Artist creator of The Clock answers the preverbal question, What Time Is It?
The list has been completed for 2012 and who is designated the number 2 slot, for the most influential people in the world? None other than Christian Marclay, the creator of the sensational installation, ‘The Clock’ Time magazine states that this list includes; ” The people who inspire us, entertain us, challenge us and change our world. Meet the breakouts, pioneers, moguls, leaders and icons who make up this year’s TIME 100.” It is all about Time and “finally an Artist has been met with a rare combination of critical approval and public affection. The idea was audacious in its simplicity and herculean in execution: take moments in films when people are interacting with time, looking at their watches, hurrying to intercept the 3:10 to Yuma or hanging on to the hands of Big Ben and splice them together in such a way that they unfold in real time over 24 hours, so that the whole thing becomes an accurate up to the minute timepiece.
Christian Marclay walks a fine line between being entertaining and mundane. His work The Clock which was a surprise international success in both New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery after having its London debut at White Cube, in Mason’s Yard in October and November 2011. It is constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or just a particular time of day. Marclay has excerpted thousands of these fragments and edited them so that they flow in real time. While ‘The Clock’ examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching ‘The Clock’ experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once. Even while ‘The Clock’ tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence. The Clock’ plays with how audiences experience narrative in cinema, examining the conventions and devices through which filmmakers create a persuasive illusion of duration. When watching a film, an audience is removed from normal time and swept up in a new register that corresponds to the narrative at hand. ‘The Clock’ transforms this condition of cinema: time, in this case, corresponds precisely to the actual time beyond the work. The audience will have the peculiar awareness of experiencing a fictional event, or countless events, at what appears to be the same time as when they watch it in the gallery. Using the medium of collage has been a recurring strategy for Christian Marclay since the late 1970s, when as a pioneering turntablist he began mixing sounds and records, before turning to album covers, works on paper and video. ‘Manga Scroll’, Marclay’s most recent collage-based work, was exhibited in the ground-floor gallery. Included in Marclay’s ‘Festival’, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, ‘Manga Scroll’ is a 20-metre long scroll featuring hundreds of onomatopoeic words excerpted from Manga cartoons, collaged by Marclay to create a chain of words buzzing with aural energy.Christian Marclay was born in California in 1955, raised in Switzerland and now lives in London and New York.
Time magazine released its annual list of the 100 “Most Influential People in the World” on Wednesday. Among them Kate and Pippa Middleton at number 94 and despite a State visit to the US last year,no sign of David Cameron.
Photo: Christian Marclay, The Clock 2010. Single channel video. Duration: 24 hours © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Tate Photography (Matt Greenwood) from press release