The Brooklyn Rail

“Hi! Are you my three o’clock?” These words exclaimed by Mira Sorvino—playing a sex worker with a precise schedule and “a great sense of humor”—in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995), launch the mid-afternoon hour of Marclay’s The Clock. Apart from the school-day ending, the time between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. is without structure. The opportunity exists to do anything or almost nothing: take a nap, check your pulse, have illicit sex, defeat a villain, wage a war, get out of jail, go to a bar, make a ransom call. There is plenty of anxiety during this period of transition—the fear of being late, of a timebomb exploding, of not completing the trade before the market closes at 4:00 p.m.—as well as the pleasure that comes when the tension ends—busting out of class, punching the time clock, downing a pint. Does a narrative emerge from these glimpses of human activity? Is there a coherent meaning to be found in this dog day afternoon? Are there moral underpinnings associated with time—what we should and should not be doing? (Punctuality is good and sleeping all day is not.) Is it my imagination or are most adults quite tawdry? Is it a surprise that Mary Poppins, the epitome of order, chooses this hour to exit? Snapping open her umbrella, she takes flight over the clock towers of London.

In his New Yorker profile of the artist, Daniel Zalewski aptly describes Marclay as “the most exciting collagist since Robert Rauschenberg.” In his drawings and Combines begun in the mid-1950s, Rauschenberg mined his surroundings for ready-made images and objects, transforming them into art and synthesizing them with handmade gestures. While Marclay instead uses preexisting film footage and the construct of time, he similarly made something new through his recombination of chosen fragments. The overlaid sound collage—music and dialogue punctuated by clanging bells and chimes—glues the pieces together. Both artists dangle the promise of a continuous narrative: you’ve seen the image or clip before, you’ve brought your own associations, you search for a story. Yet, the quest to find reason among what Rauschenberg described as “random order” proves frustrating and beside the point. The Clock seduces you into watching for hours. There is the urge to see something again, but time marches on without the possibility to rewind. Rauschenberg rewards prolonged looking differently, asking you to look at the same thing often, but each time with a changed perspective. He described making a surface that “invited a constant change of focus and an examination of detail…. Looking … happen[s] in time.”

Time, the leitmotif of The Clock, is also a constant for Rauschenberg. He described his all-white canvases, first made in 1951 at Black Mountain College, as “clocks.” “If one [is] sensitive enough” you would know “how many people were in the room, what time it was, and what the weather was like outside.” For Paul Taylor’s 1957 dance, Epic, Rauschenberg suggested that automated time announcements serve as the score to accompany the choreographer’s pedestrian movements: “At the tone, the time will be 2:59 and 40 seconds. At the tone, the time will be 2:59 and 50 seconds. At the tone, the time will be 3 o’clock exactly.” First Time Painting (1961), one of several Rauschenberg Combines to incorporate clocks, was made on stage. The ticking of the clock and the making of the work were amplified to a live audience by contact microphones; when the alarm rang, the performance and the painting were complete.

Most interesting to Rauschenberg and Marclay is how time relates to people. As Marclay has said, he “want[s] to comment on the everyday day, the life we’re all living.” Rauschenberg’s anthropomorphic Carnal Clocks (1969), a series of mechanized lightboxes that function as timepieces, measure 5 feet tall, with faces, hands, and feet, exuding a soft hum, a sepia glow, and a person-like warmth. Silkscreened photographic images of household objects and the genitalia of the artist’s friends—rather than numerals—illuminate the passage of hours and minutes. “Time,” Rauschenberg said, is “marked by real people.”

By 1970, when Rauschenberg moved to Captiva Island off the Gulf Coast of Florida, he embodied the ethos of the liminal mid-afternoon hour. He no longer chafed against the confines of time. His habitual lateness was now acceptable. He wore a watch (and collected many), but what it said didn’t dictate his activities. Rauschenberg made his own time and set his schedule to accommodate his night-owl working habits. According to his son Christopher, a “classic Bob-day” began in the early afternoon, tuned in to the CBS soap operas—Guiding Light from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. With a collagist’s ability to track multiple lines of simultaneous thought, the TV provided the background noise as Rauschenberg puttered, “operating at half power,” while clearing the deck to get to the studio.