Christian Marclay | The Clock, 2010
Single channel video | Duration: 24 hours | Courtesy White Cube
British art show 7. In the days of the comet
The Clock, features thousands of found film fragments of clocks, watches, and characters reacting to a particular time of day. These are edited together to create a 24 hour-long, single-channel video that is synchronised with local time. As each new clip appears a new narrative is suggested, only to be swiftly overtaken by another. Watching, we inhabit two worlds; that of fiction and that of fact, as real-time seconds fly inexorably by.
These clips from several thousand films, are structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which is it being exhibited. The scenes in which we see clocks or hear chimes tend to be either transitional ones suggesting the passage of time or suspenseful ones building up to dramatic action.
when do you stop watching the film?
fixed on film but conscious of real-time
how long did it take to make? production of the work as much a part of it as the final film
endurance- making the film- appreciate that it can/has been done
