the clock
Christian Marclay, The Clock 2010. Single channel video. Duration: 24 hours © the artist.
Courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Go up to the second floor of the new wing at Tate Modern, pass by an attendant on a desk with a clicker, go through a doorway and then another, it's getting darker now, so tread carefully, then through one last door and — oh! You have left the gallery, entering instead into a cinema, lined with rows and rows of white wide sofas, all facing a giant screen. Some people will be asleep, some will be cuddling up, one woman silently breastfeeds her infant, lit up in the glow of the screen. Find yourself a seat and turn to face the bright glare of the screen. You are watching Christian Marclay's The Clock.
Let me explain: Marclay's 24-hour art film The Clock has something of a cult following. Originally produced at White Cube back in 2010 it is compromised of hundreds of film clips, set precisely to the time you are watching it. So at six pm, you will see a flurry of clips: people asking the time, checking watches, clocks in the background, digital, analogue — all showing the exact time, 6.01, 18:02, three minutes past six and so on. You will be bombarded with films, some you will recognise, some you will not. You will see the Princess Diaries, you will High School Musical and Vertigo, you will see a Spanish film you have never heard of and a girl throwing alarm clocks out the window that insist on ringing. Time is ever present. It is remarkable, both in the fact that it was ever made in the first place and the experience it conjures.
What it means to live in the present moment, to be contemporary is always under question in art, in literature and film. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote that contemporariness is "a singular relationship with one's own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it." To live in the moment, in Agamben's view, is to also paradoxically be outside of it. And this is what The Clock does. In watching Marclay's film I have never been so hyper-aware of time, yet so lost in the moment. He turns all the viewers into Agamben's contemporary: aware of time and yet simultaneously ahead of it, behind it and above it, but caught irrevocably by time too. Impossible to not be aware of time as you watch it, combined with a delight to be carried away by it. You watch every second, each 24 frames as they whizz by, and then suddenly you've been watching for an hour. Jonathan Jones writing in The Guardian observed that "The longer you watch it, the more addictive it becomes". Striking (pun intended) here too, the narrative link between the verb to 'watch' and the object 'watch'. You will, of course, watch many watches in the watching of The Clock.
Christian Marclay The Clock 2010. Single channel video, duration: 24 hours © the artist.
Courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Elise Bell interviewing Marclay in Dazed, describes The Clock as "A 24-hour long film without a narrative" but I'm not so sure that's right (not least because then it wouldn't fit this tinyletter). It is, I would argue, full, absolutely marvellously chock-full o' narrative. It's a film made of films and so you are always watching a brief moment in someone else's narrative — much in the same way we brush pass moments of other people's lives on our day-to-day interactions and travels. But Marclay's great trick is to make us see narrative not just in the singular clips but across them, by linking shots by eye-lines, cuts, and even music. It creates a sense of a great winding, breathless narrative that crescendos and falls and crescendos again, that starts and stops without end. Time and The Clock is a cycle after all. It picks up narrative threads across film (often, of course involving time) and drops them again without much care and with such subtly that you're already following the next one. It explains in part I think that sense of addictive viewing Jones describes.
Marclay does provide a narrative then, just not in a conventional way. The Clock is telling you a broader story, a longer story, one that is as old as time (haha) because it is about time itself and our relationship to it. How we live in and out of it, how we are the contemporaries in that watching moment of self-awareness. The film (and I would argue narrative) comes alive under our gaze as we stitch a story together out of its disparate parts. A story that will be different for every single person watching. In the same interview with Bell, Marclay said, "Time is something that we struggle with every day – it’s the ominous ticking clock". Watching The Clock it's impossible not to feel every single, glorious, awful, moment of it.
The Clock is on display at Tate Modern until 20th January 2019