THE CLOCK at the MOMA: inspiration for all visual artists and writers

Christian Marclay won the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale with The Clock, an astonishing film made up of thousands of hours of film excerpts that form a 24-hour montage. What a tour de force of editing to get just the right film clips from the last 100 years of movie making. The clips often display a watch or a clock with everything from Woody Allen rushing through the streets of NYC to Marlene Dietrich wearing sequins, a veil, and a feathered hat as she’s pined over by a serviceman to Vincent Price sitting on a bench, watching prey caught in a spider web.

How it can inspire is seeing how The Clock holds fast to a theme, but not to material. Time ticks and tocks as the filmmaker throws a wide arc into diverse content. Think of building a collection of short stories focused around the same point in time, but different years. Or perhaps a collection of poetry. And the time doesn’t have to be your biographical time. Tether your work around a theme and you’ll see the freedom in it!