Clock Time by Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Krauss’ article Clock Time examines Christian Marclay’s most recent work The Clock  (2010).  Krauss uses her term ‘technical support’ to describe Marclay’s use of commercial sound film in which he joins end to end film clips to create pure synchronicity.

In his anthology of film clips Video Quartet (2002) Marclay uses sound synchronicity where in The Clock he projects synch time (projection at twenty four frames per second, synchronised with the psycho-physiological facts of optics) which allows for a seamless movie via the “phi effect” where frozen images cut together at a certain speed per second create constant motion.

Marclay gives being or identity to the audience through what Louis Althusser describes as  “Ideological State Apparatuses” where the viewers are transformed into the role of the subject. Marclay does this through his use of sync time where he coordinates the watches and clocks of the ‘reel time’ with the audiences ‘real time’. His series of film clips feature suspenseful, anticipatory shots of characters staring at clocks and watches in fear of what disaster awaits them. With the viewers taking on the position of the camera and role of the subject, they too experience this sense of uneasy anticipation.

Marclay, through his “technical support” and methodologies of pure synchronisation, Krauss states that The Clock has given rise to the ‘ “invention” of a technical support and, consequently, a new medium’.

While Krauss is an art critic and theorist, I felt that this article was aimed at an audience with a greater understanding of theories and ideologies in contemporary art.  At times I found this article difficult to understand due to it’s technical vocabulary such as “intermittent reperfusion”, “phi effect” and “interpellation”. I spent alot of time researching terms so as to understand what Krauss was discussing. A critical evaluation of this film could have been more reader friendly with an understandable explanation of the terminology or simplified vocabulary. I also felt that the article made so many references to other films, ideologies and theories, which to the uneducated reader, made a short piece into what became a very long read due to the research required to make sense of her piece.