Christian Marclay, The Clock

The National Gallery of Iceland is pleased to host the Icelandic premiere of the renowned Swiss American artist Christian Marclay’s masterwork, The Clock, 2010, an epic, 24-hour single channel video with sound. Winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale and widely acclaimed as one of the most significant works of art of the 21st century, The Clock is both a profound meditation about time and an homage to the history of cinema. 

Marclay’s video is structured as a montage of thousands of film clips, in black and white and in color, collected over the course of three years. Each clip references a moment in time, whether in dialogue or as indexed to a timepiece – a clock, watch, hourglass, sundial, or blinking LED alarm clock – covering in chronological sequence the entire span of a day, minute by minute. Synchronized to the local time, the video is itself a timepiece. The Clock is also a soundscape composed by Marclay, using the rhythms of sound and music to track the passage of time.

No single narrative emerges from the myriad moments in time that are spliced together in The Clock. Instead, an almost surreal effect emerges when observing the events that unfold over the course of a day. In one sense, The Clock is an epic narrative of human activity as told through the prism of cinema, the shared routines of daily existence inevitably leading to dramas of chance encounters and unexpected events.

The Clock is also a memento mori, a reminder of the temporality of life. Marclay has said that it is “very much about death in a way… The narrative gets interrupted constantly and you’re constantly reminded of what time it is.”   

There will be at least two 24-hour showings of The Clock: one on the opening night of the exhibition, and a second on the summer solstice. Other programming will include an artist talk at the time of the opening.

 
The exhibition has been funded in part by Pro Helvetia.