The hot ticket in Chelsea earlier this winter was The Clock, a 24-hour video installation by Christian Marclay. A piece of appropriation art, The Clock unfolds in real time, a 24-hour collage of clips from thousands upon thousands of films and videos in which clocks and watches tick off the time and characters inquire about, announce, or otherwise fret over the time of day.
It’s a rich, multi-layered concoction. The Clock is, first and foremost, a clock – a sleight-of-hand construction that functions perfectly as a timepiece. Part of the delight in watching this epic is that you can set your watch by it: when the on-screen clock says 1:15, it’s synced to your time. I know how long I watched because we arrived just before that 1:15 mark and, when we decided to move on, it was 2:44 on screen.
But The Clock is more than a piece of stage magic. People were lining up, in frigid February weather, to see this high-concept work because it is mesmerizing on just about any level.
If you want your artwork brainy, The Clock is for you: a meditation on the history of film and the way it pervades our lives, it is deconstructs cinematic time. The conventions of filmmaking that have been developed since its introduction in the late 19th century to create the illusion of temporal logic, of a narrative unfolding along coherent lines. Today, most movies skip lightly over time, eliding and compressing narrative time; years pass in seconds and the past flashes back in expository loops.
The Clock gives the lie to that experience and reveals film at its most essential: as the time-defined medium.
The first films to be publicly projected were snippets, none longer than 49 seconds, of “real life.” The very first, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, depicts just that, a stream of workers, mostly women, poring out of the factory gates at the end of the work day. At its public debut in 1895, this proto-documentary film was joined by nine others, equally remarkable for their seemingly unremarkable subject matter: a father feeding a baby, a man jumping onto a blanket, a street scene in Lyon. (You can watch them all here.) Lumieres’ proto-documentaries didn’t bother with narrative. What fascinated them and their audiences was the recording of movement in real time, what a contemporary observer called, “a life surging.” These little vignettes are, in a way, film in its purest manifestation.
Not long after those first films of commonplace scenes appeared, the movie industry was born, and filmmakers created a new vocabulary for story-telling, chopping up and rearranging snippets of filmed time at will. If you think about it, they effectively invented a new experience of time, one that spools out more like time in a dream than time in life.
In The Clock, Marclay asks us to think hard about cinematic time, using the premier device of narrative filmmaking – editing – to explicitly restore time as the central preoccupation of the medium. That he does so without boring the socks off his audience is a mark of his brilliance. Watching The Clock is an exercise in split consciousness: you are certainly aware of the way that film manipulates time, but you also become immersed in the mini-narratives Marclay has embedded in the piece.
Most of what’s been written about the piece focused on the ubiquity of clocks – wristwatches, clock towers, cuckoo clocks, alarm clocks, or simply people declaring the time. If that’s all Marclay had done, The Clock would have been another high-concept, high-tedium piece of conceptual art unlikely to be pulling in SRO audiences.
What’s spellbinding about The Clock – what keeps the gallery-goers glued to the screen for hours on end – are the stories, the fragmented narratives that Marclay has embedded in the grand narrative-that-isn’t. Some appear only once, like a stranger glimpsed just once through a train window and then gone forever. Others weave in and out, starting, then stopping, and then starting up again. So if you want your art poignant, The Clock can deliver that as well.
In the section I saw, there were indeed clocks abounding: wristwatches, wall clocks (a lot of which came straight out of the 1950s), the clock tower in Fitzcarraldo, more wristwatches, a time-fuse bomb sequence in a cellar, plus Orson Welles telling Joseph Cotton, “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switerzland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”
What’s hard to capture in any description of The Clock is the artfulness of Marclay’s editing. Snatches of (filmed) life follow on one another’s heels, tumbling onto the screen all at once, like snatches of (real) life. 2:15 – and virtually any other time you care to mention – is packed with snippets of stories.
Leaving the gallery (reluctantly), I couldn’t help but think about all the other lives, all the other people making their way through 2:47 in the afternoon, and all their stories, some of great import but most the insignificant stuff of daily life: a stroll down Broadway, a late pizza delivery, an afternoon drink.
