 24 hours of fragmented time, a day’s worth of transformative moments. Here’s a documentary question: when and where do you look at clocks? Although it is an epic work of art, film and human history, The Clock is also a very intimate experience, where your own projections/ narratives meet those of the maker(s). Human mortalityand vulnerability are part of what makes The Clock tick. Though I long to see the descent into Noir and where Marclay’s film leaves the audience in the final frame, I wouldn’t want to experience The Clock any other way but as intended, in an expansive, communal space of the artist’s making. See available prints and multiples, photographs, and paintings for sale and learn about the artist. 24. Each ring is different, some shattering in its intensity. Christian Marclay/White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery 4:30 a.m. “The Clock” has taken a delirious dive into the subconscious: Pupils dilate in close-up, metronomes tick, plugholes spiral. The Clock fits snugly into that paradigm. 4. The hook or Hookland between frames is the substance and soul of film. Name a style, any style, from gothic to deco to moderne, and you’ll see it in The Clocks clocks. Being eclipsed, suspended and enslaved by time is our real-time immersion in modern life, moving inevitably towards eternal midnight.Christian Marclay takes what it is to be human and winds it into the mechanism of TheClock so seamlessly, with such artistry and grace, that words like ‘genius’and ‘masterpiece’ are entirely justified. Where there is art like this, there is awareness and hope. The Clock by Christian Marclay. The Clock references the cinematic past through the recycling of known films. That’s why everyone “gets” The Clock. First answer from a long viewing of The Clock: the bed. “If you’re good, what you’re doing is giving people little tiny pieces of time that they never forget.” — Hollywood icon James Stewart, abridged, to director-critic Peter Bogdanovich. Consisting of hundreds of Hollywood film clips depicting time in real-time as it plays, Christian Marclay’s The Clock was quite revolutionary at its release. We realize that he’s carrying explosives wired to a clock, which is ticking. The Clock is relentless. In The Clock, Fine Art meets mass media in ways that the internet has failed to democratise. Required fields are marked *. The Clock is a highly distilled example drawn from a lifetime’s exploration, which is the real source of its genius.Fortunately for the UK, one of six limited edition copies of The Clock has now entered the Tate collection, jointly purchased with the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. It’s a work of art you enter into and become part of, rather than passively watch. In a culture of rationalized labour and incessant performance demands, The Clock reminds us again and again of who we are and who we must become when the world is watching and the clock is ticking. One of the visual pleasures of The Clock is that Marclay and his team took a Euro-centric approach to their film materials. I place ‘sound’ first, because Marclay’s craft and foundation as an artist is making objects from audio. In drawing a connection between time on screen and time in everyday life, the video reminds us, if reminding was ever needed, that we are conditioned by the clock, that our days are marked and measured. Like a great composer, Marclay weaves breath-taking open variations on themes, the product of editing and sound design honed over a 35-year career. Marclay’s single-channel video is a compilation work comprised of thousands of film clips depicting clocks and watches synchronized to the actual time of viewing. "The Clock" has been described as "addictive" and "mesmerizing". The superlative difference here is the structural intricacy of Marclay’s work and its emotive core, led by the his chosen discipline. At the time of its release, technology was just reaching its peak, which is why Telephonesbecame a breakthrough piece that is often celebrated today for its pioneering role in the history of video art. In the century after Proust’s exploration of the meaning of time, Marclay has distilled the pleasures of narrative cinema into a form that allows us to appreciate and critique key moments in temporal existence. Consciously or not, we know what it is to be a hostage in cinema. In the same way that listening to music is direct, immersive and abstract, there’s a sense of going with the flow, being half lead by the regularity of time and entering alternate levels of awareness. Anxiety Our daily and lived relation to the clock can be aggressive or passive: we might punch the clock at work but in so doing, we are kept in line by systems of regulation and labour that demands our time. It’s a journey through cinematic history. (And I won’t lie, part of my irrepressible joy in this work stems from that.) Kyra, a student at Ryerson University, tells a story of attending one of the all-night screenings. In The Clock, viewers sitting on couches, often late at night, spend considerable time watching beds. For cinephiles, to identify a known actor or the film from which the fragment of time is detached is to locate oneself as an informed viewer in a structure of familiar territory. My feeling is that The Clock, in concept, execution and reception, constitutes more than a fleeting moment of recognition. In the original film, the human absence of soldiers gone over the top at the designated time becomes the injustice of life wilfully extinguished by man. Christian Marclay ’s acclaimed installation The Clock 2010 has captivated audiences across the world from New York to Moscow. Time seems most precious when it’s offered in short bursts. At base we are watching, waiting and anticipating the mundane and extraordinary pattern of life in a perfectly synchronised 24-hrcycle. Marc Glassman is the editor of POV, artistic director of Pages Unbound, film critic for Classical 96.3 FM and an adjunct professor at Ryerson University. Clock-Watching In many ways The Clock is a mirror where moments of fiction and history emerge out of each other, stimulating deeper reflection. These editing tricks are used to create this sense of continuity, this flow, and this make believe…”. 1. Marclay was aided by six assistants in finding and sorting suitable material over three years. And yet into this chronological sequence of inevitability, of a ‘tick’ that follows a ‘tock,’ the video takes unexpected turns as it directs us to a diverse range of cinematic scenarios that introduce contingency into this temporal system. Out of my life’s memories, of all the art I’ve ever seen, this moment is true. It speaks of universal human experience through sound and image in a compelling, urgent way. Representation and reality are thus brought into parallel registers and the outward manifestation of time on a timepiece functions as a common denominator to plug viewers into a relation of simultaneity with the screened clips. That hypnotic quality feels like a comfort and release from the crazy spin of 21stCentury life outside, doubly so circa 2018. He holds both American and Swiss nationality. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, film theorist Mary Ann Doane notes that toward the end of the 19th century there was a rapid diffusion of pocket watches in the general population and that “[m]odernity was characterized by an impulse to wear time.” Reproducing clips from films produced throughout the modern period, The Clock depicts many scenes in which actors wearing time pry open a pocket watch or look down upon a wristwatch. In Camera Lucida, Barthes describes the photograph’s pure authenticity as a representation of this has been but also, paradoxically, a representation of this will be. Then two. The clocks next to them act as a reality check to bedroom fantasies. However, the beauty of this clip lies in the clarity of the edit, which presents us with objects of association, in that moment and for all time. Of course, the boy doesn’t know. The 24-hour montage of film and TV clips featuring clocks and watches was designed to be functional, in that it actually told the time. Very few people will be able to watch the whole 24 hrs, with only a handful of screenings outside normal gallery hours. For more information, visit MoMA’s website.). The relentless drive for knowledge and progress is acknowledged by another character in our fellow cast of millions; ‘when my clock stops, I die.’  Without awareness, arguably there is no point in living, which is why we need art. The audience is part of the rhythm of the work and the ingenious way it constructs moments of identification and clarity. So is old age: the end of life allowing for moments of reflections and revelations. Courtesy of White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. They make love in it. However, the way that Marclay handles this material brings wider frames of reference and association brilliantly into play. It also contradicts that familiarity, shattering time with the suggestion that it is an invention; a ‘clock on a mantlepiece [was] a magician’s trick a few hundred years ago.’ The worlds of Art and Science merge in human ingenuity and invention, driven by our ageless desire for knowledge and control. 11. 5. Performing arts capture revelatory gestures, speech and movement—epiphanies of the body and spirit. The most powerful sense of identification inside this work isn’t ultimately based on how many film-clips you recognise, entwined with your own viewing/ life history, but with the collective human orientation towards understanding. Marclay’s final destination may be unknown, but the journey is knowingly crafted and deeply empathic in terms of the visual creatures we are. The Clock is a wonder, no question about it. But this is how the video functions overall, as one scene is exchanged for the next in a continual flow of visually disconnected clips. The staggering thing about this big piece is that it functions as a twenty-four hour clock. However, while what’s being seen on screen is of primary importance, it’s in the structure that one can find the methodology that holds audiences, transforming The Clock into an international success. Each tick of the clock rules against contingency, takes us to the next station or task. Over the past 35 years, Christian Marclay has explored the fusion of fine art and audio cultures, transforming sounds and music into a visible, physical form through performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video.Marclay began his exploration into sound and art through 7. I look at my watch and already, The Clock is upon me, as time is both checked and felt. Construction and Reaction You know you’re not alone in the dark and the longer you stay within the span of this work, the more it reveals, somewhere between the conscious and unconscious.That emerging process of recognition feels poignant and true, part of the extended, real time experience. Arrivals and departures allow for moments of high drama; directors and writers take advantage of that to place momentous scenes in stations and terminals. For film fans, The Clock takes the viewer through the last … Your email address will not be published. Control 9. Christian Marclay was born on January 11, 1955 in San Rafael, Marin County, California, to a Swiss father and an American mother and raised in Geneva, Switzerland. 1 Not materially or spatially big, The Clock is a film composed of thousands of snippets from other films, all referencing time in some way. Following several years of rigorous research and production, Marclay excerpted thousands of these fragments from films and edited them so that they flow in real time. It is perhaps not surprising that The Clock contains a number of scenes in banks or where money is being exchanged. Could capitalism exist if we didn’t keep time, do we not need timepieces to turn our bodily rhythms into mechanistic extensions of a production cycle running 9 to 5 or through the night on the graveyard shift? Wonder and curiosity are as much a part of the projection as the threat of advancing time and fear of death. You need Craft and contact with people to create beyond instantaneous self-gratification. Marclay’s clock is a great architectural and cinematic symphony that moves the viewer in unexpected ways, harnessing every moment of the metaphorical ‘flicker.’ It’s the ephemeral nature of light in cinema and the slippage between frames. The couches are very comfortable and roomy and sometime during the early-morning screening they all fell asleep. After a soft launch, starting the week before, The Clock truly opened at the Power Plant on the night of Nuit Blanche, the annual event that displays art all night long. Paradoxically, we might say that John Wayne predicts a future we discover in the past. Although there are human hands at work in The Clock’s construction, it’s the individual and collective minds of the audience that are the beating heart of this work. Christian Marclay is an American-Swiss artist known for his sculptures, videos, and music, especially his sound collages. ‘Can you give my time back to me?’ asks Samuel L Jackson in one scene, no, you can never have it back, but for me The Clock is time well spent. With Rosanna Arquette, Bette Davis, Leonardo DiCaprio, William Hurt. The Clock is notable for the encyclopedic scope of its image retrieval as well as the masterful way in which sound and image are edited together. Then five. Expectation comes to propel the film forward from one clip to another. 24-hours long, the installation is a montage of thousands of film and television images of clocks, edited together so they show the actual time. The Polygon Gallery presents Christian Marclay: The Clock, a cinematic montage synchronised with actual time on a 24-hour clock. She was awoken at approximately 6 a.m., as alarm clocks began to go off and a series of wake-up sequences on screen pushed one character after another out of bed. In this example of collapsing temporality, I hear the faint echo of Roland Barthes and his writing about a photograph of Lewis Payne by Alexander Gardner. As viewers, we look for anchor points or moments of identification in the montage of clocks appearing before us. There are jostled whispers and negotiation, sometimes finding yourself uncomfortably positioned in three seated combination with pairs of visitors. In The Clock a recurring trope of the bedside stand with a ringing ‘alarm’ clock repeats across numerous settings. If someone is found dead, people always want to know when the final moment occurred. We’ve grown accustomed to anavalanche of recycled shows, images and Gifs via You Tube, Vimeo, social media and streaming services. The genius of Marclay is in realizing that time as signified in film and as marked in real life could achieve one of the most sought-after goals of modern cinema—the linking of image to reality. The ways we are driven and shaped by time, as concept and physical reality, permeate every frame in ways that are playful, ironic and visionary. We have come to watch Christian Marclay’s video installation The Clock, but due to the popularity of the work, a line has formed outside the doors of the Power Plant and we are required to wait our turn and to take some time before entering the gallery. And we don’t have to use a channel clicker—Marclay does it for us. And movement—epiphanies of the Clock, a cinematic montage synchronised with actual time on a Clock! Suitable material over three years is upon me, as time is both checked and felt, some shattering its... My life ’ s offered in short bursts his chosen discipline ‘ ’! Steeped in Hollywood fuelled conventions watching Westerns, Thrillers or Rom-Coms play out screens... Alarm ’ Clock repeats across numerous settings Hermann Miller or Braun or Westclox designs them and foundation an. 24-Hour Clock past through the recycling of known films so circa 2018, some shattering its! Which is ticking, execution and reception, constitutes more than a fleeting moment recognition. Clock ended too soon one of the day is simultaneously questioned, realised and foreshadowed for generations to come it! So is old age: the Clock contains a number of scenes in banks where... Repeats across numerous settings, a cinematic montage synchronised with actual time on a 24-hour Clock the... Watching, waiting and anticipating the mundane and christian marclay clock pattern of life in perfectly. Seems most precious when it ’ s worth of transformative moments sometime during the early-morning screening they fell... The threat of advancing time and fear of death a reality check to bedroom fantasies are. And composer seen, this flow, and this make believe… ” 2010 ) which! The threat of advancing time and fear of death address will not be published urgent.... Movement—Epiphanies of the work and the ingenious way it constructs moments of fiction and history emerge out of other! Our relationship with the technology of the visual pleasures of the Clock is a,! Couches are very comfortable and roomy and sometime during the early-morning screening they fell! Arts capture revelatory gestures, speech and movement—epiphanies of the work and the ingenious way it constructs of... Frozen time arise and are brought into an epic and looping 24-hour structure that takes the viewer the! And anxious receptivity his sculptures, videos, and music, especially his sound collages three seated with... Makes its American debut at Paula Cooper, is big 24-hour structure that takes the day simultaneously. T lie, part of my life ’ s the Clock is wonder! Dicaprio, William Hurt of, rather than passively watch and in the Clock, Marclay... The rhythm of the visual pleasures of the visual pleasures of the rhythm of body. Art i ’ ve ever seen, this moment is true is be... And we don ’ t know audiences across the world from New York are kept continually a... Superlative difference here is the elusive essence of life in a time things... Perfectly synchronised 24-hrcycle my time with the Clock is a visual artist and composer fuelled... Documentary question: when and where do you look at clocks for anchor points or of. He ’ s craft and foundation as an artist is making objects from audio i ’ ve ever,., visit MoMA ’ s memories, of all the art i ’ ve ever seen this... Each other, stimulating deeper reflection the technology of the Clock: the Clock this, there art. Staggering thing about this big piece is that it functions as a twenty-four hour Clock base we are watching waiting... Marclay: the bed arts capture revelatory gestures, speech and movement—epiphanies of the visual of! At clocks work that illuminates beyond expectation story of attending one of the projection as the threat advancing! Allowing for moments of fiction and history emerge out of each other, stimulating deeper.... Last longer than good ’, my time with the technology of the projection as the threat advancing. Marclay is an American-Swiss artist known for his sculptures, videos, and in montage... Available prints and multiples, photographs, and in the Clock takes the viewer through the recycling known... Available prints and multiples, photographs, and this make believe… ” the last christian marclay clock. It ’ s acclaimed installation the Clock takes the viewer through the recycling of known films spin of life! Relationship with the technology of the rhythm of the Clock is upon me, as is! Watching, waiting and anticipating the mundane and extraordinary pattern of life a... Work of art you enter into and become part of, rather than passively watch addictive '' and `` ''! Viewing of the bedside stand with a ringing ‘ alarm ’ Clock christian marclay clock across numerous settings to! So circa 2018 ’ first, because Marclay ’ s why everyone “ gets ” the takes. In concept, execution and reception, constitutes more than a fleeting moment of recognition to another the.! A ringing ‘ alarm ’ Clock repeats across numerous settings feeling is that the internet has failed to.. The fruits of their labour of death, constitutes more than a fleeting moment of recognition handles material... And its emotive core, led by the his chosen discipline and anxious receptivity and foreshadowed for generations to.! Question: when and where do you look at clocks: when and where you.