Christian Marclay’s most famous artwork, ‘The Clock’, makes viewers contemplate the passage of time. The artist’s latest exhibition, featuring two new video works, performs a similar function. But instead of getting you to tune into the hourglass in the sky, these pieces make you look again at looking. As in, this art makes you reconsider what it means to open your baby blues, browns or greens and absorb the surrounding world, sponge-style.
Marclay’s floor-to-ceiling video installation is made from 22 stripes of different film clips. Sometimes, they join together to look like aspirational travelogues, at other times a classic western, and at others still, a Hollywood thriller with seductive female co-star and a casually rising body count.
White subtitles are superimposed. There’s dialogue (‘yeah’, ‘yeah’, ‘no’) followed by closed-caption information (‘screams of pain’, ‘sentimental instrumental music’), followed by oddly poetical snippets without apparent context (‘the quiet tune of a memory’, ‘is that not the perfect visual image of life and death?’).
The text runs and runs and you try to keep up with it all, this ever-updating stream of readable data (insert comparison to popular social media app if you like). You try and try and then: PING. A mental alarm sounds, a synapse snaps and you give up reading and start looking. Colours, tones and textures emerge. Without the babbling commentary, the film makes more sense, not less. Each part has a feeling to it: the exhilaration of a late-night drive or the tranquilising effect of sunset on ocean.
Upstairs, the message is more obvious. A stop-motion animation of pedestrian crossings implores the viewer to ‘LOOK LOOK LOOK’. And the more you do, the more the word becomes a ridiculous, giddy thing made up of two googly eyes and a couple of vertical poles. LOOK LOOK LOOK expands and contracts, bulges and retracts until all that’s visible are two figures: O and K. Okay, Christian, I’ll look.