Pioneer sound artist Christian Marclay began manipulating gramophone records and creating time-based works using loops, skips, and scratches on turntables as musical instruments in the 1970s. Working in sculpture, performance, video, and other time-based media for nearly four decades, he incorporates strategies of collage, painting, appropriation, music composition, hip hop, and DJing in his multimedia practice.
Since its premiere in London in October 2010, followed by its debut in New York in February 2011, The Clock has been praised as a true masterpiece. Winner of the Golden Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), this 24-hour single-channel montage is constructed out of moments in cinema and television history depicting the passage of time; in other words, scenes in which clocks and watches appear—“from clock towers to wristwatches and from buzzing alarm clocks to the occasional cuckoo.” Weaving together Marclay’s interests in collage and found visual and aural artifacts with his own roots in performance art, The Clock enmeshes viewers in a durational performance piece.
The edited footage of clocks not only provides cues as to the role of time’s passage in the appropriated film narrative, it also serves as a functioning timepiece that marks the exact time for the viewer. When one sees The Clock at 1:15 pm, for example, the action (or inaction) in the clip will be taking place at the same moment. Screened in a cinematic setting, it retains the rhythmic pulsations and tonal shifts typical of Marclay’s sound works but also plays with the viewer’s expectations, drawing attention to time as a multifaceted protagonist in a moving image. The Clock records the measure of time while also presenting a visual tapestry from, of, and about time in our frenzied twenty-first century existence, creating a conflation of tensions à propos the layered tempos of contemporary life. “If I asked you to watch a clock tick,” Marclay explains, “you would get bored quickly, but there is enough action in this film to keep you entertained, so you forget the time, but then you’re constantly reminded of it.”
Marclay follows a long trajectory of artists interested in the history of cinema and the ways in which its footage or grammar can be appropriated and recontextualized. The Russian filmmaker and scholar Jay Leyda devoted an entire book to the study of this method in Films Beget Films (1964) and connected the use of found footage in film to the collage techniques of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Constructivism, among other historical avant-gardes. An important precedent to The Clock is Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958), in which he edited together clips from disparate sources, from stag to sports footage to mainstream melodramas, to create a meta-film. In its complex building of cinematic time, A Movie frustrates the viewer’s anticipation of a beginning, middle, and end by throwing out all rules of linearity and narrative progression. Similarly, The Clock causes the viewer to ruminate on what David Velasco calls the “temporal grammar” of a film or television show: by “string[ing] together this panoply of irrational times according to a rational tempo, [Marclay] makes salient the idiosyncrasies of movie time” (Artforum, February 2011).
While more recent works by artists such as Douglas Gordon and Candice Breitz employ found footage to comment on the limitations of authorship and the artificiality of dramatic codes in a postmodern era, Marclay uses sampled segments to reformat our understanding of media’s discrete elements. For example, in the montage Video Quartet (2002), he deftly created a musical composition out of individual clips from movies. While Video Quartet conveys Marclay’s complex engagement with audio culture, and his ability to craft something wholly new out of foraged components, The Clock turns a collection of seemingly banal shots (of timepieces) into a compendium of cinema’s extraordinarily complex relationship to time and memory.
Christine Y. Kim
2011
