The Clock is a 2010 video installation by Christian Marclay. It combines excerpts from thousands of films and television shows into a 24-hour loop that always reflects the current time.
The Clock premiered on October 15, 2010 at White Cube in London. Six copies of it were sold, and it now screens at various locations around the world.
Production[]
Production of The Clock began with a grant of over $100,000 from White Cube in London and the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City. Through an ad in a Clerkenwell video store, Marclay recruited a team of assistants. They watched DVDs and recorded scenes with references to time. Marclay then edited these clips together, converting the original footage into a standardized 16:9 aspect ratio with a 1024 × 576 resolution. As the project grew, he spread the content across two Power Mac G5s, divided based on the time of day.
In 2010, a few months before the premiere of The Clock, Marclay brought on Quentin Chiappetta from Media Noise to work on the sound design. He traveled to the Brooklyn studio, where the two refined the sound, often recording new audio to go with the footage.
In total, production lasted three years. The final work uses roughly 12,000 clips from over a thousand different works.
Exhibition[]
The Clock premiered at White Cube on October 15, 2010. Four institutional sales of The Clock were made: one to the Museum of Modern Art; one to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; one to the National Gallery of Canada and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and one to the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Israel Museum. Another private sale was made to hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen. The four institutional copies have been exhibited regularly around the world since 2010, with no more than one institution at a time screening it.
Exhibitions of The Clock take place in gallery spaces. Marclay's specifications request that the video be projected onto a 21' × 12' screen in a room with white IKEA couches. Because of the work's ambiguous copyright status, institutions generally offer viewing as part of their general admission instead of selling tickets to see the installation. To make sure that the full 24-hour loop would be on display, Marclay requires that institutions agree to allow viewing for all 24 hours of the work at some point during each run.
Credits[]
- Director and Editor: Christian Marclay
- Computer and Editing Assistant: Paul Anton Smith
- Sound Design: Quentin Chiappetta, Media Noise
- Research Assistants: Ed Atkins, Philip Beeken, Andrew Gibbs, Joanne Kernan, Ryan MacLean, Konstantinos Menelaou, Paul Anton Smith
- Project Coordinator: Clare Morris
- Technical Manager: Scott Martin
- Technical Consultant and Software Design: Mick Grierson
- Co-Produced by: White Cube and Paula Cooper Gallery