“Da Vinci never slept, he said it was a waste of time!” Kevin Bacon explains to me on a cold Saturday night in October. It’s just after 4am and I’m in London’s Tate Modern. It’s not just me and Kevin though—there are about 150 people in the IKEA-sofa-clad viewing gallery with me, and we’re all here watching The Clock. Not an actual clock, but Christian Marclay’s renowned video installation, a 24-hour montage of clips sourced from archives that span the history of film. Each clip, either visually or verbally, tells the exact time. So, on second thought, I guess we are watching an actual clock.
I’ve been at the Tate Modern for just over 18 hours and I’m in thorough disagreement with both Da Vinci and Kevin Bacon. I’ve come to watch all 24 hours of Marclay’s masterpiece in one sitting, and am nearing the kind of exhaustion where you forget your name. I want to experience Marclay’s film in a way that few have before: all-in-one, like the way you drink a pint after being dumped, searching for some meaning behind it all.
When I decided to spend 24 hours with The Clock, I wasn’t sure it was possible. Marclay himself has said he doesn’t think it is. I tried to get a comment from him to see what he would think about my self-assigned task. Unfortunately, by the time the first 24-hour viewing of The Clock was open to the public, Marclay was no longer available for questions. So, we’ll just have to go with what he would theoretically say in my head: “Don’t forget to pee”.
The first hours of The Clock were, strangely, the most challenging. The film starts at 10am, and as I settle down Roger Moore coolly checks his watch: “Bang on time”. It’s not until you watch an hour or two, however, that you realise each clip builds into a tension that’s never relieved. Everything is an anti-climax. Every face that appears bloodied will suddenly be replaced with one hysterically laughing, or waiting by the window in anticipation, or Danny Dyer. This is anxiety-inducing at first. But by the time Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider throws his broken watch to the ground at 11.40am, my mind throws down its metaphoric watch to the floor in surrender.
The Clock is a masterpiece, but by 3pm I’m surprised at how banal some of it is. In the morning, people wake up and go to work. At lunchtime, they eat. From around midday, we’re travelling through time by way of a lunch table. Liquid lunch even: Gillian Murphy scolds David Duchovny for having a drink at 2pm. “It’s not stopping the rest of the people here!” he says as he surveys a black-and-white group of young Brits in a swinging ’60s cafe. Finally, a bill is dramatically slapped on an al fresco table out in the pre-war French countryside. You can eat all you like, but ultimately you must always remember to pay.
Time is money. And, like any structure that’s been hijacked by capitalism, it confines our days to functional temporalities—work, eat, play, sleep, wake, work again. Such are the demands of 24 hours in modern life. So, when the man next to me lets out a bellowing laugh at Jack Nicholson tediously watching the clock so he can leave work at 4.59pm, the IKEA sofas around let out a collective chuckle too. Thank god it’s Saturday.
As such, The Clock never fails to remind me of what I should be doing, rather than stewing in a dark room for 24 hours. 7.30pm is for dinner, 7.30am is for waking up for work. At 3am people have neo-noir sex. I panic: maybe I should be having neo-noir sex right now. I think of the Guy Debord quote, “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” and sigh.
The Clock reflects back to us the degradation of modern life by the homogenising rhythms we live by. Often, it will contrast these rhythms with alternative (though just as futile) ways of being. This means that when we watch Jack Nicholson sneaking around a darkened hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at 6.20pm, we celebrate. Although filmed over 25 years later, he is the same Jack Nicholson that was waiting to get out of work at 5pm, and he’s finally free. From the workplace at least, he is now trapped in a mental hospital of course; we’re always going to be prisoners, but we might as well go down swinging.
At 2am, there’s a man at the back of the gallery snoring louder than the Titanic (literally, we are watching the Titanic sinking). The only clock that can beat The Clock is, in this instance, the body clock. This is something I’m struggling with at around 3.30am. “If the clock stops, I’ll die!” a bedraggled man shouts from the screen, and all I can think whilst sipping my contraband Red Bull is how much I wouldn’t mind dying if it meant I could properly sleep (…lack of sleep makes me a little melodramatic).
By 4am, half-asleep, I’m living in a phantasmagoria of mine and Marclay’s making. A car is driving down an endless highway, no wait I’m driving down it. No wait the car is. No wait, I can’t drive! I seriously think about giving up and leaving, but the empty streets on the screen don’t exactly look inviting, and I don’t think the ones outside are any different right now either.
At this point, the alternative temporalities of The Clock become overwhelming, as if each scene is a room in a massive dollhouse of Marclay’s making—the actors are tiny figurines all at the mercy of Marclay’s will. I’m vulnerable from lack of sleep, obviously, and the barrier between me and the screen that was there hours ago has all but gone. The mastery The Clock has on my psyche is starting to worry me. What if I’m just a character in one of those rooms too?
Suddenly, I realise I need to wake the fuck up. Asleep or not, this is something The Clock certainly makes you realise on all fronts. It’s 8.45a, and I regain control by eating the end of a sandwich I’m not supposed to have in here. That’ll tell ‘em.
To watch The Clock in one sitting is a kind of endurance cinephilia fit for anyone self-absorbed enough to spend 24-hours thinking about their own time. (Or anyone that’s able to – not everyone has the luxury of being able to spend 24 hours at a gallery and sleep for the next day.)
All I can decide when I leave is that I want to live my life by The Clock, not the clock – trapped by time, but irreverently so. I stumble out into the light at 10am, wondering what it’s all about, and text my mate to say I’ve survived. “It’s about time!” they reply. I’m too tired to laugh.
“The Clock” runs through to 20 January 2018 at Tate Modern.
Images credit: Christian Marclay, The Clock (2010) single-channel video installation, duration: 24 hours, © the artist, courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery New York