Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay’s work spans sound, moving image, performance and collage. Since the late 1970s, he’s used and abused recorded media to explore how we experience time, memory and attention, with works that range from pioneering turntable experiments to ambitious, multi-channel installations. In 2010, he released The Clock, a work widely regarded by critics as one of the greatest artworks of the 21st century.
This 24-hour film installation assembles thousands of cinematic excerpts depicting the exact minute at which they appear. The result is a constantly shifting timeline that reframes a century of cinema as a single, synchronised loop. Moments of tension, humour, mundanity and drama fold into one another, creating an experience that is at once both profound and deeply intimate: a work designed to be entered, exited and re-entered as time itself keeps moving forward.
Where did the idea first come from?
I had the idea five years before I began, while working on a collaged video guiding live musicians. I wanted performers to synchronise without a conductor. In contemporary music, stopwatches are often used, so I thought, ‘What if the screen itself displayed clocks counting down? And what if I could find every minute of a 24-hour cycle?’ We found some footage and used them in a piece, and I thought, ‘There’s something there’. But I didn’t have the courage to start; I knew it would be such a huge job.
It features over 12,000 individual clips from thousands of different films. How long did it take to produce?
It took three years. It started when I moved to London in 2007. I didn’t have a studio, but I knew I had to start working. All I needed at the beginning was a computer. Then I needed two computers. Then I needed assistants. It grew from there. I wasn’t working on it constantly – I also did other projects, had exhibitions, had a life – but that life slowly disappeared as I got more and more involved in editing The Clock. Eventually there was a deadline, and it was finished. And that was 15 years ago. Wow. To me it’s an old piece. It’s amazing that it still has the success it has and that it’s been shown all over the world.
It’s an astounding cinematic experience, because just as you recognise clips from favourite movies, the constant depiction of clocks and watches makes you horribly conscious of time ticking away – totally conscious of wasting away your time watching it.
I’m not forcing you to waste your time. Hopefully it’s not a waste. It’s like any exhibition; some people might think it’s a waste of time. But if you connect with the work, it never is.
That came out wrong. I didn’t mean it like that…
Don’t apologise. I’ve said that myself. People have the option of spending a lot of time there. I encourage people to come back at different moments, when they don’t feel stressed. Come at unusual hours – 3am after you’ve been out all night – because they make you think about time differently. Cinema usually makes you forget time or compress it. You can watch a whole saga spanning generations pass by in hours, or a minute can stretch for eternity. The Clock does the opposite, making you hyper-aware of how elastic time really is. Sometimes time is slowed down, especially in suspenseful moments where a single minute can feel like five. And then there’s our own perception of time, where people say, “OMG, I can’t believe an hour just went by,” even though they could see the clock constantly ticking.
One of your stipulations is that a museum has to show it for its entire 24-hour duration. Why is that important?
If you’re going to show a painting, you wouldn’t just show half of it. I’m a bit disappointed that the Neue Nationalgalerie isn’t keeping it open longer than just two 24-hour performances. But of course, it costs a lot to keep a museum open, and staff have to be paid… It’s not about seeing all 24 hours. And I don’t advise it. Seeing it in one stretch would be very unhealthy and stupid. But some people love the challenge. They’ll sit there for 24 hours, pee in their pants, and forget about the rest of their lives. For me, it’s important that people have the choice. If you want to stay 24 hours, that’s your problem. Good luck!
Couldn’t it be shown outside? Then anyone could just walk up to the museum and see it at any moment.
That’s a good point, but bonkers. That’s not understanding The Clock, which is a video and sound installation. If you’re outside, you have the sound of the city, distractions, no controlled sound environment. You have to sit in a dark space with other people.
You’re quite right – and I saw a video of you once meticulously measuring the seating in front of the screen before a showing. The cinematic experience is integral to the work.
It’s important to offer viewers the best experience possible, especially for durational work. You want people comfortable enough to spend hours without suffering. Usually for film work in museums, you walk into a dark space, it stinks, you can’t see, you don’t know where to sit. You don’t know if you’re [going] to be stuck there for 15 minutes or two hours. Did I catch the beginning? When can I leave? With The Clock, it’s very clear: it lasts 24 hours. Every time you come in is the perfect time. Every time you leave is the perfect time.
If you want to stay 24 hours, that’s your problem. Good luck!
You once described The Clock as a memento mori: a reminder of time passing and of death. Was that something you were conscious of while making it?
I’ve always been interested in the notion of time and its brevity. Even in my early work with vinyl records, damage to the record – the scratches, the way the grooves wear down – eventually becomes audible. That noise is also the sound of time. The skips, the pops, the hiss: that’s not what the musicians intended, but it’s what time does to the medium. The medium itself expresses the passing of time. So I’ve always been conscious of time and death, and of how short life is, which is why I think we should be enjoying it.
Your more recent film and sound work Doors (2022) uses found footage to create an endless loop of entrances and exits – actors crossing thresholds and reappearing as others. It teases our sense of anticipation and curiosity, our desperation to know what’s beyond the next door.
Cinema is manipulative. It creates atmospheres to draw you in. With Doors, some viewers get frustrated because it’s not narrative cinema; it’s not cinema at all, but an installation. It’s about that frustration, and about the way moving images are presented in museums, where you never know how to behave. Loops like these are meant to be entered at any time. That’s very different from cinema, where you sit with everyone else for two hours and then leave. Installations require a different approach.
Performance was also a big part of your practice, and during your DAAD residency in Berlin, you created Berlin Mix (1993), a simultaneous concert featuring over 180 musicians. Do you still perform?
These weren’t just professionals, but [also] street performers from all over the city. We played in a tramway station, mixing all these sounds as I conducted live. At the time, I was also performing with records, though not as a DJ. My music wasn’t about making people dance; I treated records as instruments, improvising with others. But I stopped doing that about 10 years ago.
Why’s that?
Because I was starting to have hearing problems. Too much loud music for too many years. I also felt at the time that records had become obsolete, yet they keep having a renaissance. They did in the 90s, and now even more. It’s interesting how some old technologies seem to stick. But I’m more interested in music as a cultural phenomenon. Certain songs, bands and recordings become soundtracks to shared experiences. Of course, when I did these works in the 1980s, we listened through analogue devices. Now music is faster, cheaper.
Less meaningful?
I don’t think it’s less meaningful. There are just more choices now, so it can act more as a divider than a way to bring people together. Everyone has their own style, their own musical lifestyle. But I don’t listen to pop music much at all. Music is mostly part of my environment. It’s everywhere. People listen to music in earbuds and shut out the world. It becomes very individualistic. Music is almost unavoidable now. Even in moving images, there’s a constant need to connect sound and image. Synchronisation is critical.
So much of your practice is based on collaging pre-existing material. Is that because it already has a resonance to begin with?
I like working with things people are familiar with. I’m not so much interested in inventing something out of nothing. I want to reflect on our environment, the things we share, the things we have in common. So it’s really about reacting to what’s around me, and the found material is always somehow at the source of the work. It’s also what The Clock is – a giant collage of found material, mixing film, television, different languages, different styles.
Quite literally found material if we consider your photographs of chewing gum or cotton buds you discover on your walks around London.
Exactly. It’s right there under your feet, but nobody sees it until you frame it, underline it, show it. Something low and trashy can suddenly look beautiful in a strange way.
Is there beauty in it?
Oh yes. The way the gum gets embedded in the pavement has some redeeming quality. People on the run need a sugar fix, or they chew because they’re nervous. A lot of that work – animations from photographs of trash I found on the street – deals with our addictions, the stimulants we use: sugar, tobacco, caffeine. Everyday people interact with them, and what I photograph on my walks around London are the traces left behind. When you look closely, they tell a lot about who we are and how we live.
The Clock runs through Jan 25 at Neue Nationalgalerie.
