The Museum of Fine Arts Boston & National Gallery of Canada Join LACMA in "Clock-Watching"

Written by Adrian Bottfield Friday, 30 September 2011 22:33

Boston, MA.- The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the National Gallery of Canada announced this week that they have jointly acquired a copy of "The Clock" by Christian Marclay. The Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA) purchased an edition of Marclay's masterpiece in April for $467,500 and MOMA in New York is also rumored to be considering buying a copy. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston is currently undergoing refurbishment, and will unveil the new Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art in September. Marclay’s work will have its Boston premiere on September 17 and 18, when the MFA hosts a 24-hour celebration of the new wing.

“This first screening of ‘The Clock’ will be an unforgettable way to mark a new era and historic moment for the MFA’s contemporary art program,” says Jen Mergel. In Los Angeles, "The Clock" will be screened in LACMA’s Bing Theater in early May for its West Coast premiere, and in the galleries thereafter, before its celebratory screening at the Venice Biennale in June.

The edited footage of clocks not only provides cues as to the role of time’s passage in the appropriated film narrative, but also serves as a functioning timepiece that marks the exact time in real time for the viewer. When one sees The Clock at 1:17 pm, for example, the action (or inaction) in the clip will be taking place at the same moment. Screened in a cinematic setting, it retains the rhythmic pulsations and tonal shifts typical of Marclay’s sound works but also plays with the viewer’s sense of expectation, casting time as a multifaceted protagonist and creating a conflation of tensions à propos the layered tempos of contemporary life. Since the dawning of the medium, experimental and documentary filmmakers have used found or appropriated footage, such as in the collage techniques of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Constructivism, among other historical avant-gardes.


An important, albeit much shorter, precedent to Marclay’s "The Clock" is Bruce Conner’s "A Movie" (1958), an experimental film which edits together clips from disparate sources, from stag films to sports footage to mainstream melodramas, to create a meta-film that throws out all rules of linearity and narrative progression. Similarly, "The Clock" causes the viewer to ruminate on what David Velasco, writing for Artforum in February 2011, calls a film or television show’s “temporal grammar” in the way that Marclay “string(s) together this panoply of irrational times according to a rational tempo, [making] salient the idiosyncrasies of movie time.” Additionally, The Clock pays homage to "Empire" (1964) the epic eight-hour film by Andy Warhol, which tracks the flickering floodlights of the Empire State Building from sunset to near total darkness around 2 am. It also recalls Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s signature film The Way Things Go (1987), in which a Rube Goldberg device performs a very simple task via a series of chain reactions in 29 minutes.

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