![]() ![]() Even the wait in line adds to the anticipation. Marclay’s collage is nothing less than a masterpiece, and one that must be experienced in person to be appreciated.įirst, there is the event of it all, of gathering together with fellow film-goers to have a common and unique experience. ![]() No description of this 24-hour installation can possibly convey its genius. Accepting the Golden Lion, the artist humorously invoked Andy Warhol, thanking the jury “for giving The Clock its fifteen minutes.” At the 2011 Venice Biennale, Marclay won the Golden Lion for best artist in the exhibit. “If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it,” Marclay told Zalweski. As Zalewski details in his New Yorker profile, no one has ever objected to the artist’s appropriation of sounds and images in the past, so using thousands of film and music clips in The Clock didn’t give Marclay pause. One cost that didn‘t factor into Marclay’s budget was copyright payments. Both galleries gave Marclay financial support to cover the budget of creating the piece, which cost more than $100,000. The Clock finally debuted at the end of 2010 at London’s White Cube Gallery and was first shown in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery. The Clock is a film about film, but also a film about our own mortality and obsession with time. In The Clock time passes not only in minutes, but also in years, as we glimpse actors like Joan Crawford, Catherine Deneuve, and Jack Nicholson in youth and in old age. This is the time when people wait, comb their hair, smoke, call a friend on the phone, commute to work, or cook dinner. But life is less outlandish when the hour hand passes the 12. ![]() ![]() The top of the hour is a popular time for cinema’s most dramatic moments-hangings, bombings, shootouts, trains leaving the station. The Clock has no beginning and no end, but endlessly loops, just as a real clock does.Īs the clocks tick and we see snippets of shootouts, bank heists, chase scenes, romances, comedies, and detective dramas all appropriated from the rich history of cinema, patterns begin to emerge-travelers rushing to catch trains, men with hangovers smashing alarm clocks. One moment Patrick Macnee is looking at his pocket watch in The Avengers the next, Tobey Maguire is racing to deliver pizzas in Spiderman. The time is conveyed through dialogue, clocks, watches, and other timepieces. (Note: You can watch Marclay’s Telephone at the end of this article).īut while Video Quartet was only fourteen minutes long, and Telephone a mere seven, The Clock is Marclay’s magnum opus, a mesmerizing 24-hour montage of thousands of time-related movie clips that have been masterfully edited and synchronized to show the actual time. The Clock is the brainchild of Swiss sound and video artist Christan Marclay, the same artist who created the brilliant video works Telephone (1995) and Video Quartet (2002). So is The Clock really worth of all this trouble? I’m happy to report that it is. Wait times for screenings have burgeoned to two hours at some points and can be longest around midnight, when the ultimate climax of this 24-hour art installation occurs. The Twitter feed for the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center has also reported sightings of Angelica Huston, Marlo Thomas, and Dr. Before I arrived, playwright Wallace Shawn had been spotted in the queue. Last week I made the four-and-a-half-hour drive to New York City and stood in line for an hour in the rain to see a rare screening of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, currently on view at The Lincoln Center Festival. For more information, visit MoMA’s website.) Marclay’s The Clock is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through January 21, 2013, with a special 24-hour screening on New Year’s Eve. (NOTE: This review is from the summer of 2012. Stills from The Clock by Christian Marclay (Photo courtesy ) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |