Christian Marclay's 'The Clock'

An installation at the Israel Museum is making waves as it uses many bits of disconnected narrative to treat various themes – the most obvious of which is time.

By DAVID STROMBERG
Christian Marclay's The Clock Israel Musuem big (photo credit: Ben Westoby Courtesy: White Cube)
Christian Marclay's The Clock Israel Musuem big
(photo credit: Ben Westoby Courtesy: White Cube)
Once in a great long while a piece of art comes along that engages everyone from the most elite contemporary art critics to people who accidentally find themselves in a museum or gallery – and the entire spectrum of potential audiences in between. Such is Christian Marclay’s instant classic, The Clock. The 24-hour video work that premiered at the White Cube Gallery (London) in late 2010, was shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery (New York) in early 2011 and won the Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale this summer – all before arriving at the Israel Museum in August, where it will be on show until October 20.
The Clock is an audiovisual work constructed from thousands of film clips in which a clock appears and shows the time.
It also includes sections of scenes related to waiting. The range of films covers a spectrum of genres, time periods and countries.
Among other things, it is a masterpiece of editing – in particular of the montage technique championed by Soviet innovator Sergei Eisenstein – with scenes from unrelated movies insinuating new meanings through their novel juxtaposition. At the same time, it is also a grandly executed “sound work” – with music, dialogue and sound effects flowing between one film and another in order to weave them into a single entity.
The Clock is one of the most impressive, powerful and absorbing artworks to appear in the first decade of the 21st century. There is a dose of irony in this, since its raw material is the result of nearly a hundred years of a medium which was itself a revolutionary development of the 20th century: cinema.
Filmmakers, as well as critics, spent the first half of the last century articulating the artistic merit of cinema and the second half applying and developing this discourse in relation to works that were, to one degree or another, self-consciously artistic. But Marclay has created a work that is in essence something new by taking the entirety of this material and using its own built-in potential to single out one of the most essential and enigmatic aspects of human experience: time.
Two other works come to mind that preindicate Marclay’s strategy – though there are probably many more. One of them is musical artist Kutiman, who used people’s clips of themselves playing various instruments to create his own musical works. This connection is important in that Marclay himself started out as an artist who created works that reflected upon music. One of these is Graffiti Composition (1996-2002), a public work in which he pasted empty sheet music on Berlin streets, allowing passersby to make all kinds of marks. He also created different kinds of unplayable musical instruments, including a silicone rubber guitar called Prosthesis (2000), a work called Drumkit (1999) in which each piece is a different height, making it impossible to use, an accordion with an extremely elongated bellows called Virtuoso (2000), and many others.
The second, is Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, in which the filmmaker and critic gathered film clips showing the ways in which Los Angeles has been presented and misrepresented in cinema over the last century – intercutting them in much the same way as Marclay would eventually do but including a voiceover essay about the nature of cinematic representation. But where Anderson’s project (itself a littleknown masterpiece) developed from his personal connection to Los Angeles as well as his profession as a film teacher – resulting in an attempt to describe the gap Once in a great long while a piece of art comes along that engages everyone from the most elite contemporary art critics to people who accidentally find themselves in a museum or gallery – and the entire spectrum of potential audiences in between. Such is Christian Marclay’s instant classic, The Clock. The 24-hour video work that premiered at the White Cube Gallery (London) in late 2010, was shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery (New York) in early 2011 and won the Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale this summer – all before arriving at the Israel Museum in August, where it will be on show until October 20.
The Clock is an audiovisual work constructed from thousands of film clips in which a clock appears and shows the time.
It also includes sections of scenes related to waiting. The range of films covers a spectrum of genres, time periods and countries.

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Among other things, it is a masterpiece of editing – in particular of the montage technique championed by Soviet innovator Sergei Eisenstein – with scenes from unrelated movies insinuating new meanings through their novel juxtaposition. At the same time, it is also a grandly executed “sound work” – with music, dialogue and sound effects flowing between one film and another in order to weave them into a single entity.
The Clock is one of the most impressive, powerful and absorbing artworks to appear in the first decade of the 21st century. There is a dose of irony in this, since its raw material is the result of nearly a hundred years of a medium which was itself a revolutionary development of the 20th century: cinema.
Filmmakers, as well as critics, spent the first half of the last century articulating the artistic merit of cinema and the second half applying and developing this discourse in relation to works that were, to one degree or another, self-consciously artistic. But Marclay has created a work that is in essence something new by taking the entirety of this material and using its own built-in potential to single out one of the most essential and enigmatic aspects of human experience: time.
Two other works come to mind that preindicate Marclay’s strategy – though there are probably many more. One of them is musical artist Kutiman, who used people’s clips of themselves playing various instruments to create his own musical works. This connection is important in that Marclay himself started out as an artist who created works that reflected upon music. One of these is Graffiti Composition (1996-2002), a public work in which he pasted empty sheet music on Berlin streets, allowing passersby to make all kinds of marks. He also created different kinds of unplayable musical instruments, including a silicone rubber guitar called Prosthesis (2000), a work called Drumkit (1999) in which each piece is a different height, making it impossible to use, an accordion with an extremely elongated bellows called Virtuoso (2000), and many others.
The second, is Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, in which the filmmaker and critic gathered film clips showing the ways in which Los Angeles has been presented and misrepresented in cinema over the last century – intercutting them in much the same way as Marclay would eventually do but including a voiceover essay about the nature of cinematic representation. But where Anderson’s project (itself a littleknown masterpiece) developed from his personal connection to Los Angeles as well as his profession as a film teacher – resulting in an attempt to describe the gap Once in a great long while a piece of art comes along that engages everyone from the most elite contemporary art critics to people who accidentally find themselves in a museum or gallery – and the entire spectrum of potential audiences in between. Such is Christian Marclay’s instant classic, The Clock. The 24-hour video work that premiered at the White Cube Gallery (London) in late 2010, was shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery (New York) in early 2011 and won the Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale this summer – all before arriving at the Israel Museum in August, where it will be on show until October 20.
The Clock is an audiovisual work constructed from thousands of film clips in which a clock appears and shows the time.
It also includes sections of scenes related to waiting. The range of films covers a spectrum of genres, time periods and countries.
Among other things, it is a masterpiece of editing – in particular of the montage technique championed by Soviet innovator Sergei Eisenstein – with scenes from unrelated movies insinuating new meanings through their novel juxtaposition. At the same time, it is also a grandly executed “sound work” – with music, dialogue and sound effects flowing between one film and another in order to weave them into a single entity.
The Clock is one of the most impressive, powerful and absorbing artworks to appear in the first decade of the 21st century. There is a dose of irony in this, since its raw material is the result of nearly a hundred years of a medium which was itself a revolutionary development of the 20th century: cinema.
Filmmakers, as well as critics, spent the first half of the last century articulating the artistic merit of cinema and the second half applying and developing this discourse in relation to works that were, to one degree or another, self-consciously artistic. But Marclay has created a work that is in essence something new by taking the entirety of this material and using its own built-in potential to single out one of the most essential and enigmatic aspects of human experience: time.
Two other works come to mind that preindicate Marclay’s strategy – though there are probably many more. One of them is musical artist Kutiman, who used people’s clips of themselves playing various instruments to create his own musical works. This connection is important in that Marclay himself started out as an artist who created works that reflected upon music. One of these is Graffiti Composition (1996-2002), a public work in which he pasted empty sheet music on Berlin streets, allowing passersby to make all kinds of marks. He also created different kinds of unplayable musical instruments, including a silicone rubber guitar called Prosthesis (2000), a work called Drumkit (1999) in which each piece is a different height, making it impossible to use, an accordion with an extremely elongated bellows called Virtuoso (2000), and many others.
The second, is Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, in which the filmmaker and critic gathered film clips showing the ways in which Los Angeles has been presented and misrepresented in cinema over the last century – intercutting them in much the same way as Marclay would eventually do but including a voiceover essay about the nature of cinematic representation. But where Anderson’s project (itself a littleknown masterpiece) developed from his personal connection to Los Angeles as well as his profession as a film teacher – resulting in an attempt to describe the gap Once in a great long while a piece of art comes along that engages everyone from the most elite contemporary art critics to people who accidentally find themselves in a museum or gallery – and the entire spectrum of potential audiences in between. Such is Christian Marclay’s instant classic, The Clock. The 24-hour video work that premiered at the White Cube Gallery (London) in late 2010, was shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery (New York) in early 2011 and won the Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale this summer – all before arriving at the Israel Museum in August, where it will be on show until October 20.
The Clock is an audiovisual work constructed from thousands of film clips in which a clock appears and shows the time.
It also includes sections of scenes related to waiting. The range of films covers a spectrum of genres, time periods and countries.
Among other things, it is a masterpiece of editing – in particular of the montage technique championed by Soviet innovator Sergei Eisenstein – with scenes from unrelated movies insinuating new meanings through their novel juxtaposition. At the same time, it is also a grandly executed “sound work” – with music, dialogue and sound effects flowing between one film and another in order to weave them into a single entity.
The Clock is one of the most impressive, powerful and absorbing artworks to appear in the first decade of the 21st century. There is a dose of irony in this, since its raw material is the result of nearly a hundred years of a medium which was itself a revolutionary development of the 20th century: cinema.
Filmmakers, as well as critics, spent the first half of the last century articulating the artistic merit of cinema and the second half applying and developing this discourse in relation to works that were, to one degree or another, self-consciously artistic. But Marclay has created a work that is in essence something new by taking the entirety of this material and using its own built-in potential to single out one of the most essential and enigmatic aspects of human experience: time.
Two other works come to mind that preindicate Marclay’s strategy – though there are probably many more. One of them is musical artist Kutiman, who used people’s clips of themselves playing various instruments to create his own musical works. This connection is important in that Marclay himself started out as an artist who created works that reflected upon music. One of these is Graffiti Composition (1996-2002), a public work in which he pasted empty sheet music on Berlin streets, allowing passersby to make all kinds of marks. He also created different kinds of unplayable musical instruments, including a silicone rubber guitar called Prosthesis (2000), a work called Drumkit (1999) in which each piece is a different height, making it impossible to use, an accordion with an extremely elongated bellows called Virtuoso (2000), and many others.
The second, is Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, in which the filmmaker and critic gathered film clips showing the ways in which Los Angeles has been presented and misrepresented in cinema over the last century – intercutting them in much the same way as Marclay would eventually do but including a voiceover essay about the nature of cinematic representation. But where Anderson’s project (itself a littleknown masterpiece) developed from his personal connection to Los Angeles as well as his profession as a film teacher – resulting in an attempt to describe the gap between what we see on screen and what we experience in life – Marclay’s work makes no claims on personal experience and also lacks any overt voice.
Marclay uses the represented scenes as they are, and makes his personal mark through editing and manipulation – a technique used to many accolades by filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa. And this is perhaps what makes Marclay’s work so unique: it is neither a film nor an essay nor a sound work.
It is all three – and more.
Despite the specific and concrete use of clips from actual films, The Clock is in many ways an abstract piece. It uses our human faculties in experiencing and processing audiovisual content in order to watch a piece that has no actual narrative.
Just as a work by Mark Rothko may elicit one emotion or another by making use of our relation to differences in color and form, Marclay plays to the human capacity for narrative-making through juxtaposition of image and sound. He also makes use of our experience with cinema – the cinematic language with which so many people are familiar since childhood – and the enjoyment we feel is indeed quite close to pure filmic pleasure devoid of any specific narrative.
That said, The Clock does manage to use bits of disconnected narrative to treat various themes – the most obvious of which is time. But each hour, too, has its own thematic motif: 6 p.m. is the time people get off work. At 7 p.m. they visit art openings.
At 8 p.m. they go to concerts. At 10 p.m.
some have drinks while others prepare for bed. 2 a.m. is a time for lovemaking and 3 a.m. is a time for all kinds of dreams and nightmares. At 4 a.m. people are awakened by unexpected phone calls and doorbell rings. At 5 a.m. the alarm clocks start going off and by 6 a.m. there are already people getting ready for work again.
ASIDE FROM the binding of thematic content, Marclay also makes use of repetition in his piece. Various scenes from the same movie are inserted at their “real time” so that to see these connections one has to sit through the work for hours. Action scenes that are built on time running out – often related to bombs or special missions – are also spread out between other unrelated scenes.
And actors whom moviegoers are likely to recognize appear throughout the work in various points in their careers. The various incarnations of James Bond also make a regular appearance throughout The Clock, as do inspectors Colombo and Clouseau.
The emotional content, too, arises more from our reflexive reactions than from any true emotional arc. Because the scenes themselves are all centered around clocks, their emotional content is often charged with anxiety, fear and suspense – though we also see scenes scattered throughout that include celebration, joy and love. By lining these scenes up in chronological order and pacing them according to time as it is measured in the real world, Marclay creates an emotional experience out of what is essentially “watching the clock.”
But the true power of The Clock may lay elsewhere – precisely in its transcendence of time. With a work that is thematically focused on time – in which the recurring visual motif is the representation of time and which also happens to correspond to the “actual” time – we are so inundated with the consciousness of measuring the moments that we suddenly begin to notice the moments in which we do not notice time. Time becomes so all-pervasive that we find ourselves losing track of it – watching The Clock for hours and wanting to watch it for hours more, despite the fact that we know nothing is going to happen except seeing more time pass.
Christian Marclay’s The Clock is being shown at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem through October 20. The work is viewable during the museum’s regular opening hours. One 24-hour showing will take place from 10 a.m. on October 18 to 10 a.m. the following day.
Q&A with Suzanne Landau
Late last year, Suzanne Landau, chief curator of arts at the Israel Museum, visited London’s White Cube Gallery with no information other than that Christian Marclay was unveiling his new work.
Landau had followed Marclay’s work since the early 1990s, inviting him in 1992 to create a work at the Israel Museum, so she was more than curious to see what his new work might look like.
The last thing she expected was something on the scale of The Clock – and from that moment she began doing what she could to bring the work to Jerusalem. By mid-August the exhibition had opened, and it runs through October 20. The Jerusalem Post sat down with Landau for a short Q&A.
What do you say to the potential criticism that this work is too “easy”?
Everything can seem “easy” on the surface. In this work, you have to enter the complexity of the editing. If someone lowers a head in one frame, then someone else raises it in another. There are exchanges of glances between films. You also have a celebration of movie starts. There’s a feeling of narrative – you feel there’s continuity. It’s a collage – a technique Marclay has worked with in media from LP record covers to magnetic tape.
How has the piece been received in the art world?
Adrian Searle reviewed it in The Guardian when it was at the White Cube, but there was little buzz after that. Then at Paula Cooper [in New York] is where the big boom happened: people sent me pictures of lines around the block. Later Zadie Smith wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books. After the White Cube, Paula Cooper and Venice [where Marclay’s work received the Gold Lion] we see that people agree. There is a consensus. It’s a monumental work, and it’s received with very high regard.
What happened at the moment when you first saw it without knowing anything?
I saw The Clock on the first or second day that it opened. There were no people, no lines. At first I just watched. It took me a couple of minutes until I understood what I was seeing – what was happening – the whole idea that I’m looking at a film that’s an anthology of cinema. Then the next thing that struck me was the synchronization with real time. That he erases cinematic time. I became very emotional. Later I started seeing the connections in the editing – at first it’s amusing and looks like a gimmick, but it’s much more. It also took me time to understand the sound editing, the way he connects music with visual aspects. He creates a unit which you think is made up of a single thing.
There seems to be something emotional about viewing the work.
First, people recognize and relate to the films and actors. The scenes – because they’re clips – show us how great the smallest moments are. This speaks of cinema, but there’s also the notion of real time and erasure of cinematic time. Each 24-hour period passes with all kinds of activities we don’t always notice. There’s always action. Yet on the other hand, what can happen in a minute? Everything’s temporary and yet Christian [Marclay] shows us: this is what takes place nonetheless. He himself called it a memento mori. – D.S.