The Great Ticking Time Piece: Christian Marclay’s The Clock

On a bright and sunny Friday afternoon, I find myself inside one of the exhibition rooms of the National Gallery of Iceland. The familiar space, usually lined with artworks on the walls, has now been transformed into a black box: thick blackout curtains shut out the light, and soft, comfortable sofas are scattered across the floor, turning the gallery into a temporary cinema. On screen, a video moves from scene to scene — some instantly recognisable, others pulled from the deeper corners of world cinema.

What binds these disparate clips together is a singular motif — clocks. They’re everywhere.

“Like everybody else, I’m anxious about time and how time flies and how life is so short. This piece is about how we are all vulnerable to time.”

A character checks their watch. A wall clock strikes an hour. A bell tolls from a tower in a city you recognise. And what’s more — all these clocks show real time. It’s 13:45 on my phone, and exactly the same time on the screen. In a world ruled by time, calendars, countdowns and constant notifications, watching time tick by feels strangely intense. I find it slightly anxiety-inducing rather than meditative. Ironically, right on cue, my phone buzzes to remind me that my interview with the artist is about to begin.

The piece in question is The Clock — a 24-hour video loop by Swiss-American visual and sound artist Christian Marclay. Since its premiere at the White Cube gallery in London in 2010, The Clock has travelled through all timezones, winning the Golden Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale and earning a reputation as one of the most influential artworks of this century. Now, more than a decade later, The Clock — and Christian himself — has finally arrived in Reykjavík.

Why did it take so long? And given how much has changed in the past decade, is the piece still timely today?

Never off time

“Well, it still feels relevant,” Christian says matter-of-factly, as we meet a few hours before the exhibition opens. “We’re all obsessed with time.”

Serious and rather sparse with his words in the beginning, Christian Marclay has been carving out a space for himself at the crossroads of sound and visual art for the better part of four decades. His career began in late-1970s New York, where he was among the first to use turntables as instruments. Since then, he’s built a varied and experimental body of work spanning video, sculpture, photography and performance — with The Clock still his most famous creation, even if he admits it takes up a lot of his time.

The piece has only been shown once before in Scandinavia, in Denmark, as coordinating curator Pari Stave explains. Bringing it to Iceland now wasn’t necessarily about the timing, but more about the opportunity to show it in Reykjavík at all. The piece marks the beginning of a new video exhibition chapter at the gallery, which will host a retrospective of video art pioneer Steina Vasulka this autumn.

Pari Stave and Christian Marclay

The Clock has been likened to a time capsule, preserving the fragmented history of cinema. Whether you’re a cinephile or not, you’ll recognise many of the scenes — and plenty more will leave you thinking, “Where have I seen this before?”

“I was curious to see how younger people would react because 10 years ago, they were 10 years old, and now they’re 20 — that’s a big change in their life,” Christian continues, pondering The Clock’s ongoing relevance. “Apparently, they still enjoy it, even though they are not so knowledgeable about the history of cinema, and they might not know all these films and these actors.”

“Memory is part of the piece,” he says. “You can’t help but recognise people and think, ‘Oh yeah, I know these people.’ They’re like family in a weird way because you’ve seen them so many times. Here, they appear maybe multiple times, at different times of their life, not always in chronological order. You might see someone in their 50s, then suddenly, you see them in the early black and white version of themselves, much younger, but that comes later — it doesn’t follow their biological clock.”

Watch your way

Just like the real thing, The Clock runs for 24 hours — built from a staggering 12,000 clips pulled from film and television. It’s been screened in its entirety at venues around the world, often drawing viewers who settle in for the long haul. The National Gallery of Iceland has planned two continuous 24-hour screenings — one on opening night, and another on June 21, the summer solstice. The first was so popular that the museum is already hinting at adding a third screening, if demand keeps up. [Updated: a new 24-hour screening has been added on Thursday, May 29.]

Still, despite all the acclaim, some have questioned whether The Clock can truly be called a modern masterpiece when only a handful of devoted “clockwatchers” have seen it all the way through.

“It’s not about spending 24 hours in there,” Christian clarifies. “It’s not an endurance piece. It’s a piece that you repeat, you revisit at different times when you feel like you have time, when it doesn’t interfere with your schedule that much.”

Even though years of his life went into making the piece, Christian admits he usually ends up watching the same few hours each time it’s installed. Sitting through the full 24? Not his thing.

“It would be torture,” he says dryly. “Why would I do that? You have to eat, you have to go to the bathroom, you have to move a little bit. I don’t encourage people to stay there all night.”

Most of the action in The Clock plays out before midnight. After that, things quiet down — people try to sleep or, more often than you’d expect, commit crimes and acts of violence. Christian tells me that the early morning stretch between 3:00 and 5:00 — when the world is at its drowsiest — was the hardest to fill. But by 5:00, things slowly stir back to life: streets light up, characters head to work, and the rhythm of the day begins to build again.

“It’s not an endurance piece. It’s a piece that you repeat, you revisit at different times when you feel like you have time.”

“I hope people would come in the morning,” he says. “Early morning is really nice. But then your life becomes part of this thing. If it’s morning, you just had breakfast, or maybe you didn’t yet, and you see people drinking coffee, and you feel like having a cup. Or if you’re a smoker, you might want a cigarette,” he adds. “And if someone on the screen is yawning, and you’re tired, especially during the night, everybody in the room starts yawning. I like that, that tension between real life and the life on screen. So the time is the same, therefore you can’t separate your life and The Clock.”

That said, how does the artist himself relate to time? “I was raised in Switzerland,” Christian says with a smile. “I’m pretty punctual.” He adds, “like everybody else, I’m anxious about time and how time flies and how life is so short. This piece is about how we are all vulnerable to time.”

The simple genius

Similarly to many great art pieces, The Clock started with a conceptually simple idea. It is its scale is that makes it monumental. Just think about the countless hours spent sorting through footage, followed by piecing it all together, which, understandably, was a massive undertaking — or, to put it mildly, a pain in the ass. Technically speaking, The Clock could be called a film — there’s enough editing, structure, and ambition for ten of them. But Christian prefers to call it video. “I’m not a filmmaker. I’m a videographer who steals from films,” he says.

Christian Marclay Detail of The Clock, 2010 Single-channel video with sound 24 hours © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and White Cube, London. Photo: Todd-White Photography

Over three years, Christian hired assistants who were tasked with sourcing footage of every kind of clock or time-related object they could find. Christian then edited everything on two screens — one for the AM hours, the other for the PM.

“All I did was edit every day,” he shares. “People would, on their own time, rent DVDs and I would assign different genres, styles, periods to different people, so they didn’t watch the same films. Then I’d work with whatever they brought me, create a timeline and place these things.”

The most enjoyable part, Christian recalls, was finding playful connections between clips. But it was also gruelling and time-consuming — hours could be spent just putting together one minute of footage.

“Today, it would be impossible to make this piece,” he says. “I don’t know how it is here in Iceland, but in London, you can’t find any DVD rentals anymore, maybe a few very niche kind of places. Because now people download their films, and the quality is not as good as on a DVD.”

“It still takes a lot of my time.”

Still, if Christian were to make The Clock today, he doesn’t think it would change much. “It wouldn’t be so different because it’s based on what’s available,” he says, adding that he’d just use films from the last decade. “The difference is there would be more iPhones because that’s how you express time.”

Time doesn’t allow me to ask Christian about his work beyond The Clock or to expand his thoughts about not seeking copyright approval — just like that, my time is up. Before I leave, I bring up The Guardian piece where Christian mentioned that The Clock became his “nightmare,” comparing it to a hit song a band is stuck playing. He gives a knowing smile.

“It still takes a lot of my time,” he says, then adds. “Listen, it’s not a bad problem to have. But it takes me away from making new work which is a burden. I moved on, but it keeps calling me back.”

The Clock is on view at the National Gallery of Iceland until June 22.