The Brooklyn Rail

I’ve seen this before—this particular sequence in The Clock that straddles the transition from dawn to early morning: Bill Murray, who exists in The Clock universe as his characters from five different films (What About Bob? [1991], Groundhog Day [1993], Lost in Translation [2003], Scrooged [1988], and Ed Wood [1994]), wakes up at least three different times. Ethan Hawke’s character from Before Sunrise (1995) recites a poem to a sleepy Julie Delpy about the unmet human desire to conquer time. And once it hits 7:05 a.m., The Clock is a near-constant stream of alarm clocks going off, an hour of rapid fire trills that summon the sleeping world to abrupt consciousness.

At this time of the day, if you’ve stared at the screen for long enough, things in The Clock get a bit blurry. These characters quickly become splintered abstractions of themselves, just a series of bare limbs shifting and shuffling out of beds, into showers, running in and out of situations leftover from the night before. They’re at their most vulnerable states, with sleep in their eyes. Some of them are naked, cloaked only in shame or smugness. 

Yes, I’ve seen this hour of The Clock before. But never this early in the day. 

It must have been sometime in the early afternoon. Christian Marclay and his production crew came back from their lunch hour. I remained in the gallery with my laptop. It’s just easier during the installation weeks to stay put. As the curatorial assistant for Christian Marclay: The Clock, I really cannot see a clock’s face anymore without thinking about this exhibition—its production costs, implementation schedules, its opening reception and twenty-four-hour screening logistics. That first week in November, amid the tension of the US presidential election, we somehow managed to install this time-piece in a city often hindered by the limits of linear time. Once opened to the public, The Clock puts on its best face, ready to host thousands of visitors over the course of its seven-month run. But I know what The Clock looks like when it is still waking up.

While the video work is not novel to MoMA (it was first on view at the museum in late 2012), the way we experienced it during install is completely new. Months before we opened the exhibition, media conservator Ken Campbell, based at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, developed a playback script for The Clock that allows users to seamlessly hop back and forth in time. Christian Marclay, alongside Scott Martin, technical coordinator at White Cube, and sound engineers Quentin Chiappetta and Josh Samuels, could now scan through all twenty-four hours in a matter of minutes if the artist so desired, checking sound levels and refreshing his own memory of the rabbit holes he descended during the three-year making of The Clock. Sure, let’s say it was 1:15 p.m. right then, but on the big screen, it could be 7:30 a.m. or the last moments before midnight, depending on the team’s mood. During that install week, time collapsed and expanded, repeated and skimmed over itself, harnessed in totality by a few clicks on a computer. I observed small corners of The Clock that I’ll probably never see ever again. 

But now that The Clock is up and running, it has predictably embedded itself into my regular work routine. Being the coordinator of the second floor collection galleries, I’m often ambling through before the museum opens. Somehow, I’m always running a bit behind schedule, so I find myself sprinting by the empty couches in the gallery just as Natalie Portman’s character from Paris Je T’aime (2006) exclaims exactly what I’m thinking: “Shit, it’s 10:00 a.m.?”

So maybe it is good that I am back in The Clock so early on a Thursday morning, back to experiencing it the way Marclay intended. I woke up early and drudged my way to Midtown. Hunkered down on a couch hours before I’m expected to show up at my cubicle, I found myself envious of the characters who were just now clicking off their alarms. Familiar early morning movie tropes play out during this hour: men arrive at their mirrors, dunking their faces into sinks full of water and swiping their chins with razors; women somehow already have their makeup and hair done when their eyes flicker open in bed. Some characters prepare breakfast, others watch the news. 

But time doesn’t always work in these expected ways. Scholars of quantum mechanics and general relativity know this well—our sense of linear time has no clean-cut solution in the greater workings of the universe. We can wake up, get dressed, and go to work as often as we want, but this is only a portion of observable time. Perhaps the way time works is more akin to the infrastructure of The Clock—edited clips from hundreds of movie timelines, converged and spliced together in a larger multidirectional sequence, played back in and out of order to a small group of people in a darkened museum gallery.