Sunday, December 4, 2011

watching time pass; The Clock in Boston

We were in Boston and I managed to spend some time with The Clock at the Museum of Fine Arts.  I previously made a lengthy post on Christian Marclay winning The Golden Lion award and his exhibit of The Clock in Venice, Italy.  The work functioned as I imagined, but experiencing it in person builds a new layer of memory and gravitational pull worth having. 

I tried giving the baby head sculpture at the back MFA entrance a drink of water.

I came and went from the gallery at different times on two different days to sit through a few combined hours of the piece.  I recommend having this kind of time to go in and out of this piece, partly because it is a 24 hour piece but also because you have the leisure to go in and out of it and reflect a bit.

I watched it during different times of day to study the structure.  Would the 'story' shift according to the hour?  For example, would afternoon rush hour in real life have a similar tension or reference in The Clock?  Indeed, yes, it does. Everyone is running late, of course. The constant building of tension, with moving rather than fixed camera shots, is the repeating treatment of The Clock. At first there is hardly a dull moment. Dramatic moments build by placing, obviously, dramatic moments from very different films next to one another.  Once you fall into the groove of the pattern, even if you recognize there is a pattern, you enter a zone of suspended time.  It's the quintessential homage, and simultaneously critique, of a time arts piece.      

Because the story isn't linear, the viewer can't expect or watch for a conventional outcome like the hero saves the day for example. All of the memories of scenes from different movies get jumbled together bringing all their emotional baggage with them.  Humor, thrills, lurking dangers, disappointments and losses.  At the same time they cancel each other out into a numb sensation. Instead the viewer expects the rhythm of story in a general experiential way. Conflicts build to climaxes and then comes resolution, but extended into a 24 hour experience.  And while in the midst of this extended experience critiquing time, a block of scenes underscore the viewer's anticipation of drama or action or whatever is coming next with sequences from movies of characters waiting.

If one imagines setting out to do a project such as this, where you pull scenes from existing movies whenever a clock is pictured or time is referenced, it seems rather simple.  If it were only to stop there, that might be all there is to it.  However The Clock has a smooth, more seamless editing treatment than one would expect from Marclay, considering the purity of his early works like the vinyl records cut and glued back together then played with leap-frog sounds of each separate record over the other. Whereas in The Clock, audio is layered from the coming scene or parallel story giving a fluidity that his vinyl record pieces have not.  This could be due to the skill of the video editors he commissioned for The Clock, but as such a precise artist in his other works, I credit him with the conscious decision to create a more seamless work here.

The choice of each motion picture clip moves the piece forward as well.  The motion, momentum and gestures of rhythm are more frequent than a static shot of a landscape or object.  A hand reaches, a head turns, a door closes. A 007 sequence builds suspense with running, climbing, driving, and finally a knocking over of clocks. Drama is reconstructed with positive reactions, confusing and leveling our memory in order to jar us into focusing on the now.  The challenge of such a large-scale construction, it would seem, is the constant (re)building of tension over the course of a full day.  From my various visits at different hours of the day, it appears to succeed in doing exactly that. 

Conceptually, The Clock, covers the gamut.  It's one big fat pun on time for starters. Clocks, watches, pendulums, tic-tock and so on. While hammering the idea that 'time is short' and constantly checking and reminding us of the time (that corresponds with real time), the piece also encourages and lulls viewers into losing track of time for a full 24 hours. Or as many hours as a movie watcher can allow themselves until finally pulling away. There lies the tension.

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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

seductive and repulsive at the same time



Since Christian Marclay won the The Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale this year, I'm following up with some more of my notes and observations on his work.   Conveniently, too, working in sound and video, he handily gets Rolling Stop's emphasis on time-arts off the ground.  

Revealed in his final products, Marclay’s process is a repeated impulse to break things down into parts, separating them for examination then recombining them, presenting something new. Initially working with sound, Marclay first became known as the ‘turn-table guy.’  His direct technique of chopping up bits and reassembling them is most accessible and arguably most successful when he includes video.  

Watch this video of Marclay on Roulette TV for an introduction to his work and his process.  As a bonus the host of the show is an otherworldly (for lack of a better word), multi-format performance artist Phoebe Legere.

 


An early video piece by Marclay, Guitar Drag (2000) is arguably Marclay’s most American Punk expression.  An amplified Fender Stratocaster guitar is dragged behind a moving truck. The fourteen-minute video has multiple references starting with abusing an instrument to a creative end, like when rock musicians smash guitars in performances. Filmed over roads in Texas, it also has elements that echo road movies and westerns. It is "about violence in general and more specifically about the lynching of James Byrd Jr. who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck. I want the video to have these multiple layers and trigger people's imagination in contradictory ways. The piece ends up being seductive and repulsive at the same time." (Quoted text from Marclay on a YouTube upload of the complete video that has since been removed.)  

Before anything else Marclay succeeds as a deconstructionist. In a precursor to his piece featured in Venice (The Clock), he masterfully integrated moving image and sound in Video Quartet (2002).  He appropriated clips from piles of existing films – each clip involving music either with instruments being played or vocalists singing.  The separated bits, each with their own original sound accompaniment, are then edited together to create a composition of the sounds and their images projected across four screens. The installation nudges the viewer/listener to think and experience the sounds and images collectively, and opens the possibly to make new associations of meaning, like a large moving collage.  Like Guitar Drag, moments of Video Quartet are again “seductive and repulsive at the same time.” (In the bibliography below, find a link to an unauthorized video excerpt of Video Quartet in the Tate Modern in 2006 to get a glimpse of the installation.)

Using video adds a layer of intricacy but also accessibility to Marclay’s work. With four screens playing different clips in Video Quartet, the visual and musical instruments multiply significantly, making the composition complex and intense. The reconstruction of film bits, times four, suspends much expectation of a conventional narrative, yet the composition functions with a beginning, middle and end with visual performances that coordinate to heighten the progression and sense of a conceptual ‘story’, with suspense in the action, conflicts and a climax.  Even when a strain to hear it, the deconstruction of the familiar film bits gets reconstructed into something easily followed and ‘understood’ by our senses.  So in a way, because it’s easy on the eyes, it’s easier on the ears. 

Where we have a chance to get lost in the structure is also where we have a chance to connect. We feel the gap between orchestration and cacophony as well as the gap between an audience’s intuitive expectation of a story and the separation of moving images from their original context. Yet, when combined, the structure allows new opportunities to build meaning.  Naturally anticipating tension and intimacy, viewers are pulled into moments of accord, lulled by familiar characters and left to build a story or interpretive experience based partly on our individual memory. Amidst the racket, moments tug on our memory of existing films. The familiarity comforts us, includes us, and gives a simple, powerful foothold into the work. We are distracted into listening differently, to reinterpret, to be open. The experience of these moments is fleeting and richly individual. The greatest challenge as well as reward, this gap is where the viewer/listener comes into the work the most.  Or if it is missed, they simply don’t. 

The disorientation of familiar scenes and collage nature of Marclay’s work seriously demands a willingness to suspend our normal expectations from a movie and to wait for and find moments to connect. The memory of movie scenes combines with our brain’s habit to construct meaning and story to encourage us to listen differently than we do normally and hear sounds we’ve heard before with new ears. Instinctively we, as humans, see past the breaks in order to solve a puzzle. 

Video Quartet and The Clock each operate under an impression that they are composed and have order, but the moments of confusion make it also feel accidental and unintentional.  As the ‘composer’ did Marclay plan for ascending beats and falling rhythms?  Historically, the artist’s process draws on accident as much as an imposed order when it comes to meaning-making in his work. For example, he appropriated two films to make Up and Out.  In it the images of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow Up” start at the same time that the audio from Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” starts. He does nothing else – no other manipulation - to either film. The resulting piece layers the quests of two characters, a photographer in one and a sound effects specialist in the other.  The moments of conceptual synchronization are uncanny happy accidents and while we typically judge artists to control and direct such moments, in Marclay’s work the unplanned connections are part of the beauty of the work. The mostly readymade piece holds up as one of Marclay’s most elegant nods to his greatest influence, Marcel Duchamp. 

Marclay successfully plays with the tension between consonance and dissonance, deconstruction and re-assemblage while awakening our memories and senses.  He also plainly undermines our expectations in his process. While a viewer/listener can passively watch and hear what happens, the works require extra time – more than a single viewing – and an analytical teasing to glean the details. The limit of Marclay’s works is its need to command so much attention for a viewer to connect more deeply with it. However, the limitation serves to maintain further tension in the experience of the art. His work at the Venice Biennale is consistent with this but deepens the stakes further. 

The Clock is a 24-hour video deconstruction of thousands of existing films into clips with references to and imagery of time.  While Award-winning, The Clock is also criticized for being a formulaic repeat of his previous works while gimmicking the appropriation of familiar films to excite popularity.  The piece shows in 'real' time on a single screen, meaning that when it's 4:07 PM on the screen, so it is in real life for the person in the gallery watching it.  Considering how Marclay pieced The Clock together, it is indeed another deconstructed readymade collage.  The order of many clips is determined literally by their reference to time in their content.  If a clock shows 9:00 AM in a film or a character says it in another, there it goes in the 24-hour structure of Marclay’s film.  The spaces between appear filled with dramatic action tense with anticipation or attention to the passing of time. Once again the sounds and imagery builds, memories of the films are brought forth, and the rhythm ebbs and flows, all of it combining to simultaneously repel and command one’s attention.  Yet, in this piece one’s attention is magnified by literally watching the work tick and tock visually and audibly for as long as you watch it.

The simple fact that viewers would need to commit 24 hours to watching it in its entirety poses an obvious challenge, but is not necessary to embrace it conceptually.  Weighing the decisions the artist made, like any other work of art, and how they hold up with his intent, will take longer to discern. The Clock has been compelling critics and populists alike to spend and watch time closely, feeling its nostalgia, its allure and its pressure. Some even return again to spend more time observing the scrutiny and passing of time.  I suspect that in time we will find that the work is consistent with Marclay’s other works taken a step further: a simple critique of how we perceive time on an epic scale physically and experientially.

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Bonus Material:
Marclay participates in a group called Text of Light, formed in 2001. They perform improvised music to the films of Stan Brakhage and other members of the American Cinema avante-garde of the 1950s-60s. Members of the group include Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht (gtrs/devices), Christian Marclay and DJ Olive (turntables), William Hooker (drums/perc), Ulrich Krieger (sax/electronics), and most recently Tim Barnes (drums/perc).


Text Of Light: Live at the Latvian House Toronto 2007 from jol thomson on Vimeo.
   

Sources and more to read or watch on Christian Marclay:
* means I recommend it.
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Saturday, July 9, 2011

bear with me

I'm working on a fresh post but apparently it's too large or has too many links, or I don't know what the hell, but Blogger is fighting me on it - dumping piles of text as I embed video and add links.  I've recruited an html reading and writing superhero to help me strong arm the technology to simply do what it claims to do.
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Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Venice Biennale calling

I've been pining to travel to Venice for the Biennale for years and since the 54th Venice Biennale started June 4, I've been imagining myself strolling along the canals like I did when I was there as a teenager in the 80s.

For over a century, the Biennale has been a premier art event.  Apparently, it  has also grown into a celebrity magnet, like an Oscars party for the Arts,  which could be an annoying distraction, but the push to assemble large, current installations by representative artists of many countries still appeals to me.  I expect that stepping from building to building, each curated by country, in such a decadent, labyrinth of a city would be a rich and powerful art experience. Owen Sheers confirms this in his review.      


Swiss-born, Bice Curiger, curated 83 artists and groups into this year's event titled ILLUMinations. With 89 pavilions, it is touted as the largest and most inclusive Biennale to date.
"I am particularly interested in the eagerness of many contemporary artists to establish an intense dialogue with the viewer, and to challenge the conventions through which contemporary art is viewed."  Bice Curiger, Universes in Universe
For what reads to me like an even-handed review of this year's Venice Biennale that at least descriptively mentions some lower-profile works, I recommend Roberta Smith's two page synopsis in The New York Times.  Adrian Searle of The Guardian leads a melodramatic video tour of some high profile installations of an ATM pipe organ, a tank powered treadmill plus more by  Mike Nelson, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Thomas Hirschhorn and others, which is fun to see.  Click here to see it.

And be sure to watch this interview with Chrsitian Marclay, winner of the Golden Lion for his work, "The Clock." (Video from The Bienniale Channel's YouTube site.)



Haroon Mirza won the Silver Lion, an award for a promising young artist, for the way his work "immediately engages the viewer with his refreshing views on weakness and power."


Art Info also posted a handy guide by country. (Click this line of text to go to it.)  Or follow the Universes in Universe links to see theirs.

With a glimpse through images and video from the web, many of this year's selections sound interactive and engaging and probably worth elbowing your way past Leonardo DiCaprio or Courtney Love, if one  must.  The Venice Biennale runs till November 27.  

Have you ever been to a Biennale in Venice? 


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Bibliography (a.k.a. click linked text below to see and read more):
Universes in Universe
La Bienale
The Guardian
The New York Times 

artdaily.org

Art Info
The Bienniale Channel website


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