The Clock: Christian Marclay

The Clock evokes the wonder and illusionism of more than a century of cinema through a captivating 24-hour long video that plays in real-time. To produce this tribute to time and the moving picture, internationally-acclaimed artist Christian Marclay and his assistants spent three years gathering thousands of film and television clips from every era. Brilliantly edited by Marclay himself, The Clock is a montage of an impressive archive of clips that all share references to time and timepieces, demarcating, minute by minute, a 24-hour loop that audiences are invited to watch and listen to. The work unifies these disparate fragments into a coherent whole that unfolds in real time, functioning as an actual clock, allowing viewers to tell the precise time of day. Beyond its technical wizardry and dizzying accumulation of images, The Clock manages to create its own fiction, its own suspense, as time becomes the narrative.

Christian Marclay is the winner of a Golden Lion for best artist at the 2011 Venice Bienniale and is best known for his experimental work in sound and video art. This tour de force artwork shows how Marclay’s innovative artistic practice continues to combine aural and visual sources with a keen sensibility toward complex editing and sampling techniques.