Time Pieces: Horology, Chronology, Cartography and Home
After viewing 20 hours of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock,” a writer explores the cities, images and timepieces that construct her remembered past.
RIGHT NOW
I’m writing this at the library. The Mechanic’s Institute Library is the oldest library on the West Coast. The crowning feature of its 1909 building is an iron-and-marble spiral staircase that looks like a nautilus shell when viewed from upper floors. I’m sitting in the third-floor reading room looking out at the Crocker Galleria, an odd glass-canopied indoor/outdoor mall in the middle of the otherwise urban landscape of the financial district. If the Mechanics Institute is a distinguished old gentleman, the Galleria is standing across the street rolling its eyes like a 1980s teenager. There’s a huge clock in the façade of the Galleria, and when I look at it, I realize I should be getting back to my work.
In the silence of the library, the muted clack of old men shuffling wooden newspaper dowels is about equal in volume to the blur of traffic three floors down. But the loudest thing I can hear is a steady tick, tick, tick that I can’t source. I look out the window, at the giant mall clock: It has no second hand. I close my eyes and focus on the sound, the ticking, that penetrating sound that can keep me up at night, the reason I have no clocks in my bedroom. Tick, tick, tick. It’s coming from nearby, from inside the library. I realize it’s coming from my watch.
My rotary watch was a gift to myself when I first purchased a smartphone a year ago. I hoped wearing a watch would remind me not to rely on my phone for every single piece of information in my life. My new, antiquated watch has a gold-hued face that reminds me of a classic train-station clock, the kind from old films I used to obsessively watch as a teenager; its overly wide watchband surrounds my wrist in soft, imperfect leather that reminds me I used to be sort of punk rock. I’ve never before noticed the sound this watch emits, but I’m not surprised when I find myself wishing the librarian would shush it for me. It hurts my brain.
It’s a natural reaction; I’ve just come from looking at the most mentally penetrating clock I’ve ever seen: Christan Marclay’s 2010 film installation “The Clock.” I sat inside “The Clock” for as many hours as I could, and then I left it and walked out into the city and went to the library to write about it. Everything still ticks.
9:30 P.M., 2013
In a film scene from my memory, two men in dark suits — William Holden and Karl Malden, perhaps — stand in front of an abnormally large modern clock mounted on wallpaper thick with ornate flowers. In front of them, a woman in a stiff, short A-line dress sobs, then falls into the arms of a cop standing nearby. Even further in the foreground, skewing the viewer’s perception of depth, a big white bald man stands in silhouette. It’s 9:30 P.M., according to “The Clock.”
“The Clock” brought artist Christian Marclay’s predilection for remixing popular cultural objects into artistic statements to its largest scale yet. “The Clock” is a 24-hour film composed of brief clips of other films in which clocks or times are shown or mentioned. Every moment onscreen occurs in local time, so when it’s noon inside “The Clock,” it’s also noon outside, in real life. For example, at 5 P.M., the exhibition’s perpetual montage consists mainly of clips of people leaving work, often by train, as whistles and clock chimes mingle in a rush hour cacophony. At the same time, just beyond the doors of the gallery or the museum, real-world commuters are heading home.
Marclay enlisted a computer scientist to build a custom program that links the 24-hour loop of video and audio precisely with real time, effectively making “The Clock” into a clock itself. As such, the installation is an interesting intersection of several time-based experiences: It’s a clock made out of films, a history of film (which is also, coincidentally, a history of the last century) and an investigation into the physical experience of time and memory.
This spring, “The Clock” was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Artin a small theater. Because it’s a clock, “The Clock” played constantly, even when the museum was closed; but for several weekends, the institution stayed open all weekend to afford visitors a chance to watch the less waking hours tick by.
To see “The Clock” at SFMOMA, audience members are ushered into a dark theater by flashlight-bearing attendants. Viewers are assigned a place to sit one by one (which means you probably can’t sit with your party). The theater seats about 80 people, who sit in groups of three in artist-mandated, light-grey IKEA couches arranged in careful rows. The museum attendants I spoke with on opening weekend said that Marclay had supervised the installation himself; he’s reportedly particular about the in-theater experience and especially adamant about people being allowed to stay inside “The Clock” as long as they want. Accordingly, it often takes hours to gain entry, and the warped sense of time spent waiting in line adds to the temporal distortion of the exhibit.
The entire experience is, by most accounts, a trippy one. The film itself is riveting. By nature, most of the moments in movies that feature clocks or discuss time are ones of pressure or climax. Marclay’s pasted-together scenes may portray farcical capers, romantic declarations, literal and figurative blowups or tense waiting games, but they always revolve around a heightened sense of anticipation. Something is always about to happen.
I saw about 20 hours of “The Clock” over the course of two months and six visits. Whenever I was in the theater, I always caught myself checking my watch, even though I knew the film I was watching only had one line of inquiry: What time is it? Still, I repeatedly felt compelled to check my watch. I was anxious. How long was I going to stay? What if I missed a good part? How long has it been? What time is it?
“The Clock” invites big questions: How do we as humans invent and mark time? How does this act shape us and structure our lives? What do movies have to do with memory? What was the name of that one movie with Karl Malden and William Holden? (It’s Wild Rovers, according to Google, and from the looks of it, it’s a Western and would have nothing to do with the visual impression I have of a sobbing woman and a cop and a spooky wall clock. That’s what hours of montage at a time can do to the brain: meld one film, era, genre atop another.)
“The Clock” can, of course, be tiring if one decides to stay for many hours, but the main physical effects of the film are felt after emerging: Sometimes it’s night; sometimes it’s day; always, my eyes hurt.
The night I couldn’t escape the image of the sobbing woman from a film I’ll probably never locate, I left the theater at 2 A.M. Because of the hours I’d just spent watching a bright screen in a dark room and the sleep I’d missed doing so, my naturally weak eye muscles had trouble focusing. I saw double as I struggled through Yerba Buena Gardens looking for my locked bike. Everywhere I turned, time made its presence known to me.
The moon passed overhead in its nightly rotation. Clouds moved over it as though in fast-motion. Clocks chimed out from an old brick church over whose roofline the modern blue cube of another building peeked like a rising, angular planet. Forget what time it was, what year was it?
I found my bike and wheeled down Market Street, missing the bustle and cross-traffic of daytime in San Francisco’s financial district. I rode towards the water and the Bay Bridge’s feet. Ahead of me, the street’s slight downward slope bottomed out at a towering clock atop the Ferry Building. I aimed for that clock, focusing, and it waited for me, static, like a target or a parent watching my late-night stumble into its reach. The blue of the sky and the yellows of the streetlights flickering by me left an imprint in my sight like a changeover cue.
10:20 A.M., 2013
“The Clock” compounds movies with time, which are both made up of what can essentially be called scenes. Time makes sense. Human life is full of experiences that seem to lack order or sequence; because we are humans, we then seek to divide our lives into segments in a way that helps us maintain some sense of collective narrative order. So we use time to break experience into distinct units, often based in our observations of nature: This was in the Fall of That Year. We also make instruments to keep track of those units. We put these instruments in every room of our homes, on city streets and atop public edifices, inside our artistic and cultural renderings, even on and beside our bodies. Relationships with clocks are constant and intimate, public and private. But until I saw “The Clock,” I barely noticed.
On one of my last trips to see the piece, at 10:20 A.M., I stood in line with my childhood best friend while her young children were at school. My friend and I have both worked extensively in the nonprofit arts; we’d recently been complaining to one another that it had been years since either of us saw a piece or performance that genuinely moved us. I brought her to “The Clock” hoping she’d share my excitement about its ability to alter a viewer’s perception of physical time and tap into the memorial power of cinema.
While we were waiting in line for an hour and a half, we caught up, talked about the arts in San Francisco and the impending renovation of the museum we were standing in. We talked about time-based art, resurrecting our best theory-speak from earlier eras. At one point, she asked me if I still had the Moon Clock.
Early in their courtship, my friend’s husband bought a clock we all took to calling the Moon Clock. It’s a small clock, likely from the 1950s, constructed of a warm, aged yellow plastic in a half-moon curve on top and a flat bottom, all of which lights up. The Moon Clock had been my friend’s bedroom clock for years; after her first child was born, it served as a nightlight until the picky tastes of toddlerhood banished it to a closet. She offered it to me.
