Christian Marclay is a holdout against the eclipse of the medium. This requires that he embed his work in what I elsewhere term a technical support.1 (If traditional art required artisanal supports of various kindscanvas for oil painting, plaster and wax for bronze casting, light-sensitive emulsion for photographycontemporary art makes use of technical supportscommercial or industrial productsto which it then makes recursive reference, in the manner of modernist arts reflex of self-criticism. For Marclay, this technical support is commercial sound film, from which he has extrapolated that process into pure synchronicity. Earlier, this was to be found in his focus on synch-sound in the use of mostly Hollywood films for his masterful Video Quartet (2002). An anthology of film clips joined top-to-bottom, Video Quartet runs four loops of clips from commercial sound films on four DVD screens, spaced out along a wall. Sometimes the synchrony is visual, as circular forms (phonograph turntable, roulette wheel, trumpet rim) play simultaneously across the visual field. At other times, Marclay seems intent to contrast sound and silence, a historical divide over which sound jumped in 1929 to turn movies into talkies. At such points, it is the very era of silence that Marclay ambitiously wants his viewers to see. How to do this is not obvious, but one electric moment presents cockroaches spilling onto a piano keyboard and scurrying over it (soundlessly, of course). The Clock (2010), Christian Marclays latest work, is also a compilation of film clipsfragments of commercial films, joined end-to-end. Projected in video on a wall as a segmented twelve by twenty-one foot image, The Clock selects fragments in which the dials of wristwatches and large free-standing clocks figure prominently. Doubling this temporal focus, The Clock stretches over twenty-four hours of audience and projected time.2 Marclay has turned to pure synchronicity as the undeniable support for post1. See Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition, October 116 (Spring 2006) and A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 2. My thanks to Malcolm Turvey for his reading and helpful critiques of this essay.
OCTOBER 136, Spring 2011, pp. 213217. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Christian Marclay. Video Quartet. 2002.
Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
1929 film and thus for cinema itself. This is easy to see in Video Quartets exercise in synch sound. In The Clock, we confront what must be called another of the underlying conditions of filmsynch time: which is to say, projection at twenty-four frames a second, synchronized with the psycho-physiological facts of optics, as the retinal production of the after-image from one frames visual stimulation slides invisibly into the next. The illusion of movement overrides the film frames appearance, creating the visual slippage we call the movies. This explanation by way of the after-image, called the phi-effect, has become controversial of late, making the synchronization between projected frames and the physiological-optics of viewing problematic. Recent research on the intermittent reperfusion on the brain supports the reality of the phi-effect, however, even in the relatively smooth unrolling of video.3 The Clocks synch-time joins audience and screen in the manner of what film 3. Research at the Thoralf M. Sundt Jr. Neurosurgical Research Laboratory, Mayo Clinic, and Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, Rochester, Minn., 1995.
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Marclay. The Clock. 2010.
Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
scholars call interpellation, after Althussers Ideological State Apparatuses, as the
subject recognizes himself as the addressee of a command, thus identifying with the commander, himself; for Laura Mulvey, classical narrative cinema positions female viewers to identify with the male protagonist. In film, this recognition, or identification, causes the viewing subject to suffer a passivity that results in her being woven into the weft of the films movement, as the swiveling camera or shot/reaction shot editing lifts the viewer imaginatively off her seat to join the sides of the projected actors. At the very outset of cinematic editing, Vsevold Pudovkin conserved scarce film stock in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union by interspersing pre-recorded scenes with cutaways to an actors expressionless face, thereby creating the illusion of someone acting out pity, horror, anguish. These cutaways perform another act of interpellation, synchronizing observers in the audience with the temporal unfolding of events in the film. Marclays The Clock exploits the cutaway as its plot unfolds through the sights of the dials displayed on clocks and watches, and the reaction shots of horrified characters in the film clips Marclay anthologizes into his own work. It doesnt take long before members of the audience glance at their watches and realize that the precise moment displayed on the screen matches the moment registered on their own wrists. Marclays plot gears itself into that of the film clips he uses, in which characters anticipate a catastrophe that will be unleashed at a certain moment: a bombs explosion, a missiles strike. We recognize Sean Connery, Charlie Chaplin, Steve McQueen, Gregory Peck, but unlike the temporal arcs that produce the plots of Dial M for Murder, or Strangers on a Train, the suspense unreeling inside the screen is not synchronized with the suspense unfolding in the viewers real time. In another twist on this, Annette Michelson has characterized Michael Snows Wavelength as the very distillation of suspense: And as the camera continues to move steadily forward, building a tension that grows in direct ratio to the reduction of the field, we recognize, with some surprise, those horizons as defining the contours of
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Marclay. The Clock. 2010.
Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
narrative, of that narrative form animated by distended temporality,
turning upon cognition, toward revelation. Waiting for an issue, we are suspended towards resolution.4 Snows resistance to editing, except for several cuts and splices, allows for an extended zoom to pass through space, ignoring the body that crashes to the floorthe presumed object of the films suspense. The near continuity of the cinematic zoom enforces the viewers perception that Wavelength can only continue for the length of a 16mm reel of film, synchronizing the suspense time on the screen with his own perceptual experience, in his seat. On all of these fronts, The Clock explores synchronous time, a tour de force in the invention of a technical support and, consequently, a new medium. Post-structuralism, in the form of Jacques Derridas Speech and Phenomena, a critique of Hsserls own critique of structuralism in his Logical Investigations, focuses on the now effect of Hsserls dismissal of structural linguistics with its division of subjective experience into consciousness and representational sign. He quotes Hsserl as saying, consciousness means nothing other than the possibility of the self-presence of the present in the living present, and consequently: In inward speech I communicate nothing to myself because there is no need of it. The existence of mental acts does not have to be indicated because it is immediately present to the subject in the present moment. Derrida insists on this effect of self-presence, this indivisible now-effect, as pure fiction, or myth. He writes, It is a spatial or mechanical metaphor, an inherited metaphysical concept.5 The Clocks simultaneity, enacted by the synchronous gearing of reel time into 4. Annette Michelson, Toward Snow, in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), p. 175. 5. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. Newton Garve (Evanstown: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 62.
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Marclay. The Clock. 2010.
Christian Marclay. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
real time, flirts with Hsserls desire for the self-present instant, the revelation of self-presence in the now-effect. Derridas critique of the idea of synchrony is explored as well in The Double Session, where he emphasizes the line in Mallarms essay Mimique, characterizing the mimes performance as the false appearance of the present, which Derrida will celebrate as overthrowing the idea of synchronic self-presence, and consequently of the very specificity of an object-initself.6 It is the strength of those contemporary artists who want to explore the dimensions of a specific medium, in itself, that they put Derridas strictures behind them. Marclay manages this by turning to suspense as the extended dilation of the now effect, transforming the reel time of film into the real time of waiting.
6. Jacques Derrida, The Double Session, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 200.
