theconversation.com: There is something unnerving about The Clock, Christian Marclay’s acclaimed installation, which was recently on display at the Tate Modern in London before moving to Australia where it has appeared in Melbourne to sell-out crowds. This remarkable piece of contemporary art, which has travelled the world gathering awards and critical acclaim, is a montage of scenes drawn from thousands of films, from Orson Welles’ The Stranger to James Bond in Live and Let Die, which feature a clock or timepiece of some kind.
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This brief history lesson provided with the thoughts behind this installation caused me to think about the idea of time. We as humans have an obsession with what time it is, what is coming up, what we have to prepare for. If I have a long list of items to accomplish, I find myself thinking about the next task before finishing the first. This somewhat unhealthy habit has taken me away from enjoying the present moment. The fact that this installation is able to combine various instances in the media that center around this concept reveals the endless focus and concern about it. The fact that it includes over seventy references ensures that a broad audience will recognize examples and ponder their relation in terms of the film they are from. This makes me even more excited to see how the large clock is tied into the idea of time in Comedy of Errors this coming weekend.
I think the idea of showing movie clips that are related to the real world time is so smart because showing how characters in movies are obsessed with time really shows how the entire world is obsessed with time. This article really did teach me about how the world has changed to become so obsessed with time. It would never occur to me that it would be possible to live a life without the concept of time and without keeping track of time non-stop. This idea was definitely reassured when this article was talking about all of the ways that people have been keeping track of time. Although the full obsession with time is more modern, it is clear they people have been interested in knowing the time for way longer. I would totally watch this piece just for the waiting to see what is next and watching all of the next clips. I am definitely the kind of person who this article was talking about is focused in the next. Sometimes when I listen to music I just listen to the first lines of songs and then I skip them to see what the next song and I can do that for hours without actually listening to full songs. This article really put that obsession with the future and time in perspective for me.
This installation is really interesting. I really didn’t consider our fascination with time until now. I have sat in hundreds of hours of classes and lectures about maximizing time, managing time, how there is never enough time to do the thing. If I hear one more time that the smartest and best people in the world wake up at 4 in the morning, manage their lives down to the 15 minute block, and only sleep in 2 hour blocks I am going to lose it. This installation inspired me to really consider my personal relationship with time. The idea of using movie clips to pursue this message is really interesting. The way religious traditions revolve around time whether it be an amount of time fasting, a time of year to celebrate or to mourn all the way to the way people’s lives revolve around smart phones and technology that constantly present the time to us down to the second. I wish I could see this exhibit in person; the concept is fascinating and I want to consider it more personally.
I clicked on this article because I thought the article title made me think that there this installation was going to be some cool mechanical device, which caught my interest, but this continuous video is so neat. It is interesting to think how movies have every possible time viewed in them. We as humans do really prioritize and idolize our time. We obsess over time to the point where people start doing what Emma mentioned: planning everything down to the minute, and sleeping minimally in order to be using all the time possible to get things done. We see things start to fall apart if people lose track of time. To be honest, I do not totally understand how this installation causes the viewer to anticipate the future. Since this is a collection of clips, it feels more like an archive of the past and more about being able see everything that has been and how it will inevitably repeat.
Of course I got click-baited by the word installation, but this piece of art turned out to be worth checking. The part really made me want to go to see the whole 24 hours of it is that how directors/artists would like to decide when is the scene happening. There are many scripts specified the exact time of the scene down to a minute, and through this compilation we might find out how time interact with our imagination about the fiction world. Is there more intensive scene in day or night? What should natural lighting and environmental sound be like when the scene happens in mid night? All these question have a depth discussion waiting to be covered. The work used an absolute common standard to link up films across time zones, cultures and spaces, the artist even blurred the stories involved. After first few clips I felt just lost in the time and dragged into a endless ticking sound.
I think this article points out some very interesting historical facts about the development of timekeeping and watching. That said, it does seem to be very much a European history, and I’m curious about how this all developed in other parts of the world. I’ve done shows in a few countries which seemed to engage with time in a very different way, culturally. We called it “island time,” mostly because the countries we experienced the phenomenon in were island nations. For whatever reason, in those countries, punctuality was simply not all that important. Of course, when you are trying to put up a show, it can be frustrating to have crews wandering in (and out of) calls, but you have to learn to adapt yourself to the local situation. In a similar vein, there are parts of the world that are adapting “slow living” as a methodology. The idea is generally that we are rushing through life, and we don’t take the time to notice it happening. Mindfulness is a buzzword that frequently gets thrown around in the US as a similar idea, although I think it’s less a resistance to time than a resistance to technology.
This piece of work is totally fascinating. It’s no surprise that human obsession with timekeeping is as old as time itself, but to see instances of clocks and time in our cultural imagery on this scale of a collection is a bit unnerving. Time drives plots, causes urgency, creates conflict-- it is essential to so many great stories. Not only do I think that Marclay’s Clock effectively and economically makes its point, but I also appreciate the elegance of the work itself. The old timey grainy black and white film footage causes such a magical sense of nostalgia, and the iconic ever-ticking of the clock is unmistakable-- there is a familiarity in the imagery and sounds despite a lack of context for the scenes that are being watched. I also think this piece is so effective due to its irony; it portrays the constant passage of time while allowing the viewer to take a pause in their day.
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