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Frédéric  Reby

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6 déc. 20234 min de lecture

Let's talk about Christian Marclay!

Dernière mise à jour : 21 avr.



Christian Marclay, “The Clock” 2010



Introduction


The Clock is a 24-hour film created by the artist Christian Marclay. Showed for the first time in 2010 at the White Cube Gallery in London, his work won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale the year after. To make it simple, the film is a patchwork of thousands of footage or samples extracted from movies through the 50s to the first decade of the 2000s, from Orson Welles to Quentin Tarantino.

All the sequences stage a relationship with time and this through: clocks, watches, dialogues, locations like restaurants, train stations, offices and so on. It’s always a question of time, the wait, the idea of the forthcoming moments.

This is the aim of that work: put the audience into time, in its inherent tension. This idea is great and the result is amazing.

Marclay succeeded in building a real-time movie of 24 hours from 10am to 10am the next day. When visitors come in the room they're on time.


But where did this idea come from?

To answer it we need to make a quick review of Marclay’s work.


He was born in 1955 in San Raphael California to an American mother and a Swiss-French father. He grew up in Switzerland, and, when he turned 20, he went to the School of visual art in Geneva. Returning to the US in 1977, Marclay got involved into the Punk-Rock scene of New York, trying to mix his avant-garde culture close to 50s movement Fluxus, especially John Cage, and the freedom of Punk.


The gesture of mixing elements is clearly the common thread of Marclay’s work. Music material (I mean physical ones) and contemporary art was closely linked. So, even if he was not in the Hip-hop scene, in that era, he explored music and samples through cut and recomposed vinyls played on turntables, creating noisy experimental music segments. This way of making art is, obviously, close to those of Duchamps, the Dada and Beat Generation Artists.


The first exhibitions

“Footsteps”


For his first exhibition «Footsteps» in 1989, he invited people to wander in a room of which the floor was cover of vinyl discs containing footsteps recordings. Following the six-week exhibition, the vinyls, damaged by the all of the foot-traffic, were removed and became recordings of new scratchy rhythms, which were then packaged with a poster of the show and sold as individual pieces.



“Body Mix”








Then with the series «Body Mix», created between 1991 and 1992, he gathered vinyl covers from various artists to create odd characters.


“Telephones”

Meanwhile he was also interested in video creations. One of them reminds us “The clock”: "Telephones" in 1995. Associating footage from films, he built an impossible narrative script of a phone scenes going step by step from the dial, to all kind of ringtones, to the time-frame before picking up, to the rush, to the answer to the call, to that moment when no one is speaking, then the impossible dialogue, to finally hanging up.

We could consider it as an appetizer announcing the masterpiece, "The Clock", in 2010.


...Let’s go back to our subject:


3 years of work


“I was working in New York on a ‘video score’ – a video projection that triggers music from live musicians. I wanted to mark time and one way to do that was to use clocks. That’s when I had this eureka moment. What if, in the history of film, I could find every minute of 24-hour? But it would take for ever – it’s an impossible task!”, The Guardian, sept. 10th 2018.

Marclay explained that to manage to do this gigantic work he put ads in several video stores and finally found 3 assistants who spent their time watching all kind of movies and selected all the scenes staging time. Some gave up, others stood, the gathering was not so easy. Then, patiently, Marclay edited all that eclectic material to create this 24-hour film.


What is the purpose?


As Marclay comments : being constantly in the tension of time works like a “memento mori”. The “tick-tock” is the countdown announcing Death. But not only hopefully. It's also our relationship with time, it is, of course, the relationship between cinema and time, it's a journey.

It’s a beautiful journey into cinema and its code. Probably to understand better how cinema can use time in drama. How, as a public, we react to tension and relief. It’s a way also to accept the frustration. Due to the fact that none of the sequences ends, you stay in a kind suspended time. The forthcoming moment never comes. The next sequence puts you back to the tension of the wait, the expectation of a new narrative plot.

I’ve seen 45 minutes of the movie and I felt stuck in a time going on but strangely never seeming to go forward. I was kept in tension and it was pretty addictive. I remembered that it was hard to go out, nearly impossible. I’m sure if I would have been alone I would have stayed there for hours.

It's definitely a must-see!


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