Telephones

Object Description

Running Time: 7:30 minutes
The original Certificate of Authenticity is stored with the DVD (also see pdf surrogate document)
ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORKER WHICH INCLUDES REFERENCE TO THE PIECE “TELEPHONES”: The Hours How Christian Marclay created the ultimate digital mosaic. by Daniel Zalewski March 12, 2012 Marclay spent three years assembling “The Clock,” a twenty-four-hour video collage. Photograph by Nadav Kander. When Christian Marclay moved from New York to London, in the summer of 2007, he left behind some of his most valued possessions: hundreds of boxes of thrift-store junk. Marclay, the most exciting collagist since Robert Rauschenberg, had accumulated this trove over three decades, and relied on it to create his art. Many items had a connection to music, a dominant theme in his work. There were countless worn LPs, their covers bearing ghostly outlines of the vinyl inside; containers filled with bird’s nests of unspooled cassette tape; tatty theatre-geek scarves embroidered with musical notes stolen from Gershwin. The studio where he had curated all this stuff, in the former American Can Factory, in Brooklyn, was now a lifeless vault. Sawdust generated by the artist upstairs sprinkled through cracks in the floorboard ceiling, shrouding his things in beige snowfall. Marclay liked to make something new by lovingly vandalizing something old. He remixed music—turning it inside out to foreground crackles and hisses—and he remixed objects that created music. He’d based dozens of projects on the vinyl records alone: scarring them with images, using a phonograph stylus like a lathe; melting them into cubes; piling them into menacing black columns. He even strapped a revolving turntable to his chest, as if it were a guitar, and videotaped himself whaling on a Jimi Hendrix LP. He says that his governing impulse as an artist has been to take “images and sounds that we’re all familiar with and reorganize them in a way that is unfamiliar.” In a 1991 collage, he arranged album covers so that Michael Jackson’s face and torso joined, uncannily, with the glistening bare legs of two women (one black, one white). Marclay, a fixture of the East Village music scene of the eighties, was particularly renowned as an avant-garde d.j.—in the late seventies, he’d been one of the first people to scratch records in performance, treating the turntable as an instrument. During sets, he sometimes smashed LPs, Frankensteined shards together with tape, and played the hiccupping results. To keep advancing as an artist, Marclay needed not just his mischievous imagination; he needed material to manipulate. Marclay, who is now fifty-seven, went to London so that he could be with Lydia Yee, his partner, who had just become a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery. A Californian who grew up in placid Switzerland, Marclay hates histrionics, and he made no fuss about abandoning his bric-a-brac. But upon arriving in London he felt unmoored. “What am I doing here?” he asked himself. “How am I going to be able to work?” The apartment he’d rented with Yee, near the Barbican, was barely five hundred square feet. Though he had pieces in the permanent collections of the world’s top museums—including MOMA, the Whitney, and the Centre Pompidou—he wasn’t rich, and he couldn’t afford a large London studio. He settled on a grim nook, accommodating a five-foot-long desk, in shared office space on the fourth floor of a narrow town house in Clerkenwell. A window looked down on a courtyard, containing a tangled mass of crashed cars, where Fire Brigade members simulated extracting accident victims. Marclay was regularly rattled by fake cries of “Help!” But Marclay has little need for luxury. He wears baggy, untucked button-downs that make his long legs resemble stilts. His putty-colored face has been left to its own devices by an indifferent buzz cut. He has a cheap aluminum Swatch whose hands resemble pencils, and he dutifully follows its dictates: his work hours are grinding and consistent. Given his space constraints in London, Marclay decided that his first project would involve immaterial material—that is, digital media. Instead of wielding an X-Acto knife, he’d use Final Cut Pro. As he told me recently, sitting at his desk in Clerkenwell, “All I needed was this table and a computer.” Though most of Marclay’s works had been tactile, he had made a few short videos, and they had received more critical attention than most of his other pieces. There was a reason for this: Marclay’s physical collages were dependably clever, but their impact often faded once you got the joke. (Rows of seating reupholstered with piano-score prints and images of instruments? “Musical Chairs,” from 1999.) Adding the dimension of time infused Marclay’s wit with drama. His best sculpture, “Tape Fall” (1989), had hinted at this potential. A reel-to-reel tape player, perched high on a ladder, plays water sounds, but the takeup reel is missing, so the tape cascades to the ground. The sculpture was recently shown again at Paula Cooper Gallery, in Chelsea; as the weeks passed, the tape pile rose balefully, like sand in an hourglass, and the burbling contraption became a relentless memento mori. Video offered Marclay another way to play with time. In 1995, he completed a rapid-fire montage of movie clips depicting one side of a telephone call. The seven-minute “conversation” was as funny and stilted as the dialogue in a Pinter play. (“Darling, it’s me.” “What?” “The girl’s dead.” “Are you sure? Do you have a positive ID?” “Ah . . . no, not exactly.” “I’m so confused!”) “Telephones,” as it was called, was quietly revolutionary: one of the first video mashups, it was created a decade before the genre became ubiquitous on YouTube. Like its digital descendants, “Telephones” had a wrecking-ball quality; to look smart, it made its source material seem foolish. (Apple later asked to use the video for an ad launching the iPhone; when Marclay declined, the company aired a rip-off.) He repeated his experiment with “Crossfire” (2007), an earsplitting installation featuring closeups of guns firing, especially the staring-into-the-cylinder shot favored by action directors. Marclay edited the clips into a loop of unnerving rhythms—pulsing techno-like beats, solitary booms—and screened four synchronized montages on the walls of a dark room. His organization of random violence was exhilarating and bewildering: should you dance or get the hell out of there? As the minutes wore on, however, “Crossfire” became oppressive; you felt like a thief being chased down a dank film-noir alley, with no chain-link fence offering escape. Part of Marclay’s fascination with the cinematic archive had to do with the way it resisted transfiguration. It wasn’t hard to turn a recorded sound into an estranged abstraction, by slowing it down or folding it into a new rhythm. But, even if you chopped a film into a single frame, specificity clung to it: Audrey Hepburn, Givenchy, Manhattan, 1961. Marclay wondered if he could fashion from familiar clips a genuinely unfamiliar film, one with its own logic, rhythm, and aesthetics. In his view, the best collages combined the “memory aspect”—recognition of the source material—with the pleasurable violence of transformation. If Marclay could turn the sky green for one day, he’d do it. His most thrilling foray into film collage came in 2002, with “Video Quartet,” which was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Art and acquired by the Tate. Four montages featuring actors and musicians playing instruments, singing, or dancing appeared, in calibrated unison, on a row of four screens. As in a chamber-music ensemble, one “player” took the dominant line—Judy Garland belting, Harpo Marx tinkling the harp—while other clips provided orchestration and rhythm. “Video Quartet” had the calculated riotousness of a Charles Ives composition, and it was often hilarious. Marclay repeated an Ann Miller tap-dancing stampede over and over, as if it were a badass drum solo. Just as the screens traded melodies, they parried visual rhymes: a clacking roulette wheel on one screen was countered by a whirling turntable on another. Museumgoers often clapped at the end—a rarity with video art, whose practitioners can pride themselves on being punishing. But “Video Quartet,” which lasted fourteen minutes, was a trifle in compositional terms. It was time to go Wagnerian. In Clerkenwell, Marclay recalled a performance piece that he once presented in Manhattan. He had combined film clips into a “video score” for an ensemble of musicians. The images—a surfer crashing, a flower folding up—were chosen to provoke diverse sounds. He titled the work “Screen Play.” (A devotee of Duchamp, he shares the Master’s love of horrible puns.) Though Marclay encouraged his performers to go wild, he wanted them to know their place in the score—it would help them give the performance dramatic structure. He decided that clips of clocks “would be interesting to use to mark time, to say, ‘You’re watching the seconds go by, and you know where it’s gonna end, because you actually see the time.’ ” A techie intern was enlisted to scour the Internet for clocks. After embedding a clip—a boy in bed, checking his watch at 4:20 A.M.—in the opening bars of “Screen Play,” Marclay had a dangerous thought: “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to find clips with clocks for every minute of all twenty-four hours?” Marclay has an algorithmic mind, and, as with Sol LeWitt’s work, many of his best pieces have originated with a conceit as straightfoward as a recipe. The resulting collage, he realized, would be weirdly functional; the fragments, properly synched, would tell the time as well as a Rolex. And, because he’d be poaching from a vast number of films, the result would offer an unorthodox anthology of cinema. There were darker resonances, too. People went to the movies to lose track of time; this video would pound viewers with an awareness of how long they’d been languishing in the dark. It would evoke the laziest of modern pleasures—channel surfing—except that the time wasted would be painfully underlined. He would not be creating the first film with a running time of precisely one day. That distinction went to “24 Hour Psycho,” a 1993 work, by Douglas Gordon, that stretched Hitchcock’s taut thriller into excruciatingly portentous art. And Andy Warhol, in his 1964 film “Empire”—eight hours of stationary footage of the Empire State Building fading into darkness—had created a work whose point was to make viewers “see time go by.” There was a lineage of avant-garde cinema that, with varying degrees of obscurity, examined the temporal qualities of film. Marclay’s contribution to the cinema of duration, though, would be pleasurable to watch. He sensed a creepy challenge. If his film was sufficiently seductive, he might coax people to sit for hours, literally watching their lives tick away. Though at any given minute the film would have the weightlessness of a Hollywood trailer, in its entirety it would be an even heavier memento mori than “Tape Fall.” Marclay “had the spark,” as he put it, but he was daunted: how many clips would be required to fill up twenty-four hours? In most film sequences, the camera lingers on a clock for a few seconds. “I didn’t have the courage to get started, because I knew it would be an endless struggle,” he said. But now, in London, he decided to see if he could build the defining monument of the remix age. Marclay proposed the project to White Cube, the proudly slick gallery that represents him in London. “Even though none of us were sure that it would be possible to make, the concept was so exciting that we wholeheartedly committed,” Jay Jopling, the gallery’s owner, recalled. Marclay’s budget exceeded a hundred thousand dollars. White Cube’s signature artist is Damien Hirst—a man who has made a diamond-encrusted skull—so Marclay’s sum seemed comparatively paltry. Moreover, the cost would be partially covered by Paula Cooper Gallery, which would show the video in New York. Craig Burnett, an associate director at White Cube, told Marclay to consider the first six months a “feasibility study”; by then, he’d know if the global archive of cinema could accommodate his thin-slice vision. One issue that didn’t give Marclay pause was copyright, because nobody had objected before to his appropriation art. He had a theory: “If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it.” For “Video Quartet,” Marclay had spent months pestering clerks for clips at Kim’s Video, in the East Village. But this time he’d need foragers. “I could do it, but it’d take me ten years to collect,” he said. Still, he didn’t want to outsource its construction, in the manner of Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami. Marclay believes that “art is all in the details,” and so he committed to handling what mattered most: the editing. The key to his video projects, he believed, was the artfulness of the transitions, which reassured the viewer that a tactical intelligence controlled the flow of imagery. He also felt that the clock video would not cast a spell if it had the blunt cuts of its Internet cousins—those “supercut” compilations of Hollywood clichés, such as action heroes deadpanning, “We’ve got company.” He wanted his supercut to emulate the rhythms of a Hollywood feature. Others could collect the thread, but Marclay would weave the tapestry. Marclay’s monstrous creation needed a title. He thought of a few of his usual puns: “Time Piece,” “Clock Work.” Then he and Burnett discussed the matter, and decided that the work was too grand to be trivialized with wordplay. Better, Marclay decided, to call it “The Clock.” At Marclay’s request, White Cube posted a “Help Wanted” sign at Today is Boring, a cinéaste redoubt on Kingsland Road. Six young people were hired to watch DVDs and rip digital copies of any scene showing a clock or alluding to the time. (Sophia Loren to Marlon Brando: “I can’t appear at eleven o’clock in the morning in an evening dress!”) Files were logged with search-friendly titles: “1124—kid waiting on streets/old man checks watch—Paper Moon.” The assistants recorded their discoveries on a Google spreadsheet, to avoid overlap. Since a rival version could be hastily crowd-sourced on the Internet, the assistants signed nondisclosure agreements. Each afternoon, Marclay was presented fresh clips: the “catch of the day.” At first, he was merely collecting scattered files, but eventually he had enough to forge “hinges” between them. The more hinges he came up with, the more inventive they got. At 10:30 P.M., Marclay realized, a shot of David Strathairn, delivering the news as Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” could slide into Dustin Hoffman, in “Tootsie,” watching television. To create continuity, the Murrow dialogue was extended into the “Tootsie” clip, at muffled volume. Marclay relished such sly incongruities. He wanted to make an expertly edited film that exposed the fakery of editing. “By putting the clips back into real time, it’s contradicting what film is,” he explained. “You become aware of how film is constructed—of these devices and tropes they constantly use. Like, if someone turns abruptly, you expect someone else to be in the next cut. An actor looks down at his watch and, suddenly, you have a closeup of the watch. But, if the first clip is in black-and-white and the next is in color, you know you’ve been fooled.” These absurdities echoed the seminal 1958 film collage “A MOVIE,” by Bruce Conner, which juxtaposed clips from old films to comic effect. “He definitely had an influence on my understanding of editing,” Marclay said. “I admired his odd transitions.” In the film’s most famous sequence, a submarine captain sees something unexpected through his periscope: a voluptuous girl in a bikini. Conner’s collage piles on the spectacle: the captain aims a torpedo at the girl, and the next shot is of a mushroom cloud. Marclay wanted “The Clock” to feature the occasional outlandish fragment—an explosion from “The Aviator,” at 11:17 A.M., led into Al Pacino looking startled, in “88 Minutes”—but he felt that overrelying on melodrama wouldn’t work in such a long video; it would be like composing an opera with nothing but cymbal crashes. To inspire queasy contemplation of lost time, he emphasized more incidental moments: a woman applying deodorant before a mirror, a depressed man fussing with his crooked tie. Between 7:09 P.M. and 7:18 P.M., there are four clips from Claude Chabrol’s “This Man Must Die”—images of a cigarette left burning in an ashtray. (A table clock is nearby.) “The burning cigarette is the twentieth-century symbol of time,” Marclay said. “As a memento mori, we used to show a candle, but a cigarette is so much more modern. Yet it’s the same thing—you see time burning.” “The Clock” turned actors into a more chilling kind of memento mori. At 12:27 A.M., there was a clip of a resplendently dewy Catherine Deneuve, then twenty-one years old, from “Repulsion.” Four hours later, she’s three decades older, in “My Favorite Season,” an embittered wife intentionally knocking a clock off a fireplace. At 1:51 A.M., Jack Nicholson is a frantic juvenile delinquent in “The Cry Baby Killer”; at 4:59 P.M., he is the paunchy and bald hero of “About Schmidt,” gazing at his office clock as he torpidly awaits retirement. The video’s melancholy strain was, in part, an aesthetic choice, but it was also dictated by the material. We look at clocks, after all, in order to shackle ourselves to a schedule. In films and in life, eyes consulting a clock usually look disappointed, harried, or distressed. At 11:30 A.M., the point was underscored by a montage of jittery people shouting things like “I need ten minutes” and “There’s no time!” In Marclay’s hands, clocks became instruments that destroyed contentment, as when Julia Roberts, dreamily caressing Clive Owen in bed, realizes with dismay, “It’s twelve-fifteen!” Marclay’s head assistant, Paul Anton Smith—a laconic, long-haired Canadian with a passion for Golden Age cinema—understood that his boss coveted moments that were “banal and plain but visually interesting.” Smith explained, “If there was someone making tea, it helped if it was a clip from the sixties and it was a cool-looking kettle.” Other assistants didn’t get it, Marclay said. One fellow, who offered little but gunshots and “guys getting their heads chopped off,” was fired. The surviving assistants specialized in different genres, and all of them yielded images of timepieces except Bollywood films, which were oddly clockless. Marclay was often surprised by his assistants’ viewing choices. “I probably would have made different selections,” he said. “But you have to accept what people bring to you. I’ve worked with collage a lot. And there’s this chance thing that happens—you don’t always control things. Why did you find this today and not this? But you’ve got this thing, and you make it work. It’s the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.” Some sequences in “The Clock” were inevitable—at noon, “High Noon.” But Marclay’s video rendered even that material strange. In Fred Zinnemann’s film, the fateful hour is preceded by a gallery of anxious faces intercut with a pendulum clock. “It’s condensed in the actual film,” Marclay explained. “I put all of that back into real time.” His video upended a central illusion of film. Theorists like Henri Bergson had dilated on the falseness of cinematic “duration”—the way that, say, the swirl of a long drunken evening can be captured in a set piece lasting three minutes. Marclay made the same point, but viscerally. Though “The Clock” subverted many cinematic tropes, it participated in others. When a movie emphasizes that it’s five minutes to four, it’s meant to raise anticipation or anxiety. In Marclay’s video, too, there was an artificial rise in tension before almost every hour, and a slackening afterward. He decided to make comedy of it. The lead-up to noon accelerated toward mayhem, with flame-haired Lola running down the streets of Berlin while Debra Winger leaped out of bed in Algeria and Leonardo DiCaprio dashed to catch the Titanic. At 12:01 P.M., the video abruptly returned to boredom: Burgess Meredith, as a bank teller, silently putting up a “Next Window, Please” placard. At the end of the six-month trial period, Marclay had amassed several extended sequences, and he told White Cube that he could accomplish his feat—eventually. His computer was getting so clogged with data that a second machine was added. One G5 was reserved for midnight through noon, the other for the remains of the day. If a filmmaker made a montage of Marclay editing his epic video, it would show a man aging by three years while locked, ten to twelve hours a day, in front of a computer. There would be many closeups of Marclay wincing from his aching back. About halfway through the sequence, the artist’s right wrist would become entombed in a tan Velcro prosthetic support. “It was a gruesome three years,” Marclay told me. “But I became addicted to finding those little solutions. It gives you a bit of a high. You put two things together, and you get, like, ‘Oh, my God, this works!’ ” He admitted that he sometimes dreaded the arrival of fresh clips: “The worst was when I worked really hard on figuring out a nice transition at 10:46 A.M. and someone would bring another 10:46, which was better footage or worked better with the narrative. There was constant remodelling.” “The Clock” started sprouting leitmotifs: men with hangovers smashing alarm clocks, late travellers racing across train platforms. Such sporadic recurrences, Marclay felt, rewarded attention and knit the work together. Smaller themes, connected to a particular time of day, sang out and then faded. In the early evening, Marclay inscribed a pattern of women being disappointed by their husbands. At 7:14 P.M., Liam Neeson calls Julianne Moore, who’s planned a surprise party for him, to say that he’s missed the flight home; four minutes later, Moore, this time in “Far from Heaven,” tells a servant, “It’s nearly twenty after and Mr. Whitaker still hasn’t phoned!” At 7:19 P.M., Steve Martin promises his wife, “Shouldn’t be any later than ten.” The capper is Katharine Hepburn, preparing place settings for a dinner party while fuming over an absent Spencer Tracy: “Isn’t that typical! Twenty minutes of eight.” For all its jokes, the video was emerging as the first mashup to be deeply moving. The 5 P.M. hour was the first to be completed—movies so often depict characters leaving work. As the subsequent hours filled in, there were some coups. One evening, Paul Anton Smith watched “The Woman in the Window,” a Fritz Lang noir. The corpse of one character, Claude Mazard, is discovered, in the sewers, at 11:44 P.M. The film cuts to a closeup of his pocket watch, monogrammed with the initials “C.M.” Marclay suddenly had his version of a Hitchcock cameo. The montage method ruthlessly exposed the quality of an actor’s performance. In a seven-second clip, the line between feeling and fakery becomes painfully clear. At 4:09 P.M., there’s a shot of Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby,” lying in bed; her face subtly conveys that her distress will tip into lunacy. But when Sandra Bullock is seen, at 10:15 A.M., waiting in a conference room for Hugh Grant, and tapping a pencil like a jackhammer, her anxiety seems as contrived as Kabuki. To keep the desktops of each Mac uncluttered, Marclay set up folders for every hour. This decision yielded a narrative strategy: the clips in each folder often suggested a theme. The 8 P.M. folder held many clips of characters attending the theatre, so he filled in the gaps with scenes of heightened drama. At ten o’clock, several clips of women drinking alone prompted a theme of sadness. Marclay began thinking of the hours as chapters in a novel. This seemed fitting: in building a monument to the drama of a single day, he was following the lead of “Mrs. Dalloway” and “Ulysses.” Marclay told me that the process made him feel like a writer: “You have to sit down every morning at your fucking computer and just do it. If you write three sentences? Fine.” Just as the sentences in a novel build into patterns and story lines, so did Marclay’s clips. One actor whose star was reborn in “The Clock” was Joan Crawford, who in the video becomes a sinister nocturnal creature—she appears nearly a dozen times, always intensely plotting, whether she is putting on gloves (7:41), starting a fire (9:03), administering medicine (10:49), snooping in drawers (10:57), stopping a clock from ticking (11:25), drinking a cocktail in a black sequin dress (11:48), hiding behind slotted blinds (11:52), or staring at a pendulum (2:25). Marclay found that a few clips of a film, spaced apart, could create effects more trenchant than the original movie. At 9:52 A.M., Jodie Foster, poised to confront her rapists, is told to wait in an antechamber; the cruelty of this delay registers at 11:16 A.M., when another clip shows her finally entering the courtroom. Seven minutes before noon, Charlie Sheen is stoked for an interview at Gordon Gekko’s firm, declaring, “Life all comes down to a few moments. This is one of them.” At 5:23 A.M., Sheen brusquely nudges a one-night stand out of bed as he walks over to a computer to begin trading. These bookends convey his entire dissolution. At the same time, “The Clock” was a sprawling anti-narrative; like a churlish Robbe-Grillet novel, it toyed with your impulse to create a coherent story. Marclay often included several clips from a movie in a single hour, daring viewers to anticipate a big plot turn—which never arrives. Nine clips show residents of Elm Street preparing for sleep, but Freddy Krueger doesn’t appear. At 11:57 P.M., a young Vanessa Paradis proposes sex to a boy while disrobing him. At 1:19 A.M., they’re sleeping in separate beds. Did they do it? At midnight, Marclay constructed a wicked trap. There is a sweeping build: an American in London howls like a werewolf; Gary Oldman howls as Sid Vicious. Orson Welles, in “The Stranger,” plummets off a clock tower. Finally, there is a shot of a clock that has loomed oppressively in the video, appearing dozens of times: Big Ben. It’s obliterated in a fiery explosion—a clip, from the wretched “V for Vendetta,” turned golden through the alchemy of remixing. Yet Marclay undercuts this seeming climax. In the next minute, he segues to a scene in London in which Rhett Butler’s daughter wakes from a nightmare. As Butler comforts her, the window behind them frames Big Ben, fully intact. Marclay has turned the apparent crux of “The Clock” into a mere dream. “You always feel tricked when that happens in movies,” Marclay said. “And the video, in a way, is one big trick.” In September, 2010, Marclay returned briefly to New York. White Cube had scheduled the video’s première for October, but there was a hitch: hundreds of transitions worked visually but not sonically. For help, he had enlisted Quentin Chiappetta, a Brooklyn sound designer who had worked on “Video Quartet.” Holing up in a warehouse in Williamsburg, they tweaked the soundtrack with Pro Tools. Chiappetta told me that Marclay, as a d.j., viewed easy solutions with contempt. “He doesn’t like fadeouts,” Chiappetta said. “He thinks it’s weak. It’s his work with turntables—the easiest way to get out of a spot is to turn the knob down. So to do it in a more clever, rhythmic way became the goal.” Sometimes, as with Dimitri Tiomkin’s stirring score for “High Noon,” the soundtrack of one movie was laid under dozens of neighboring clips, binding them together. In other cases, a score was shifted in pitch or speed so that it merged with the next. Noise was gradually added to a pristine surround-sound clip, easing the shift into a crackly mono one. Such remastering made it “so that you didn’t notice clips were ending, so that you were continually pulled along,” Chiappetta said. The sound collage became ten times as intricate as the visual collage. A number of scenes received entirely new soundtracks, to striking effect. At 11:33 A.M., there’s a fantastically tense sequence of Dana Andrews, in “Laura,” snooping around Clifton Webb’s New York apartment; it’s virtually silent, and every footstep feels like an earthquake. The original is not suspenseful in the least—it’s dominated by Webb’s tough-talk voice-over. Sometimes, Marclay created new sound effects. A clip, at 6:49 P.M., showing Kevin Spacey shaving, was marred by distracting audio; to redo the soundtrack, Marclay stood in a sound booth and pressed the nozzle of a Noxzema shaving-cream can in sync with the visuals. As the première date approached, a few holes remained. “There was a point where it was, like, ‘How are we going to deal with 3 A.M. and 5 A.M.?’ ” Marclay said. “Those were tough. The hardest was five.” At that hour, Smith and his crew couldn’t find time-stamped clips for fifteen of the minutes. Marclay hit on a solution. The later that viewers stayed up watching “The Clock,” he surmised, the more “strung out” they would become. “You have to imagine that, if you’ve been up watching and it’s 5 A.M., you’re in a weird state of mind,” he said. “I decided to play with that.” He completed the late-late show with more than a dozen dream sequences, including the classic Dali nightmare from “Spellbound.” It worked, because so many of the clips in between showed people agitatedly tossing in bed. In the end, more than ten thousand clips were collected. The first screening was at White Cube’s austere gallery in Mason’s Yard. Jopling and his staff told Marclay that he’d produced a masterpiece. Sure, it was fun to try to identify all the clips whizzing by. But “The Clock” was no game. By presenting a day in the life as a ceaseless parade of fictional narratives, he had confirmed Joan Didion’s dictum that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” while reminding us that we are all going to die. “Time’s up,” Marclay said, tapping me on the shoulder. “I’m ready to go out for dinner.” It was 7:29 P.M. Onscreen, Nicole Kidman, in a Manhattan bathroom, was also ready to go out, asking a distracted Tom Cruise if her hair looked pretty. Offscreen, we were in a third-story gallery, enshrouded in black velvet curtains, in Yokohama, Japan. It was August, and the city, a southern satellite of Tokyo, was celebrating the opening of its Triennale, a contemporary-art exposition. “The Clock” was being shown in a warehouse on the waterfront; it was the anchor of the show, which had been given the companionable title “Our Magic Hour.” Several works on display were apparent tributes to Marclay, such as a video of a Japanese artist using a turntable as a potter’s wheel. I was happy to be interrupted. My body had been locked in symbiosis with “The Clock” for some three hours, and my stomach had been growling ever since cooking sequences had begun proliferating, around five. At 7:25 P.M., not long after Juno’s family starts in on the baked potatoes, a French matron is shown chopping vegetables, her metronomic rhythm evoking a loudly ticking watch. Marclay, who had flown in from London the day before, was jet-lagged and disoriented: when he’d guided me into the installation, he stood in front of a closeup of an elementary-school clock, indicating 4:29 P.M., and asked me what time it was. His exhaustion was a happy consequence of success. “The Clock” has become as iconic as Jeff Koons’s flowering “Puppy” or Damien Hirst’s taxidermied shark—and Marclay had risen from art-world respect to international fame. Though “The Clock” was the evolutionary outgrowth of decades of remixing, it registered as a shocking leap in ambition, as if a dedicated short-story writer had suddenly published a Tolstoyan novel. “The C