Hasta La Ideas

Still from Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” (2010). Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. (Courtesy White Cube, Paula Cooper Gallery, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Those who didn’t have time to catch Christian Marclay’s 24-hour chronological odyssey, “The Clock” (2010), when it debuted stateside earlier this year at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery are in luck: the critically acclaimed video work has been acquired jointly by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the National Gallery of Canada, the institutions announced this week. One of the five other editions was snapped up last month—for a reported $467,500—by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“The Clock” is a particularly (you guessed it!) timely acquisition for the MFA, which in September will unveil the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, a seven-gallery showplace housed in the museum’s fully renovated I.M. Pei-designed building. Marclay’s work will have its Boston premiere on September 17 and 18, when the MFA hosts a 24-hour celebration of the new wing. “This first screening of ‘The Clock’ will be an unforgettable way to mark a new era and historic moment for the MFA’s contemporary art program,” says Jen Mergel (pictured at right), the museum’s Robert L. Beal, Enid L. Beal, and Bruce A. Beal Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. Mergel made time to answer our questions about the work, the acquisition, and how two institutions share a video (an armored truck is not involved).

How would you describe “The Clock” to someone who hasn’t seen it?
I’d have to describe what Marclay does as an artist to explain what “The Clock” is as an artwork. With his background as a pioneering DJ, Marclay samples and splices popular recordings into smart, resonant, profound new sequences of image and sound. For “The Clock” Marclay assembles thousands of film and TV clips that include watches, clocktowers, sundials, alarm clocks, countdowns, and more into a 24-hour cycle of footage that, scene by scene, breaks films’ narrative time but keeps the local time on screen, in sync with the local time zone wherever it is shown. So in “The Clock,” when a famous actor in a sci-fi clip launches a rocket at 11:59, another in a western meets for a duel at high noon, and another in a thriller catches a train at 12:01, you can be sure that these scenes and all of the clips in between will always accurately match the passage from a.m. to p.m., wherever it is shown.

So what is “The Clock”? It’s fair to say it’s a paradox: it’s both a working timepiece and a time capsule, it at once breaks chronology to redefine chronology, and it takes time as it gives time. It’s a space where worlds collide but never meet as they keep marching forward.
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