MINNEAPOLIS, May 20, 2014—From June 14 through August 25, 2014, the Walker Art Center will present The Clock, a major cinematic work by artist Christian Marclay screened in the Burnet Gallery. Winner of the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, The Clock samples thousands of film excerpts from the history of cinema that indicate the passage of time—from clock towers to wristwatches to buzzing alarm clocks—that edited together unfold on the screen in real time as a 24-hour montage. Called “an abundant, magnificent work” (The Financial Times) “relentless and compelling” (The Guardian) and “utterly transfixing” (The Huffington Post), The Clock has garnered rave reviews from art critics and the public alike since its premiere in 2010, and has traveled to a host of venues worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Garage Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; the Kunsthaus, Zurich; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Throughout his career, Marclay has worked with a wide range of media, including sculpture, photography, collage, painting, and performance. His video work often takes the form of collaged images and sound made from filmed fragments. Telephones (1995), is a rhythmic montage of clips from Hollywood films showing characters engaged in phone conversations; Video Quartet (2002) is a multi-screen work that samples hundreds of films featuring images of hands on keyboards, horns and violins, as well as characters singing, dancing and making other noises. Crossfire (2007) similarly mines Hollywood source material, stringing together fragments of footage from gun shootout scenes.
The Clock is the artist’s most ambitious moving-image project to date, drawing upon over a century of cinematic history. Though it is constructed from a dizzying variety of periods, contexts and film genres whose storylines have been reduced to fragments, The Clock proceeds at a unified pace as if re-ordered by the underlying narrative of time itself. The artist intends for the work to be synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, so that the work conflates cinematic and actual time, giving each passing minute the potential for alternately suspenseful, tragic, or romantic narrative possibilities.
About the artist
Christian Marclay has exhibited his work for more than three decades in museums around the world. His 2003 retrospective, which originated at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, traveled to other North American institutions as well as venues in France, Switzerland and Great Britain. The touring exhibition Replay, focusing on his video work, originated at the Cité de la Musique, Paris, in 2007 and was presented at DHC/ART in Montreal (2008). In 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized Festival, a one-person exhibition organized around Marclay’s “graphic scores”—visual works to be interpreted by musicians. As a pioneering turntablist, performing and recording music since 1979, Marclay made a significant impact on the new music scene. He has performed internationally, alone or in collaboration with musicians John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Lawrence Butch Morris, Christian Wolff, Shelley Hirsch, Günter Müller, the Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth, and many others.
Marclay and the Walker
Christian Marclay was Artist in Residence at the Walker Art Center in 2004, where he collaborated with the departments of Performing Arts, Film/Video, and Visual Arts in a series of programs. He additionally produced an original commission, the video installation Shake Rattle and Roll (Fluxmix), which emerged from the artist’s curiosity about the Walker’s important collection of objects related to the international Fluxus movement—some 500 works by artists including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, and Yoko Ono—and its significant collection of multiples by the German artist Joseph Beuys. Marclay also created a site-specific sound installation Museum with the Sound of Its Own Making (2005), a composition utilizing construction sounds from Walker’s 2003–2005 expansion.
Walker coordinating curators: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator, Visual Arts; Sheryl Mousley, Senior Curator, Film/Video.
EVENTS
Christian Marclay: The Clock
Opening-Night: Northern Spark @ Walker Art Center
Saturday, June 14 FREE
Saturday, 11 am–Sunday, 5 pm
The Clock opens with its first overnight screening as part of Northern Spark, the annual city-wide dusk-to-dawn festival. Visitors will also get a late-night glimpse of two major Walker exhibitions, Art Expanded, 1958-1978 and Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process featuring paintings, drawings, sculpture, installations, video, and more. Free gallery admission all night. For more information about activities and amenities at the Walker during Nothern Spark, please visit the Walker’s website.
Extended Hour Screenings
The Clock will run continuously during regular gallery hours with additional overnight screenings presented four times during the run of the exhibition:
June 14–15 (Northern Spark opening): Saturday, 11 am–Sunday, 5 pm
July 10–11: Thursday, 11 am–Friday, 5 pm
August 8–9: Friday, 11 am–Saturday, 5 pm
August 23–24: Saturday, 11 am–Sunday, 5 pm
Monday, August 25, 2014 FREE
Christian Marclay: The Clock
Closing-Night
AND
Summer Music & Movies concludes with Christian Marclay’s Graffiti Composition and Screen Play with Laurent Estoppey, Ikue Mori, and Anthony Coleman
Walker Open Field
“I believe in the power of images to evoke sound.”—Christian Marclay
Grab a blanket and join us on the grassy hillside next to the Walker for a special Summer Music & Movies evening of playful and conceptually rich works by Christian Marclay and live performance by the nationally respected experimental trio of Laurent Estoppey, Ikue Mori, and Anthony Coleman.
The evening begins with a live music performance of Graffiti Composition (2002), an open-ended score composed from graffiti drawn on musical notation sheets left outside for a summer in Berlin. Collected as a work of art, it becomes the score for this performance.
A moving image graphic score for Screen Play (2005) begins at dusk when the trio retakes the stage to perform with Christian Marclay’s found footage film and computer animation montage in “an extraordinary evening of looking and listening.” (The New York Times)
A Current DJ/Host will be spinning music starting at 7 pm. Come down for your last chance to view Marclay’s The Clock on view from 5 pm-midnight, have a drink or a bite from the food trucks, or just hang with friends and enjoy the setting sun with one of the most beautiful skyline views in Minneapolis.
Summer Music & Movies is presented by the Walker Art Center in partnership with the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board. Support is provided by the Bentson Foundation.
