Christian Marclay’s acclaimed installation The Clock 2010 has captivated audiences across the world from New York to Moscow.
24-hours long, the installation is a montage of thousands of film and television images of clocks, edited together so they show the actual time. It is a thrilling journey through cinematic history as well as a functioning timepiece.
Following several years of rigorous and painstaking research and production, Marclay collected together excerpts from well-known and lesser-known films including thrillers, westerns and science fiction. He then edited these so that they flow in real time. When watching The Clock you experience a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes.
While The Clock examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching The Clock experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once.
Tate Modern: Christian Marclay – The Clock (until Jan 20, 2019)
