ROSALIND KRAUSS - Clock Time

                                                            

Christian Marclay

Still from The Clock, 2010

Single-channel video 24 hours

Christian Marclay explores synchronous time and technical support through the use of medium specificity. One of Marclay’s prominent mediums to use in his artistic practices is the use of film. Marclay’s films allows the viewer to feel a greater connection to his art, involving them to a point of suspense. 

  Rosalind Krauss mentions the “technical support”. In contemporary art, which makes recurring references of commercial or industrial products (in the case Marclay’s reference to film in an archival manner) in “the manner of modernist art’s reflex of self-criticism. In his  artwork Video Quartet, 2002, he uses this commercial sound film and uses different ways to show synchronicity either visually and through contrasts of sound and silence. Marclay wants his viewers to see the silence (here there is a reference to the importance of the  Jazz Singer as the first talkie in 1929). 

Christian Marclay’s most recent work The Clock, 2010 uses the archival method of reusing fragments of film. There is a doubling of temporal focus (as it stretches over 24hrs). Marclay uses pure synchronicity as his accompaniment of actual time. In The Clock he uses ‘synch time’ with 24 frames a second and the psycho-physiological facts of optics for the frame to invisibly slip into the next. Krauss talks of the importance of “Ideological State Apparatuses” that allows Marclay’s viewers to be transported to each scene as the camera becomes the eyes of the viewer. Marclay uses the cutaway as its plot, effectively creating a suspense where the actors and viewers anticipate a catastrophe that could happen at any moment. 

Krauss draws comparison to Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers “Dial M for Murder” and “Strangers on a Train”. Here the suspense is identified unreeling on the screen that is out of synchronization with the viewers. However in Marclay’s The Clock, the suspense is created as the plot continually unfolds bringing back the anticipation of a catastrophe as each minute passes. 

The Clock uses Husserl’s ‘self-present instant,’ the self-presence in the ‘now-effect’ “transforming the reel time of film into the real time of waiting”.