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If Christian Marclay Could Put Time In A Bottle

Quite possibly the only critical piece you’ll ever read on Christian Marclay’s The Clock.

Back in LA for a much-needed winter reprieve. Settled into our seats at the Arclight, waiting for the movie to begin—Drive, one of the wildest cinematic rides in recent memory, a more perfect movie experience you can’t imagine—we were reminded of why it is that we still go to the movies. Especially here in Hollywood, the company town. We go to be transported, in the sense of being both emotionally moved and taken outside of ourselves, to hold the everyday world at arm’s length, to be told great stories, whether believable or not. But say you’re going to the 6:40 screening and your friends are stuck in traffic. You nervously check your watch, it’s 6:25, then 6:30. You hope they make it to the theater in time. The previews will buy them an extra five or ten minutes. You’ve got good seats but will they find you in the dark? Even if they’re only a few blocks away, Sunset is bumper-to-bumper. So near and so far. We’ve all been there and it’s a major drag. (If Ryan Gosling were behind the wheel, they would have been there by now.) Christian Marclay‘s video The Clock (2010) is that anxiety times the longest day of your life. It’s what we go to the movies to avoid.

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A lot of positive ink has been spilled over The Clock. Perhaps too much at this point, with people gushing over it either because they really do believe it’s “an abundant, magnificent work” (Financial Times), that it’s “relentless and compelling” (The Guardian), and “utterly transfixing” (The Huffington Post), or gushing because they’ve been conditioned to respond so predictably to the plodding ambition that passes for genius these days. That’s entertainment! And Hooray for Hollywood. But this is art, or it’s supposed to be. There are many who love the guessing game that accompanies Marclay’s video—as they identify scenes from their favorite movies and TV shows, scoring points with their fellow viewers—quite possibly the same people who made Trivial Pursuit so popular in its day. If this was your idea of fun then you couldn’t beat The Clock, an interminable video game in which the audience, like its creator, congratulates itself for cleverly sorting all the pieces of the puzzle. And don’t discount the fact that Puritanism continues to pervade American culture. We admire hard work and fortitude, though sadly we’re too easily impressed by grandiosity and duration. Critics back in 1964 weren’t falling all over themselves for Andy Warhol’s Empire, but that film is simply a silent, static shot of the Empire State Building in black-and-white. With no giant gorilla or aviation stunts, not much happens over the course of its eight-plus hours. The Clock, in stark contrast, is practically action-packed, anxiety-ridden, and runs for 24. Not that there’s any great mystery or suspense. Because no matter where you come in during a screening of The Clock, you would have to be an imbecile not to have figured out what’s going on within a very short while. An imbecile or a dim-witted child. Maybe the space between Warhol’s Empire and Marclay’s Clock is the end of the proverbial line, the dead end for the avant-garde in film. While The Clock was packing them in at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, with an impatient, agitated crowd stretching all the way down the block on weekends (the mob mentality reared its ugly head now and then), someone went around Chelsea and anonymously left decals on nearby lampposts which read:

Christian Marclay
Your 15 Minutes Will Be Up
In 24 Hours

And yet the accolades streamed in, and continue to do so. All very troubling for a few Hollywood film editors who read about The Clock, apparently two years in the making, and wondered: What took him so long? Friends who live in LA were nonplussed, noting that The Clock wasn’t that different from the sort of montage you see every year on the Academy Awards show, or for that matter what’s served up every day to the tourists on the Universal Studios Tour. Well, different in its ambition and its intent, which was what exactly? A number of film students randomly polled at UCLA wondered why Marclay went to all the trouble, what he was after. Despite being mostly baffled, they were in agreement on the likelihood that Marclay had made The Clock for the same reason that movie studios obscenely pump millions into one dubious project after another: they are in search of a blockbuster. And there’s nothing like a hit movie and the sweet smell of success. Marclay’s video, please take note, is not a unique work but an edition of six, each one priced at half a million dollars, with all of them sold ostensibly to museums. (One wonders if there is an "artist’s proof, or proofs?, the extra copies that artists and galleries keep for themselves, saving for a rainy day, and which can quietly come on the market at a later date.) Having not paid a dime for any of the clips he used, Marclay claims, and rightly so, “fair use,” while the museums that now own and show the video will certainly charge their increasingly steep admission fees. What for Marclay was free for the taking, the public will have to pay for. The relentless ticking of The Clock was troubling as well for a young French artist named Etienne Chambaud, who you’ve probably never heard of, but who figures into the story of Marclay’s opus, little hand to its big hand, a ghost haunting the machine.

Read the full article on VICE.com