Christian Marclay

'The Clock' is constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or just a particular time of day. Marclay has excerpted thousands of these fragments and edited them so that they flow in real time. While 'The Clock' examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching 'The Clock' experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once. Even while 'The Clock' tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Christian Marclay: The Clock, held at White Cube, Mason's Yard, London, 15 Oct.-13 Nov. 2010.
"This publication shows a selection of 1440 stills excerpted from Christian Marclay's 24-hour video The Clock"--Colophon.
Text on inside covers.… (meer)

Seeing and imagining music in a pandemic: a dialogue of found scenes and inspired sounds between two protagonists of experimental music

Known for his ability to locate music and sound in the most unexpected contexts, artist Christian Marclay (born 1955) began photographing the emptied London streets when the world shut down in the spring of 2020. He found the quiet―the absence of all the city sounds―both haunting and peaceful. On his daily walks, he began to imagine that there might be music in the landscape. He snapped a photo of an iron gate adorned with decorative white balls as it reminded him of a musical score. He sent it to his friend, the composer Steve Beresford (born 1950), and asked: “How would this sound on the piano?” Beresford responded a few hours later with a recording. Over the course of the spring, he took more photographs which inspired more music.
This book collects the dialogue between Marclay and Beresford, which could only take place virtually during lockdown. In his introduction, Marclay writes, "I realized that all my pictures were of enclosures: gates, fences, windows, closed stores. A view of the world behind barriers." The correspondence between image, sound and its notation breaks through those barriers, expanding space in magical ways. Call and Response is a testament to how the world at large can be not only reflected in image but translated into sound.… (meer)