The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay

In the spring of 1990, artist Christian Marclay debuted at the Wexner Center, Ohio, a work commissioned by that institution a few months before. The brand new piece was installed outside, on the white metal grid at the entrance of the building, and consisted of over two dozen mechanical apparatus that struck the grid’s beams on the hour, making a huge rattle that would disrupt the familiar symphony of the other clocks around. Descriptions of the work make it sound like an automatic rip-off of one of Jean Tinguely's machines fused with architecture. Unfortunately I couldn't find any visual documentation of the work. It was called “The Clock” and when you search for a piece by that name by Christian Marclay, the 1990 one is not what you find.

Christian Marclay was born in San Rafael, California, in 1955, after his parents had met in Peru, but was brought up in Switzerland. As a kid he took an interest in art and when he was 20 went to the Ecole Supérieure d'Art Visuel in Geneva. In 1977 he moved to the United States and begun studying at the Massachusetts College of Art, where his interest focused on performance art, after becoming acquainted with the work of Bruce Nauman, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, Dan Graham and Vito Acconci. He would visit New York on the weekends, but the galleries didn't draw him as much as the East Village clubs, and there he discovered and got immersed in the immensely creative cultures of punk and no wave. He wanted to perform live, so after witnessing that highly inventive and energetic environment, and taking the hint from Laurie Anderson, he decided his vehicle would be music, a subject he still "knew very little about". He settled on singing and got himself a guitar player, but without a drummer Marclay "started using skipping records to generate rhythm and beats". He realized the hidden potentiality of the turntable (“the perfect machine célibataire”) and made it his instrument, since he couldn't play any other. He was one of the first to scratch records and developed other techniques for his live sets, like playing LPs created in the moment by smashing a few and taping them together. Like John Cage, he was making the leap from music to fine art, having recognized the parallel between hip-hop and appropriation.

Over the next years, Marclay emulated Marcel Duchamp and begun creating collages from found objects, images and sounds. His intent was getting his hands on something culturally recognizable and manipulate it, damage it, cut it, juxtapose it, vandalize it, reorganize it, twist it, until it was unfamiliar and irrevocably his own work, displaced from its original meaning. In his practice, almost always built around sound and music, he went from performances, collages, sculptures and installations to paintings, photography and videos. This last medium wasn't his most prolific, and he only started with the advent of accessible video editing software, but the few short films he produced are among his more critically acclaimed works. "Telephones", from 1995, a montage of movie fragments of people talking on the phone, didn't take full advantage of its concept (the single, not very coherent conversation between several individuals had the potential to be taken further and be longer) but paved the way for video mashups in general (including Apple's rip-off ad for the iPhone) and for the artist's work with cinema in particular. “Video Quartet” came in 2002, a collage of hundreds of clips related to music (be it musicians playing, actors singing or people dancing), displayed over four screens, assembled as a very particular, 14-minute composition for a large orchestra and choir. In 2005 he premiered "Screen Play", a performance based upon a silent montage of film footage (and some digital annotations) that works as a score for musicians to interpret and improvise over, with the different clips evoking a variety of sounds, rhythms and emotions. It starts with a ticking clock and others appear throughout the video, acting as metronomes. "Crossfire", from 2007, is an expertly edited film installation made from snippets of weapons being very loudly and rapidly discharged on four screens, which thrusts the viewer into a quite alluring and frightening experience with a pounding beat. All this coming from someone who isn't a devoted cinephile, but had already "used film loops from cartoons and sex films as audio-visual rhythm tracks" in his late 70s musical performances.

It was also in 2007 that Christian Marclay left New York for London, to be with his partner Lydia Yee, who had been appointed a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery. He couldn't afford a large studio in the city so he settled for a desk in a corner of a shared office space near the Barbican. He didn't bring his collection of random objects, his raw material for the collages, with him so, sitting in front of his Mac, he figured his first British project had to be made with Final Cut. His montages of film fragments, and the clocks from "Screen Play", had given him an idea: what if he could find instances of clocks in movies depicting every minute of every hour, and then had them arranged in chronological order and sync everything with real time, for a running time of a full day? By then he had enough experience to know that, even though it would be by far his most ambitious project, it could probably work and quickly realized some of the interesting elements a movie whose plot was the passage of time could have. He would be putting together a relatively (!) quick and thorough overview of cinema history, he would be able to expose and exploit the most common devices films use to manipulate time, as well as to subvert the narrative logic and natural rhythm of movies, he would confront viewers with time going away at all times employing a medium that people usually use to lose track of it and he would be producing functional art (an oxymoron by most definitions). Movie images are also inherently more easily identifiable than snippets of music, which presented the artist with an interesting challenge, given his goal of remixing the memorable, and the possibility to play with the different memories and feelings the audience had concerning the movies they remembered. Where there clips for every single minute though?

Video art often requires discipline and can easily turn into painful experiences for the uninitiated. Longer-than-usual works have been a staple since the 60s. From Andy Warhol's extremely fruitful movie career came anti-films like "Sleep", more than 5 hours of one of his friends sleeping, and "Empire", about 8 hours of slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building. "The Movie Orgy", by Joe Dante (of Gremlins' and Piranha's fame), is a 7-hour long montage of pieces from films and commercials. Even 24-hour movies have been around for some time, from Warhol's "Four Stars" (that actually had a plot) to Douglas Gordon's "24 Hour Psycho", which shows Hitchcock's full feature at 2 frames per second. And then there is "The Cure for Insomnia", by John Henry Timmis IV, more than 3 and a half days of a poem being read. Almost always, the ideas behind the creation of these videos are wholly translated when the spectator becomes aware of their extensive duration and people don't have to muster the courage to sit through them to get what they are supposed to get, the very difficulty they present to be watched in full being part of the concept. Marclay's intention wasn't to produce something unwatchable though, he didn't want to create art viewers were only suppose to rationalize after watching a couple of minutes and acknowledging it was really long. He wanted to make something which could be enjoyed like a Hollywood product for any 2 or 3 hours without becoming boring. While he realized he needed help given the sheer enormity of the project, he knew from the start he would be taking full care of the editing, especially when it meant creating the “hinges” of the transitions, to be able to guarantee a seamless flow throughout.

The artist didn't want to assemble a production line, like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, but asked White Cube, his London gallery, for seven assistants to help with the research. To make sure there would be no competition they signed a confidentiality agreement, and then got started in watching all the titles they could get their hands on from London rental stores, from which they would rip all instances of clocks or mentions of time they would come across. White Cube and Paula Cooper, his New York gallery, gave him full support and over $100,000 for expenses (a nice sum, but the London house had helped Hirst with the £14 million necessary to make "For The Love of God"). One assistant was fired for only bringing bombastic clips, but the other six kept at it for three years, sending the files for Marclay to convert to a unified format and edit together, which he did for 10 to 12 hours a day, constantly reworking sequences when better snippets arrived. Since he didn't have time to watch many movies, he had to accept an element of chance and a certain lack of control would be part of it and work with what was delivered to him. Eventually, an additional hard drive was necessary, as they ended up with over ten thousand clips. He trusted his respect towards the material and the attractiveness of the final work would prevent copyright problems (Sofia Coppola would later say she felt honored by the use of "Lost in Translation").

By 2010, Marclay was using an orthopedic wrist support and, as the agreed premiere date approached, still had some problems to take care of. Unifying motifs had emerged when a large enough number of clips had been collected for certain time periods. Between 7 and 9 people were waking up, at lunch time they were having lunch, by the evening they had left work and were going to the opera. At other times thought, not only were themes less apparent, there was also a tremendous lack of references to time, be they big, obvious clock faces or just general allusions to a more or less specific period. At several points during late night, especially around 5 a.m., he had almost nothing to work with. He decided to resort to symbolic representations. Abstract portraits of the likely fragile mental state of someone viewing his work at that hour, between agitated and sleepy, reality melting with dreaming, was the Swiss solution. He was also having difficulty with a few hundred aural transitions, and considering he thinks of his films as “sound pieces with a visual dimension” that couldn't be. Close to the date of the opening he enlisted Quentin Chiappetta, a sound designer with whom Marclay had already collaborated on "Video Quartet", to help and they sought different ways to merge score and dialogue, sometimes even choosing silence in place of the movie original sound or adding newly-created effects, so that the passages between scenes were never abrupt. The sonic collage ended up being the most elaborate portion of the whole and he was still working on it (and correcting small continuity errors) a week into the exhibition, an echo of 19th century's vernissages.

The Clock premiere in October 2010 at White Cube's location in Mason's Yard, and then went to Paula Cooper, in Manhattan, staying open 24/7. It was shown in the 2011 edition of La Biennale di Venezia, where Marclay won the Leone d'Oro, one of the highest honors of the art world. It also got him the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Editing. Five copies of the work (a computer program with separate audio and video tracks, coded by Goldsmiths College professor Mick Grierson, and a twenty-four page instructions manual, conveying the optimal conditions in which it should be installed) were made to be sold only to museums and were gone in a couple of days (about half a million dollars each, various patrons immediately provided the funds to get the piece to their institution of choice), with a sixth going to Steven A. Cohen, probably the most prominent collector in the world. Two extra artist's proofs have been globetrotting for the last four years, going from Los Angeles to Yokohama, from Jerusalem to Paris, from Ottawa to Sydney, from Zürich to San Francisco and from Istanbul to one of the many places on the waiting list. In every site, since the first exhibition, tens of thousands of people (per location) have waited in unceasing lines for up to four hours to watch it and returning visits are common, with some people even camping out to get a place for the special overnight screenings and friends placing bets on who can identify more movies or watch more of it. It's rare in the fine art world for a work to get as much public attention as critical praise, but that's just one of Marclay's chef d'œuvre many achievements. From tonight through April 19^th it will be shown in Portugal, in Museu Berardo, with nocturnal sessions starting on the first day and then on March 7^th, March 28^th and April 18^th.

Companion piece to this article.  

Note: I think Christoph Girardet's "60 Seconds" (2003) deserves to be mentioned, given certain obvious similarities to "The Clock". Check it out here.