Christian Marclay

The book which was published to coincide with the inaugural presentation of the masterful video work The Clock held at White Cube Mason's Yard (October - November 2010), presents a selection of 1,440 stills excerpted from Christian Marclay's acclaimed 24-hour video work The Clock (2010). Constructed from moments in cinema where the face of a clock or watch appears, or a specific time is referred to in dialogue, Marclay extracted thousands of these fragments and edited them to flow in real time.
While The Clock 24-hour video examines the depiction of time, plot and duration in cinema, it simultaneously functions as a fully operational timepiece, synchronized to the viewer's local time zone. At any given moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching The Clock experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the span of a few minutes, causing time to unravel in countless directions at once. Even while The Clock tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence. An essay by psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader examines the multifaceted role of clocks, considering them both as devices that measure time and as conceptual markers that condition, shape and orient human existence. Leader interprets their manifestation in the cinematic moments of Marclay's The Clock, where time operates as the prevailing engine driving narrative tension.

A brick-thick artist's book of some 1,200 pages and 600 black-and-white images, gathering the high-contrast photocopies Marclay produces in the studio as quick sketches. For Marclay the photocopier is simply another tool: a fast way to sample, appropriate and collage found images and try out ideas, with accidents often leading somewhere unexpected. The result is a visual index of the source material behind his work of recent years.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Christian Marclay: Translating" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2021-2022).

Index is a key volume in the collection's ongoing thread on printed matter and mechanical reproduction. Like Wade Guyton, who swapped the brush for inkjet printers and flatbed scanners and made their glitches and ink bleeds part of the image, and Christopher Wool, whose raw Xerox books such as Absent Without Leave turned the copier into a medium in its own right, Marclay uses the machine not to duplicate faithfully but to transform: toner, contrast, cropping and enlargement do the work of the hand. It also sits naturally beside Kelley Walker and the Guyton\Walker collaboration, where mass-media imagery is recycled through scanning and reprinting. At 1,200 pages, Index is perhaps the most complete statement in the collection of the copy as a creative act, less a record of finished works than of reproduction as a way of thinking.

Marclay's body of work Liquids takes as its point of departure wet sounds suggestive of the action of painting. These paintings, winkingly bridging Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, represent a continuation of the artist's longstanding experimentation with the relationship between images and sounds.

This catalog includes these recent Onomatopoeia paintings, the recent films "Pub Crawl" (2014) and "Surround Sounds" (2014) and an installation of found glassware. Revered in the worlds of art and music for a body of work that bridges both camps, Marclay planned a lively program of collaborative musical performances led by the London Sinfonietta to accompany his exhibition and set up facilities for the on-site recording, pressing and screenprinting of vinyl records in the gallery, also documented in this volume.