I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about The Clock.
This shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone familiar with the work. Even within the heady framework of contemporary art, it offers plenty of avenues for exploration; from the technical to the conceptual to metaphysical. For those unacquainted, The Clock is a 24-hour video by the artist Christian Marclay. Assembled through the careful splicing and editing of thousands of movie scenes featuring clocks, watches, alarms, and timepieces, The Clock literally marks and documents the passage of time. It functions as both art and…well…a clock. If this sounds pretty labor intensive, it was. It took Marclay three years to assemble and edit the final piece.
One could argue that this was time well spent. Since its debut at London’s White Cube gallery in 2010 The Clock has become an art world sensation. It’s been screened at some of the most prestigious venues in the United States (including MoMA, LACMA, and the Lincoln Center) and left in its wake a trail of enraptured audiences and critics. None of this, I should note, is an accident. Nor is it hype. The Clock is that rarest of works that is both smart and accessible. It offers something for everyone while still managing to uphold the standard of what important and meaningful art should do (that is, provide us, the viewer, with a new way of seeing and experiencing our world). In the case of Marclay’s work I believe this “experiencing” may be the key. The Clock is, at it’s heart, not something you watch, it’s something you experience. Oh, I can try to describe it, but understand my words are no substitute for being there. They are, in the context of Marclay’s work, little more than shadows.
First there’s the careful and seamless editing. In some respects, this is the key to work. It’s the connective tissue that provides at least a veneer of continuity. A door from one film opens into another. A phone rings in black and white and is picked up decades later in technicolor. Conversations from different films overlap and complement. Sound editing, while not as immediately apparent, plays an enormous role as well. Musical scores bleed across clips, combining disparate elements and forging new meanings. Boat horns, train whistles, buzzers and alarms bridge scenes and provide important connections. It’s this attention to editing, this understanding of how moving images fit together, that’s the backbone of The Clock. Without such rigorous editing and attention to detail it’s easy to imagine Marclay’s work devolving into a 24-hour surrealist jumble.
There are also a lot of loose thematic arrangements in The Clock. Travel sequences cluster; so do cityscapes and domestic scenes. Sleep and dreams appear in proximity to each other. Waiting often begets more waiting. On the one hand there’s an ebb and flow that becomes apparent as you spend time with The Clock. Patterns and pacing start to emerge [Spoiler Alert: Things pick up at the top and bottom of each hour]. On the other hand, it’s also very much like standing in a river. The same water never passes twice.
But these are technical things, the nuts and bolts of the work. It’s like talking about the chemical properties of DaVinci’s pigments; interesting perhaps, but not entirely relevant to what his works mean or how we experience them. In a recent Lambert Family Lecture Marclay was very emphatic and open about the viewers experience. He created this work and presents it as prescribed, but the rest is up to us. There’s no beginning and no end. Viewers can enter whenever they like, stay as long as they want, and leave when the mood strikes them. They can watch 20 minutes or 24 hours.
More importantly they can ascribe whatever meaning they choose as they watch. For some that means The Clock is a fun diversion, a chance to play a game of never-ending movie trivia, naming actors and films and guessing whether a certain film will appear at a certain time. For others The Clock becomes something more like a time machine. They’ll likely remember when they saw a particular film, how it made them feel, where they were in life’s journey. If you stay long enough, The Clock becomes meditative, almost hypnotic. It’s easy to get lost in the work; to (perhaps counter-intuitively) lose track of time. It simultaneously creates a sense of being carried forward while living in exactly the moment you’re watching (which gets about as close to metaphysics as I dare). If you’re anything like me, The Clock is all of the above.
One of the most fascinating elements of The Clock is how it demonstrates in a very real way our penchant for storytelling. In The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human author Jonathan Gottschall outlines the primary role storytelling plays in our lives. We are sensemaking creatures. Part of how we make sense of the world is through the stories we tell. The Clock of course, offers no story; not in the traditional sense at least. There is no plot, no narrative arch, no sustained conflict and no resolution. Its sequencing is a combination of opportunity, chance, selection, and will. Yet, as we watch The Clock, this is clearly not the case. There is a story. We see it. We watch it unfold. It’s a unique story, but one that’s born of collaboration. It’s a story that we create in conjunction the artist. The artist provides the medium and we fill in the blanks. Our experience makes the story. Each of us, each individual viewer, completes the narrative. We decide when it starts, when it stops, and what matters in between. Perhaps this is true of all art, be it painting, novels, poetry, or film, but nowhere is this more apparent than in Christian Marclay’s The Clock. This is important work. Make time to see it.
For more information, visit www.wexarts.org.
All photos credited:
Christian Marclay
The Clock, 2010
Single channel video
Duration: 24 hours
© Christian Marclay
Courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York