MoMA Is Exhibiting A 24-Hour-Long Movie That Operates Like Clockwork

It’s high noon at the Museum of Modern Art. On a screen in a darkened theater, the hands of a clock converge on the number twelve.

Cinephiles will recognize this moment as the climax of a 1952 Western starring Gary Cooper. Viewers who linger may subsequently identify scenes from movies such as Mommie Dearest and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Each clip focuses on a timepiece indicating the current hour and minute in Manhattan. The montage, which spans twenty-four hours and runs on a loop, operates as a clock.

The Clock is as complex in execution as it’s simple in concept. The multimedia artist Christian Marclay enlisted half a dozen assistants to find the footage, which is sourced from approximately twelve thousand films and TV episodes spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries. Over a two year period, Marclay spliced disparate clips from virtually every known genre to craft a new narrative with time as the protagonist. Initially screened in London in 2010, the work has since become a classic of durational art in the tradition of Andy Warhol’s Empire and John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP.

As is the case with those earlier works, The Clock has the paradoxical property of being both renowned and unknown. It’s a familiar stranger, to borrow the title of a classic book about time (which glosses a concept originally articulated by St. Augustine). The simplicity of the concept makes it easy to reference in passing, much as Empire can be described as a fixed view of the Empire State Building screened over eight continuous hours.

But has anyone actually seen the whole thing? Marclay viewed every scene many times while editing it. But has anyone watched it continuously? The Museum of Modern Art has gamely offered the opportunity by presenting several all-night screenings. An intrepid MoMA staffer actually sat through one of them. He fell asleep.

That the work eludes full viewing is not a failing. Instead it should be seen as an indication that the work is more than mere concept. Or, to be more precise, Marclay’s execution reveals that the concept contains unforeseeable complexity underlying its simplicity. The Clock need not be viewed in entirety for the complexity to be revealed. Seeing all of it might even be beside the point. Meaning emerges from minute to minute.

The most striking quality of The Clock, at least initially, is that time is experienced vicariously. Sitting in the dark, viewers become voyeurs, watching every tick and tock. This perspective comes quite naturally, since film is a vehicle for voyeurism. What is unusual is the attentiveness to what would ordinarily be background information. With time as the protagonist, the viewer seeks to understand its character as keenly as people watching High Noon seek to understand the character played by Gary Cooper.

Observed in this way, time loses the abstraction of a purely physical phenomenon, everywhere the same. We recognize time to be contextual and interpersonal. It’s the stuff of relationships. Although The Clock is not polemical, it calls attention to the consequences of mechanization, advancing themes evoked in some of Marclay’s source material (most obviously Modern Times). Marclay’s work reveals an alternative to standardization: In contrast to the precision timepieces that populate it, The Clock keeps time in aggregate while syncopating time from moment to moment.

Christian Marclay. Still from The Clock. 2010. Video (black and white and color, sound). 24 hrs. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. © 2024 Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery and White Cube

The syncopation of time arises in part from stylistic differences over the lifespan of cinema: Different periods have different pacing. The scenes that comprise The Clock are not set in chronological order, progressing from the oldest films to the newest. On the contrary, movies of different eras are juxtaposed. The cyclical time of clocks and watches is constructed by fragmenting the linear time of cinematic history and reorganizing the fragments according to a logic alien to their origin. Almost miraculously, a circle emerges from countless tangents.

Marclay’s deconstruction and reconstruction of time does not reduce to a coherent theory of the fourth dimension. On the contrary, The Clock celebrates the perplexity we feel when we strive for definitions. And yet, the work is perfectly lucid. Like time, that familiar stranger, The Clock seems strange only upon reflection.

Many of the strategies Marclay used to make The Clock can be seen in his earlier works. The most obvious forerunner is Video Quartet, a 2002 work in which four screens show four videos simultaneously, each constructed from myriad film clips, all synced in a way that interlaces their soundtracks into a musical composition. More than just a feat of virtuoso editing, Video Quartet liberates the films from their intended function. Their appropriation is ontological. They’re orchestrated like musical instruments. In an equivalent way, The Clock appropriates cinematic material to make a timepiece.

The rupture opens up what it means to be a clock. But there’s a reciprocal effect on the movies themselves. By setting the scenes to local time, the movies are defictionalized. The fourth wall is broken. The films enter everyday life. Or viewed from the opposite vantage, time no longer seems real. The clock becomes nothing more nor less than a narrative device.