33 Artists in 3 Acts (35 page)

Christian Marclay

Still from
The Clock

2010

SCENE 4

Christian Marclay

C
hristian Marclay is finishing a masterpiece. He has been cooped up for months in his small studio on the fourth floor of a townhouse in Central London’s Clerkenwell neighborhood. He invites me to sit down next to him at his desk and then slumps into his cushioned swivel chair. Yesterday, he missed yoga and was a “zombie” by the time he went home. He has calluses on his fingers from clicking a mouse—or mice, rather, as his twenty-four-hour video
The Clock
is too big to be loaded onto a single computer. Sometimes he bandages a couple of fingers together to stave off carpal tunnel syndrome. Who would have thought that making concept-driven art, crafted on computers, would be so physical?

The Clock
is a montage of clips from several thousand films, structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which it is being exhibited. The scenes in movies where viewers see clocks or hear chimes tend to be either transitional ones suggesting the passage of time or suspenseful ones building up to dramatic action. “If I asked you to watch a clock tick, you would get bored quickly,” explains the artist. “But there is enough action in this film to keep you entertained, so you forget the time, but then you’re constantly reminded of it.” Born in California, Marclay was raised in Switzerland speaking French; he still tends to drop the “s” off plural nouns.

Artworks based on appropriation sometimes get ensnarled in copyright issues. “Technically it’s illegal,” Marclay says of his elaborate remix of cinematic snippets, “but most would consider it fair use.” His work ultimately pays homage to these movies, particularly the actors. “When a scene is well acted, you could look at it a hundred times and never get bored. You see the flaws but understand the talent. It’s such a vulnerable profession,” he says. In
The Clock
, actors crop up at different stages of their careers. “Their fluctuating ages offer an interesting twist on time. The work is a giant memento mori.”

While Marclay himself keeps a low profile, many of the faces on screen are world famous. “They’re part of this weird extended family and this element of recognition—of familiarity—is appealing,” he says. Strangely, Marclay bears more than a passing resemblance to Kiefer Sutherland, the lead actor in
24
, a television series in which each twenty-four-episode season covers twenty-four hours in the life of the main character. Though Marclay acknowledges the importance of fame for Hollywood, he dislikes “the cult of personality” when it comes to art. “I think people get interested in art for the wrong reasons,” he says. Certain artists who are central to Marclay’s thinking have legendary personas, such as Marcel Duchamp with his transvestite alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. “I try not to admire Duchamp in that way,” he says. Aside from a few early pieces, Marclay does not make self-portraits or autobiographical work. “I want people to be interested in the art, not me,” he says.

Marclay is also uncomfortable with “the desire to glorify artists” for the sake of their market. “In the eighties, artists were like rock musicians who had to trash a hotel room to be somebody, but that kind of rebellion is out of fashion. Now, when you think of artists, you think of sober entrepreneurs.” Like many artists, Marclay feels estranged from the increasing commercialization of art, even if the gallery that shows his work in London is an important hub of the relentless boom. “I’m thankful for the Damien Hirsts that keep my galleries happy and allow me to make this work,” he says.

Marclay has been working on
The Clock
for over two years, using Final Cut Pro software. He used to limit his editing to five hours a day, but he has been putting in ten to twelve hours seven days a week for
months. Such are the occupational hazards of making such a lengthy video. “Twenty-four hours is the logical result of the idea. Three hours would be silly,” explains the artist, who might spend a whole day fitting together a dozen clips to make just one minute of video. “I get into a zone when editing. I forget about the time. A whole day will go by. A whole week,” he says emphatically, aware of the irony.

Six research assistants work from home watching films in search of relevant sequences. For a while they scoured Bollywood films but found little time-marking. “I guess it’s a different tradition, with a different concept of time,” explains Marclay. By contrast, some American television series are fixated on it. “I have an assistant who is looking at chick flicks.
Sex in the City
is preoccupied with the New York minute.” London’s “Big Ben” is ubiquitous. “It’s the most iconic clock,” he says. “Regardless of the provenance of the film, if the action takes place in London, Big Ben appears.”

“I have a strange relationship with my researchers because I don’t see them,” says Marclay. “They drop off their footage at White Cube, then Paul, my main assistant, brings me the catch of the day.” Paul Anton Smith works full-time, taking care of the technological and logistical aspects of
The Clock
. London’s White Cube and New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery have provided the budget. Marclay says he doesn’t know the cost of the production. “Ask Jay,” he advises, referring to Jay Jopling, owner of White Cube. “It’s cheap compared to fabricating a monumental bronze sculpture.” The piece will be available as an edition of six with two artist’s proofs, for sale to museums and private collectors.
*

The Clock
will premiere on a big screen with sofa seating on the lower floor of White Cube. Marclay is supposed to fill another floor of
the gallery with objects, but is still unsure what he will make, because he hasn’t had the “mindspace” to think about it. In addition to videos, the artist makes collages, photographs, paintings, sculptures, and performances. Some of his best-known works are assemblages of musical instruments, vinyl album covers, cassettes, reel-to-reel recording tape, and other sound-related materials. When I suggest that music is his signature, he looks worried. “I don’t know if it’s necessarily identifiable right away as me, especially now that so many artists work with sound imagery,” he says. Marclay mulls it over while rubbing his long hands together. “My video editing ability came from years of deejaying,” he volunteers.

When Marclay is not working on visual artworks, he is a composer and musician who specializes in making noise. He creates unusual “scores” from found materials and invites other musicians to improvise with them. For Marclay, sight nevertheless prevails over hearing. “An image will leave an imprint that’s more powerful than sound, at least for me,” says Marclay. When the artist first started working with music professionals, he realized that he did not have the same “acuteness in listening.” He has since become more proficient and is absorbed by “how adding an image to sound changes your perception of it, and vice versa.”

Marclay has edited most of “the
P.M.
hours,” with the exception of a few holes. “I thought 3
A.M.
would be hard but it’s pretty tight now; 5
A.M.
is the most difficult,” he says. “In the movies, people rarely sleep. They are sweating, having nightmares. The phone rings or someone is waking them up.” Marclay wants to finish 4
A.M.
today, then he’ll skip 5
A.M.
to work on 6
A.M
. He hopes to be done by next week so he can start polishing up the transitions. “Every hour has its own timeline. The transitions are tricky because a lot happens on the hour, but it’s fun when you get it right,” he says.

Throughout the summer, Marclay has been sending discs loaded with segments of
The Clock
to Quentin Chiappetta, a Brooklyn-based sound engineer with whom he has worked for over twenty years. Chiappetta equalizes the disparately mastered soundtracks of the many film clips. “Sound is the glue that holds the pieces together,” explains Marclay, who will also have spent several weeks working on the soundtrack in
Chiappetta’s MediaNoise digital audio postproduction studio before the work is completed.

While Marclay enjoys collaborating in a “hands-off” way when it comes to his music compositions, he feels the need to be hands-on with artworks like
The Clock
. “I have people helping me but, in the end, I do the edits,” he says. “I sit here every day like a writer in front of a typewriter. It’s about routine and process.” Previous marathon art films have been lazy by comparison. Andy Warhol’s
Empire
, for example, is an eight-hour, silent, static view of the famous Manhattan skyscraper, while Douglas Gordon’s
24-hour Psycho
is a slowed-down version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Hollywood thriller. “Great art doesn’t necessarily require a lot of work,” says Marclay. “Sometimes an easy gesture can be conceptually strong.”

After Marclay has shown me a half-dozen finished segments, it strikes me that the sublimity of
The Clock
comes not just from its concept or scale, but its meticulous execution: the intelligent transitions, the filmic jump cuts combined with slow musical decays, the abrupt gongs that take you to completely different places. Marclay honed his editorial eyes and ears on two previous videos. First, he made
Telephones
(1995), a seven-and-a-half-minute compilation of film clips, which progresses from a flurry of dialing, through ringing, to a cacophony of “hellos.” Then he created
Video Quartet
(2002), a fifteen-minute montage of musical sequences from films, projected onto four screens that interact with one another in complex ways and so involved sixty minutes of footage. Despite these rehearsals and the progressive refinement of his abilities, Marclay insists, “I don’t have any real skills. I’m a dilettante in everything.” Really? I wonder if the statement is an instance of his extreme modesty or a knee-jerk way of distancing himself from craftsmen, or both.

The issue of creativity is often difficult for artists to wrap their heads around. “Am I being original this morning? You sense the wonder of discovery when you’re doing something that feels new,” he says, staring at one of the two large computer screens on his desk. “But, who knows, maybe someone has been there before.” Originality is particularly complicated when readymades are involved. “Every image that I use is from
someone else,” he declares. “But you can be original in what you steal and how you display your bounty.” Marclay fingers the keyboard, evidently yearning to get back to work. “Michel de Montaigne declared that he culled his ideas from everywhere,” says the artist, citing the sixteenth-century French essayist. “The ideas were like flowers that he assembled into a garland—only the string holding the flowers together was his.”

Marina Abramovi