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Doing time: what I learned from 24 hours watching The Clock

Christian Marclay’s film at Tate Modern knits together thousands of clips in an era-defining artwork. And I viewed the whole thing

Anyone who’s ever had a monotonous job will know all about watching the clock. How each minute seems to take hours, moving at a deathly pace – 10.07 … 11.13 … 11.27 … Is it really only 12.01? – until you can finally head home.

Clock-watching became a daily endurance for me in the summer of 2018. I would sit under bleaching white lights on the anonymous fourth floor of a tower block on the edge of the City of London, feeling under-utilised and bored to tears, doing little more each day than simply watching the time pass. By the time I resigned, I resolved to do something more productive with my hours. Instead of watching an office clock, I would watch Christian Marclay’s 2010 film The Clock – the 24-hour artwork made of thousands of film clips representing every minute of the day – in its entirety. In doing so, I hoped to reconfigure my relationship with time, and understand ways in which watching the clock could be enjoyable.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QofGzu

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