Wexner Center for the Arts presents Christian Marclay. The Clock on January 27–April 7, 2013.
Christian Marclay. Still from The Clock, 2010. Single channel video with stereo sound. Standard definition footage at 1024 x 576 (16:9 aspect ration) 25fps. 24 hours, looped. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Promised gift from the collection of Jill and Peter Kraus. © Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
This is the Midwest debut of The Clock, first shown at White Cube gallery in London in 2010. Marclay has seamlessly spliced together thousands of movie excerpts into a mesmerizing 24-hour video work that literally tells the time. Ironically though, the brilliant sequence of cinematic scenes—while each featuring a clock, watch, or other timepiece—invariably seduces viewers into losing track of their own time. Stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Charlie Chaplin, Nicole Kidman, and Robert Redford make “cameo appearances” as they check their watches or talk about the time, and London’s Big Ben plays a prominent role as perhaps the most frequently seen time-keeping landmark.
In a remarkable coincidence, Marclay presented an earlier project titled The Clock at the Wexner Center in 1990, a sound piece commissioned by the center for New Works for New Spaces, the third segment of the center’s trilogy of inaugural exhibitions. That Clock featured 25 hammering mechanisms that regularly struck the metal beams of the grid-like steel “scaffolding” on the exterior of the center’s Peter Eisenman building—in effect, transforming the scaffolding into a giant noisemaker that sounded once every hour, in time with other clocks and bells on the Ohio State campus. The project confronted and conversed with the Wexner Center building and its neighbors and—like the Clock of 2010—challenged us to reflect on both time and methods of tracking it.
Wexner Center for the Arts
The Ohio State University
1871 N. High Street
Columbus, OH 43210
T 614 292 3535
www.wexarts.org