The Clock has been constructed from thousands of
clips extracted from different films where time is expressed including clocks,
wrist watches, buzzing alarms and cuckoo clocks. The artist has excerpted each
of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to form
a 24 hour montage, which unfolds in real time.
The Clock will function as a working timepiece
synchronized to local Moscow time, yet the viewer will experience a vast range
of narratives, settings and moods with each passing minute of actual time.
Whilst constructed to play in real time, the multitude of different narrative
directions from different films including the suspenseful, the tragic and the
romantic, result in a compelling and relentless work which plays with the way
the viewer experiences the cinema. Through The Clock, the artist explores the
conventions and devices used by filmmakers to create a persuasive illusion of
the duration of time in cinema. When watching a film, the viewer is removed
from their local time and swept up by the narrative of the fictional reality
they are watching. By corresponding to real time, The Clock disrupts this
fiction and the viewer experiences a peculiar awareness of the countless
narratives of cinema from the last 100 years.
Using collage in this way has been a recurring theme within Christian Marclay’s
work since the late 1970s when he was pioneering mixing sounds and records,
through to his most recent work Manga Scroll which features hundreds of
onomatopoeic words from Manga cartoons.
Artist Biography
Over the past 30 years, Christian Marclay has explored the
fusion of fine art and audio cultures, transforming sounds and music into a
visible, physical form through performance, collage, sculpture, installation,
photography and video.
Christian Marclay was born in California in 1955, raised in Switzerland and now
lives in London and New York. He has exhibited widely, including solo
exhibitions at Whitney Museum of Amercian Art, New York (2010), Musée d’Art
Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2008), Cité de la Musique, Paris (2007)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2006), Barbican Art Gallery, London (2005),
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle (2004), Tate Modern, London (2004), UCLA Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles (2003), and the SFMoMA, San Francisco (2001). Group
exhibitions include British Art Show 7, Nottingham (2010), Yokohama
International Arts & Media Festival, Yokohama (2009), Platform 2009, Seoul
(2009), Vancouver Art Gallery, (2008), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum,
Ridgefield (2007), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007) Musée d’Art
Contemporain de Lyon (2007), La Maison Rouge, Paris (2006), Musée d’Art
Contemporain, Avignon, France (2005), SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2003), Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York (2001) and Hayward Gallery, London (2000).
Christian Marclay also continues to collaborate with musicians, including
recent performances with Steve Beresford, Okkyung Lee, Shelley Hirsch and Otomo
Yoshihide.
