“The Clock” wins the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale

Marclay was born in California in 1955, grew up in Geneva, and is now based in New York and London. He has crossed the boundaries between artistic genres and forms with a 24-hour film composed of carefully selected scenes, virtually each of which focuses on a clock or watch. The genius lies in how these excerpts have been spliced together so that the time shown on-screen exactly corresponds to the time at the place of screening. Over a 24-hour period, thousands of fragments from films of every era measure the viewer’s time in a dreamlike and social obsession when, as the artist says, “everyone is concerned about time.”

Shown in the Arsenale, “The Clock” represents, in the words of the Biennale’s President Paolo Baratta, “the illumination of the mind and the intellect.” This particular illumination brilliantly interprets the relentless progress of time, and the manic care with which it is measured, and which forms an immaterial and economic heritage not just for Geneva but for the whole of Switzerland.

And, as Marclay’s work suggests, possibly for the world at large, for while the precise measurement of time remains fundamental, we must pay no less attention to its passing; we must realise that time is a precious commodity and visualise its faces.

These gestures and sequences are those which our master watchmakers have established as the rules of their art, and which have been given a new means of affirmation and dissemination in contemporary art.