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. 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. 2. Early mornings become hectic as time rings down like a hammer and repeated images of the time roust a sleepy subject to life, to work, and to responsibility. Marclay was aided by six assistants in finding and sorting suitable material over three years. Non-diegetic to diegetic: Marclay can claim a post-modern award simply for the concept, let alone the execution. Clock-Watching Near the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral, the handsome and usually vacant visage of Hugh Grant is locked in deep sleep. Employing anticipation and rising levels of hope mixed with anxiety, his film clips evoke nostalgia, anger, romance, hilarity and eroticism—to name a few. Very quickly, the viewer grasps what is being presented: a series of clips from films, all of which feature clocks in dramatic ways. 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. 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. When The Clockwon the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Marclay thanked the jury for giving the work ‘its fifteen minutes of fame.’ Our Western consumer culture has made pursuit of that ‘15 minutes’ a way of life, in ways Warhol never envisaged. Lovers wake up and want to know what time it is; so do office workers and housewives. (NOTE: This review is from the summer of 2012. In The Clock, Christian Marclay has offered 24 hours of fragmented time, a day’s worth of transformative moments. We’ve grown accustomed to anavalanche of recycled shows, images and Gifs via You Tube, Vimeo, social media and streaming services. In The Clock, Marclay offers one precisely chosen clip after another, modulated to the sharpened sensibility of contemporary art and media consumers. The Clock by Christian Marclay. Marclay’s final destination may be unknown, but the journey is knowingly crafted and deeply empathic in terms of the visual creatures we are. Daylight awaited them outside of the gallery as they headed off to Kensington Market to find a place for breakfast. Telling time 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. 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. Our relationship with the technology of the day is simultaneously questioned, realised and foreshadowed for generations to come. Finding the temporal signifier resolves the expectation but this resolution is short-lived, replaced immediately with the expectation that the next scene will provide another image of time. He studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel […] Some viewers appeared to be checking the time, simultaneously visible on screens, both private and public. It’s a work of art you enter into and become part of, rather than passively watch. The Clock fits snugly into that paradigm. Paradoxically, we might say that John Wayne predicts a future we discover in the past. Christian Marclay is an American-Swiss artist known for his sculptures, videos, and music, especially his sound collages. I loved the free, associative power of this work, providing triggers for the viewer’s imagination within an ever-evolving structure of interwoven narratives. This issue looks at police brutality, Black Lives Matter, No Ordinary Man, the new hybrid drama and more! Christian Marclay (born January 11, 1955) is a visual artist and composer. Audiences enter a darkened gallery to find, if lucky, a seat on one of the couches to view the images on a large screen; if not, they crouch or sit on the floor, absorbing the images and sound. The clocks next to them act as a reality check to bedroom fantasies. But the camera keeps panning down to the briefcase he’s carrying. Your email address will not be published. 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. Nuit Blanche was, however, not the only night the gallery stayed open to screen the video in its entirety. We cater to, and are enamoured of, anything that can be understood and enjoyed quickly. Stills of Christian Marclay – Telephones, 1995, video installati… The visual arts are often about decisive moments, particularly photography but also in a range of other disciplines from painting to film. In many ways The Clock is a mirror where moments of fiction and history emerge out of each other, stimulating deeper reflection. She remembers seeing a melting clock but can’t be sure if it was in the film. With Rosanna Arquette, Bette Davis, Leonardo DiCaprio, William Hurt. We live in a time when things move at incredibly swift speeds. Viewers are kept continually in a state of perpetual and anxious receptivity. Please read our statement on the matter here with more to follow. Seward. In many ways The Clock is a mirror where moments of fiction and history emerge out of each other, stimulating deeper reflection. If this sounds too intellectual, I can assure you it isn’t- while you’re watching The Clock, you may be conscious of time elapsing, but you’re not conscious of the mechanism and are free to create your own moments out of it, something barely afforded time in everyday life. Of course, the boy doesn’t know. 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. In The Clock, Fine Art meets mass media in ways that the internet has failed to democratise. Banks are metonyms for capital. You can set your watch by it. 1. Marclay described the editing process as “the most fun…finding connecting bridges…cutaways where one action happens in one film and the reaction happens in another. As comforting as this is, the linear structure of the work and the rapid exchange of one temporal reference by another reminds one that time never stops. 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. 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. Kyra started to dream, only to wake up to a dream sequence. If they’re alive, the reveries of the bed are changed as soon as the clock comes 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. 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