Christian Marclay. The Clock, 2010 (video still); single-channel video with stereo sound; 24 hours. Courtesy of the Artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. All photos from Christian Marclay: The Clock; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Everyone I know who saw Christian Marclay’s The Clock raved about it. The twenty-four-hour sequence of film clips, most with a view of a clock face, is more action-packed than I’d imagined it would be. The focus is as much on the events surrounding the passage of time as on the instruments we use to measure that passage. In this way, The Clock isn’t about clocks at all, and often is only circumstantially related to temporality. What it’s really about is film technology, the nature of storytelling, nostalgia, and the absurdity of life.

First things first: You don’t need to watch all 24 hours. I say this with the arrogance of someone who saw only two hours, and I say it even though I am constitutionally drawn to finishing things I begin, even though I believe there is a qualitative difference between doing something for a little time and doing that same thing for a long time. I recognize the irrationality of my confidence in grasping Marclay’s epic after experiencing only eight percent of it. It is also true that some people insist that one period of Clock watching—10:00 am to noon, for instance—is qualitatively different from another—4:00 to 5:30 pm; or 1:00 to 2:00 am. Such natural enthusiasms are proof of Marclay’s achievement, even if they are tinged, perhaps, with nostalgia; that is, influenced by the memories and narratives we fabricate as a fortress against the passage of time. But there is a way in which every period—whether period equals segment formed from connected scenes, hour, or length of time I sat in the theater—is always the same.

Christian Marclay. The Clock, 2010 (video still); single-channel video with stereo sound; 24 hours. Courtesy of the Artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Everyone admires Marclay’s craft. He strings together thousands and thousands of moments from cinematic history, transforming fragments into a whole or, more precisely—since few witness the complete opus—into a series of “scenes” that somehow tell a story none of them originally set out to tell. He invites the sound from one fragment to extend seamlessly into the soundscape of the next. He conjures such segues with images as well, fading not into a double exposure, at least not during my two hours—11:15 am to 1:15 pm—but into a double exposure of associations. (And he goes beyond film editing techniques such as shot-countershot to produce this illusion of continuity from one fragment to the next.) Buttressing the whole composition is the beat, beat, beat of the clock—digital, analog, mechanical (even a sundial!)—whose relentless tick-tock presence comprises not only a visual metronome but also the false sense that we are experiencing the passage of time as linear, as complete, as fully accounted for. What a delightful fictional device! On its face, the clocks prove that time exists; beneath this facade, the seconds don’t add up, revealing the artificiality of the whole overlay of minutes and hours.

But mostly what Marclay achieves is a continuous recollection not of films we remember having seen—although there is plenty of that—but of films that we feel we’ve seen, even though we haven’t, as if the whole history of film comprised our collective (sub)consciousness. You and I are there. It appears to be no accident that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gallery in which The Clock plays through June 2 is a darkened theater, evoking something of what I imagine as the hushed, almost religious, original cinema experience. The ritual begins outside the sanctuary. Here, I experience a different sort of time. That’s part of the Clock experience too, the period of waiting. People wait for hours. Many will wait longer than I will have watched (the price of redemption, I guess). Eventually, I am called and guided by one of the two ushers ministering the sanctum to one of the pre-seating, standing-room places at the back of the theater. I hug the wall for thirty minutes with a dozen other initiates. Before us spreads not only the screen but also the heads of visitors silhouetted against grainy film clips. Finally, having withstood these trials of endurance, I am called for a second time. I shiver as I follow the darkened profile of my usher down one of the two aisles, past row after row of three-seat couches, toward the promise of the epiphany.

Christian Marclay. The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound; 24 hours; installation view, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, October 15–November 13, 2010. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London. Photo: Todd-White Photography; © Christian Marclay. The White Cube gallery arrangement is slightly different from the SFMOMA arrangement I describe.

Despite the revelations of The Clock, I do not rave about it the way my friends have. I rave about it differently. I am never bored, just clear that one time could pass for another. And that, dear readers, is the point. Even if 11:15 to 1:15 would be your favorite of all Marclay time periods—it certainly is mine!—eventually, I predict, you would feel a saturation, an unsettled sensation that you’ve had enough. But there is no relief, because then compulsion forces you to continue on and on and on. Because, well, you might miss something.

Isn’t this what life is, a sequence of such promises? We stay and stay and stay in order to satisfy the desire to see what will happen next. I can’t know anything about this string of unrelated events—orphaned from the parent films in whose embrace they had meaning and then adopted almost arbitrarily—because, even as I stand in awe of Marclay’s choices and craft, I know there are thousands of other as-good choices the artist might have fostered instead.

Christian Marclay. The Clock, 2010 (video still); single-channel video with stereo sound; 24 hours. Courtesy of the Artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

One tick after another, The Clock proclaims, “Life is arbitrary.” Unrelated events will accrete into meaning, because we are meaning-making machines willing to mold meaning out of anything. The Clock is a film that Camus could love as Sisyphus had to love his labor, love it like a rock. This explains why The Clock is both a testament to our devotion to movie trailers—90 percent of the time, the preview is better than the film, right?—and a refutation of them. Marclay’s epic cannot, itself, be trailerized. Don’t leave, don’t even blink: You will miss something.

Christian Marclay. The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound; 24 hours; installation view, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, October 15–November 13, 2010. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and White Cube, London. Photo: Todd-White Photography; © Christian Marclay.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its effect on self and society. He has graduate degrees in visual and critical studies and journalism, and is a frequent contributor to Daily Serving.

Janet Cardiff. The Forty Part Motet, 2001; installation view, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, gallery 308, San Francisco, 2015. Courtesy of Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo: JKA Photography.

Spem in alium nunquam habui 
Praeter in te, Dues Israel

I have never put my hope in any other
But in You, O God of Israel.

On paper, the first two lines of Thomas Tallis’s motet, composed in 1573, pack no special punch. Yet the effect of the words is rather different when the musical composition is played through forty speakers in Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet (2001), now at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The speakers are set in the form of an oval with two benches at the center, where Tallis’s motet, as recorded by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, plays on a fourteen-minute loop.

Most listeners followed one of two paths: starting in the center and spiraling out, or beginning next to one speaker and slowly spiraling their way in. The audience is allowed the opportunity to hear forty voices in unison, then they can walk a bit closer and listen to just twenty, then ten, then just five, until finally they usually end up in front of one speaker. I, too, often found myself chasing one particular voice, as if beckoned by a siren’s song. Yet seldom did I find the voice before the part was over.

The alternating voices give the piece a sense of movement and life, though the only movement is that of the spectators. Indeed, that’s one of the goals of the piece; Cardiff’s work allows viewers (or listeners? or audience members?) to go inside the motet and interact with it. Glancing at fellow listeners, at least half have closed their eyes. Some transformation has occurred, as many appear mesmerized, or in an ecstatic state.

Cardiff’s work allows for the contemporary reexamination of the Renaissance’s motet, but it is the location that makes the work even more poignant. The scenic view out of the window looks toward the East Harbor and, further out, the Golden Gate Bridge. For at least fourteen minutes, one’s ears and eyes are so thoroughly occupied that it is difficult to think of anything else but the music and the view. Audience members can discover the power of an impeccably composed piece of religious choral music in a modern, secular context, one that is as close to transcendental as any in San Francisco.

Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet is on view at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture through January 18, 2016. 

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Henry Rittenberg is a recent graduate of Hamilton College, where he studied art history. He is now studying photography in New York.

Rineke Dijkstra. Montemor, Portugal, May 1, 1994; courtesy the artist; © Rineke Dijkstra.

Currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the mid-career retrospective of work by the photographer Rineke Dijkstra lays out the argument she has built for more than twenty years for the intimacy and dignity of portraiture as a genre. Beginning with the portraits that first brought Dijkstra’s work to international awareness, of bathing suit–clad teenagers at the beach, and culminating with a series of images of children and teenagers posing in a park, viewers encounter subjects who are alternately self-conscious, exhilarated, stoic, or wary but always cognizant of projecting an identity for the camera.

Looking at these photographs, one notices the extent to which the close cropping of an image, a non-descript background, or the figure’s selected pose or attire inform our impressions of who these individuals are and how much of themselves they hold in reserve. While their faces are expressive, their smiles are rare; they are not trying to project idealistic personas. What comes to the foreground instead are the representations of specific moments and particular affiliations in their lives that resonate universally. Whether Dijkstra’s subjects are teenage ravers, school children, refugees, soldiers, new mothers, or bullfighters, the specific details of their individual narratives are stripped away and replaced by a viewer’s empathy and recognition for what they are experiencing.

On February 17, I had the opportunity to walk through the exhibition with the artist and discuss how these ideas of individuality and universality resonated with one photograph or another, often with the work between us a silent participant in the conversation.  The photographs’ subjects are where we have been or will be: standing at the cusp between one life phase and another or fully immersed in the attributes and behaviors of a larger group, institution, or subculture.  And whether grounded or in flux, the question “Who am I?” persists from one photograph to the next.

Rineke Dijkstra. Nicky, The Krazyhouse, Liverpool, England, 2009; courtesy the artist; © Rineke Dijkstra.

The one variation of this question emanates from the three-channel video installation, I See A Woman Crying (2009), commissioned by Tate Liverpool, in which a group of schoolchildren speculate about the 1937 Picasso painting,Weeping Woman. The portrait never appears in the video; the camera remains focused on the children as they puzzle over who the woman is and why she is crying. As viewers of this video, we sit impassively as they spin narratives of murdered ghosts and shunned wedding guests, but all the while, they are gazing outward at us. Dijsktra has turned the tables on her audience; we are positioned as the subject of the students’ observations. They express fears of death, loneliness, betrayal, and unhappiness that are intrinsic reflections of our own.

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Patricia Maloney: There’s the photograph of a schoolboy and also those photos of the Israeli soldiers, in uniform and out, in which it seems you’re trying to find the essence of who they are, within their institutional identities as schoolchildren or as soliders. How do they negotiate for their own selves within this collective identity?

Rineke Dijkstra: Within a group or a specific situation—for instance, in Israel everybody has to commit to a collective identity [with conscription]—there is always the individual who is also longing for something else. You always try to keep your own personality. You can never afford to lose that; that’s how people distinguish themselves from each other.

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