While working on the silent video Screen Play in 2005, artist and composer Christian Marclay had to find footage of clocks.
“I started thinking, ‘What if I could find every minute of day and night?” he said.
That’s what Marclay did for his 24-hour masterpiece The Clock, which has been shown at museums in New York, Los Angeles, Japan and Europe, and won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. After working for three years doing research with assistants, Marclay edited thousands of film clips together with a clock or a watch showing all 1,440 minutes in the day. The Clock unfolds in real time with footage from Westerns, thrillers, silent movies and foreign films.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will show The Clock during the final months in its current building (the Mission and 3rd Street location will close on June 2, and SFMOMA will be having off-site exhibitions until the expanded building opens in 2016). With packing up and getting ready for the move, the staff has been thinking about time and how quickly it flies by. Rudolf Frieling, SFMOMA's curator of media arts, says The Clock (showing on the 4th floor, during regular museum hours, with 24-hour showings on Saturdays in May) joins other works of art, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses in exploring what can happen in a day as well as the compositions of Erik Satie and John Cage, which investigate time and performance.
“It’s the ultimate embodiment of cinematic time,” Frieling said at a press conference about The Clock.
The SFMOMA has had a long relationship with Marclay, who was born in San Rafael and raised in Switzerland – the museum commissioned Marclay’s multiscreen Video Quartet in 2002.
Frieling called The Clock transformative and mesmerizing. Visitors often come, expecting to spend 10 minutes or so, but find themselves there for a couple of hours. Frieling calls watching it at SFMOMA on the Ikea love seats that can fit about 80 people at one time, a hybrid experience.
“You don’t feel like you’re at the museum, but you’re not really at the cinema,” he said.
Marclay said he’s long wanted to make a movie that doesn’t really have a beginning or an end.
“The theme of time is something I’m interested in,” he said. “Time is the essence of music in some ways.”
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