The artist Christian Marclay recently saw a play in New York after a long flight from Europe earlier that day, and found himself warring against the powerful urge to nod off.
“It’s terrible,” he said in an interview earlier this month in New York. “But in ‘The Clock,’ it would be acceptable. That’s what you’re supposed to do — let go and absorb it and feel like you’re part of this thing.”
Such is the unique nature of the Swiss-American artist’s magnum opus, which premiered in London in 2010: The viewer cannot help but be implicated in it, and in some sense live it.
“The Clock” is a 24-hour film made up of thousands of clips from movies and television shows, each depicting the precise time of day that you are watching it. Many of the sources are famous, among them “The Godfather,” “The Simpsons” and, of course, “High Noon.” (So many that Marclay could not recall the sources of several stills made available.) Often the time is conveyed explicitly, via, say, a clock in the frame or dialogue in which a character is asked that most typical of questions, glances at his wristwatch and responds; occasionally the time is implicit, with the screen showing a woman tossing and turning during an evidently sleepless night.
Marclay on 3 moments from ‘The Clock’
“It’s that classic thing where the filmmaker wants you to know exactly what time it is, because something’s going to happen. And that’s on the hour, so usually something is going to happen in the next frame — an explosion or something.”
“Between three and five was very difficult. Lot of people are in bed trying to sleep, being interrupted with ringing phones. But now we just turn it off at night, at least I do, and nobody can bother us.”
“You know that match is going to last a few more seconds. In classic memento mori paintings, 17th-century Dutch painting, you might have a candle. Fire is a good measuring-time device. There’s a lot of smoking in ‘The Clock,’ because it is also a durational thing.”
In addition to being itself a clock, “The Clock” is a cultural digest of our days and ways, depicting how humanity has spent — or imagined it has spent — each hour over the roughly hundred years of cinema preceding its composition. “Between four and five o’clock transport is significant: trains, cars, and airplanes,” the novelist Zadie Smith wrote in a review in 2011. “If the phone rings after one in the morning do not expect good news. Cuckoo clocks, no matter when they chime, are almost always ominous. When Orson Welles says what time it is, it lends the hour an epic sound. At two AM everyone’s lonely.”
The run of “The Clock” that commenced last week at the Museum of Modern Art and ends Feb. 17, 2025, marks the work’s return to the United States for the first time since 2016 and for the first time to New York in nearly a dozen years..
The last several years have made us, and therefore “The Clock,” fundamentally different, said Stuart Comer, the chief curator of media and performance at MoMA.
“Because this is literally a clock made of fragments from our cultural memory,” Comer said, “it is bound to take twists and turns each time it’s shown, as time goes on.”
When “The Clock” last showed in New York, Comer added, pandemics were a distant and obscure fear. “We all talk about people’s inability to finish a novel, or how memory and our sense of time in general has shifted,” he said. “It just felt like an interesting moment to revisit this work.”
Certainly Marclay, who turns 70 in January, has experienced “The Clock,” and the clock, differently depending on the season of his life. Though born in California, he spent his childhood in Geneva, the international watchmaking capital. He recalled inhabiting summers “that just seemed endless, with no notion of what was happening in the rest of the world.”
With a background in music, Marclay began making ingeniously-edited films that were montages of pre-existing ones, such as “Telephones” (1995), a seven-minute movie comprising black-and-white and color clips that depict various stages of telephone calls, and “Video Quartet” (2002), a piece of four simultaneously played movies whose sounds are synchronized — a work he saw older audiences struggle with, acknowledging, “it was just too much information for them.”
For two years in the late 2000s, up to six assistants sourced appropriate clips for him — “the catch of the day,” as he put it — by raiding the DVD sections at rental shops in London, where Marclay still lives. He painstakingly edited them into the finished work.
One result is that “The Clock” is a time capsule not only of decades of cinema, but of the specific time of its making.
“In ‘The Clock’ there are a few flip phones, but that’s about it,” Marclay said. “It was really pre-iPhone madness. But when we started showing it, people were comparing it to their phone, introducing that element of real time in the cinema.”
In 2010, YouTube and social media had not assumed the saturation they achieved in the following years. Marclay is not on social media, but understands that those who are — which is to say, most people — might view the work differently.
“The kids who were maybe 10 years old when they saw ‘The Clock’ with their parents are now 20, and they’ve been using social media for a decade,” he said. “How are they going to relate to it? It’s hard for me to answer, but that fragmentation is something that people are now quite familiar with.”
In many ways, “The Clock” will be presented the same way at MoMA as it was at Paula Cooper Gallery and Lincoln Center more than a decade ago. Marclay insists on sofas (often IKEA models are used) that permit filmgoers to arrive and depart when they would like. “In the cinema,” he said, “we all go in at the same time and we all leave at the same time. Here it’s a different choreography: you make the choices.” He has pushed the museum to open “The Clock,” which is digital and runs on a software that automatically syncs to the time of day, beyond typical museum hours.
At MoMA, two longer viewings have already been planned for the winter solstice, Dec. 21, and New Year’s Eve. “We want to be as generous as we can with the public,” said Comer, the curator.
Rewatching “The Clock” recently, Marclay could not help but contemplate how external developments beyond technology, politics and the pandemic have altered his viewing of his own movie.
“I was just installing ‘The Clock’ this weekend,” Marclay said. “I saw Alain Delon —he appeared a few times — and he just died. I was thinking how so many of these actors who were alive when I made it are no longer alive, and eventually everybody in those films won’t be around.”
He added, “‘The Clock’ is a sad piece, in a way. It is a piece that confronts you with your mortality. I did it in my late 50s. I don’t think I would have made a piece like that in my 20s — that wasn’t a concern of mine.”
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