Curators: Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya
Dates: March 6–May 18, 2014
Film & Video Gallery (103)
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is pleased to present Christian Marclay: The Clock, inaugurating a program dedicated to video and the moving image. This new Film and Video gallery will exhibit works from the Guggenheim museums and other collections, with a special focus on contemporary video creations.
Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael, California) inaugurates the Film & Video gallery with his iconic work The Clock. In this work, Marclay samples thousands of film excerpts indicating the passage of time. Spanning the range of timepieces, from clock towers to wristwatches and from buzzing alarm clocks to the occasional cuckoo, The Clock draws attention to time as a multifaceted protagonist of cinematic narrative. With virtuosic skill, the artist has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to form a 24-hour montage, which unfolds in real time. While constructed from a dizzying variety of periods, contexts and film genres whose storylines seem to have shattered in a multitude of narrative shards, The Clock uncannily proceeds at a unified pace as if re-ordered by the latent narrative of time itself. Because it is synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities.