Christian Marclay: The Clock

Coming to Stuttgart this March: The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is proud to premiere in Germany Christian Marclay’s cinematic masterpiece The Clock (2010). Winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale 2011, the 24-hour film collage has since mesmerized audiences around the globe. The public will be able to enjoy the complete duration on two special occasions, allowing viewers to experience those sections at night and in the morning hours.

The Clock samples thousands of film excerpts, in which clocks are depicted or time is referenced—from clock towers to wristwatches to buzzing alarm clocks, from sundials to pendulum clocks, and scenes in which people tell each other the time. With the help of six assistants searching and cataloging the vast archives of film and television for footage, Marclay spent three long years carefully editing each of these clips to form a 24-hour-long montage that indicates the passage of time. Minute by minute, The Clock unfolds an entire day on the screen. Moreover, since the work is always synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, the time we get to see coincides exactly with the current time. Viewers can at any moment look at the video and actually use it to register time.

Not only being a virtuoso film collage and a functioning time piece, The Clock is a tribute to cinema and its authors, directors, and actors. Marclay takes us on a fast-paced journey through the history of cinema: Westerns, film noir, screwball comedies, war films, musicals and dance films, both renowned and long-forgotten or overlooked films, Hollywood classics and B-movies are featured, as are TV series. Among them are many films that are integral parts of our collective memory, such as Fred Zinneman’s High Noon, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and Sam Mendes’s American Beauty. Film enthusiasts will no matter, as soon as they enter the screening room, start to recognize films that may have had an impact on their lives, or with which they share their own personal story.

However, it is constructed from a staggering variety of periods, contexts, and film genres, with the sampled film’s storylines reduced to mere fragments, The Clock proceeds at a consistent pace structured by the underlying narrative of time itself. Yet every fragment, every minute that passes holds the potential for alternately exciting, tragic or romantic stories which seem to challenge our imagination and even to encourage us to weave our own individual plots out of them. “Watching The Clock is a trance-like experience, almost hallucinogenic; you’re liable to see things that aren’t there” (Zadie Smith). Marclay utilizes discontinuity to create a temporal continuity. Accordingly, the work has no beginning or end: it starts the moment one enters the screening room and ends when one leaves.

The Clock is screened at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in a space designed by the artist specifically for the viewing of the piece. Two 24-hour screenings will take place during the course of the exhibition’s run, the first starting on the evening of the opening on Friday, March 14, 2025. The opening weekend will be concluded by an artist talk by Christian Marclay with director Ulrike Groos on Sunday, March 16, 3pm.

Over the past 40 years, Christian Marclay (b. 1955) has explored the fusion of fine art and audio cultures, transforming sound and music into a visible, physical form through performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video. His work is exhibited worldwide. Solo presentations of The Clock have included the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024/25); the LUMA Foundation, Arles (2021); the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne (2019); the Tate Modern, London (2018); the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2018); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014); the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2014); the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2014); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011). Marclay lives and works in London.