The 24 Hour Film
Moments from The Clock. Source: rullsenbergrules.blogspot.com
After walking from pavilion to pavilion during some time spent in Venice, there was something hopeful about the possibility to rest in comfort in front of a big screen. I am not talking about a cinema, but rather a revolutionary piece of art currently at the Venice Biennale. It is called The Clock and British-based Christian Marclay is the artist who created this masterpiece.
Audience watching the film. Source: http://www.labiennale.org
His project was one of the most ambitious works I’ve seen in contemporary art, taking three years to put in place. It won the gold lion for this year’s biennale and has been widely exhibited at the Paula Cooper gallery in New York, the White Cube in London to name but a few, and is currently at the Arsenale in Venice.
Christian Marclay is simultaneously a visual artist and a composer. His previous works were more focused on the collages of sound that are unusual to our ears.
The Clock is a 24-hour non-stop montage, comprised of thousands of clips from a panoply of different films chosen due to their sound and visual references to the time. And all this perfectly synchronised with the hours and minutes of the day that are passing by in real life. First of all, imagine the time and work it took just to make this creation. At the Biennale there are about a hundred different projects that you can visit and, what Marclay managed to do with The Clock is take a chunk of the viewer’s time, as they are entranced in a dark room, and then constantly remind them of that fact. The Clock is cinematic and artistic experience and time-keeping device condensed into one. Further to this, Marclay manages to uphold a certain logic by cutting as if the actors and locations of one film are interacting with those of another, across the medium.
http://www.scriptgodsmustdie.com/wp-content/uploads/clock-11.jpg
Is there a link with his previous work? For those of you who know the artist, his work is about distorting sounds from old vinyl records. Did Marclay consciously desire the shift from music and sound to image and time? In my opinion, just as he was fractioning vinyl records to create unexpected sounds, he has managed to fraction the films to create an unexpected movie; an organized cacophony of images not focused on but supplemented by sound. And yet, just like a vinyl a clock is (usually) round and rotates around its center.
With Bill Viola, the pioneer of video ( see films such as The Reflecting Pool)art became an aesthetic of time rather than space. The video of Chris Marclay is fascinating because it has successfully integrated the aesthetic of space in time.
Christian Marclay manages to take our perception of art to another realm with a profound metaphor about time. It is scary to think about how our lives simultaneously mark the passage of time and revolve around it; in the 21st century more than ever, we are slaves to time. Time flies and so did the movie – unexpected and captivating, just like the time that we pass in our real lives. The work itself is hypnotic; I could not take my eyes of the screen except to check the time on my watch to confirm it was accurate. It always is. And while Big Ben stayed in London, Marclay’s clock travelled the world, both through the medium of film and quite literally so, having been exhibited at art venues across the world.
But as I watched I asked myself; “Am I just watching a clock – a very unusual clock, but a clock nonetheless?”
And outside there was Venice – beautiful and constant – defying time and my own meager twenty years.
Read about the 10,000 year clock here.
Thank you very much
Dear Eleonor, that is a very good article you wrote about Marclay and Venice. did you ever think of becoming a journalist ? You are very talented ! Go for it !
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