are you looking for something to do in this sweltering summer heat here in the city that never sleeps. well this might be right up your alley at the Lincoln Center festival. see link here for line updates. for some reason new yorkers don’t mind standing in line because there are so many of us wanting to go somewhere from buying our groceries or being entertained.
Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film montage, “The Clock,” is coming to the David Rubenstein Atrium in Lincoln Center.
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: June 21, 2012
This summer the city that never sleeps will have another glimpse of an artwork that doesn’t relent much either: “The Clock,” a spellbinding, time-telling 24-hour wonder of film and sound montage by Christian Marclay, the polymath composer, collagist, video artist and pioneer turntablist.
An assemblage of time-related movie moments that had its debut in London in autumn 2010, Mr. Marclay’s “Clock” is already a popular classic. It is also a functioning timepiece; a highly compressed, peripatetic history of film and film styles; an elaborate, rhythmic musical composition; and a relentlessly enthralling meditation on time as an inescapable fact of both cinematic artifice and everyday life. Perhaps the ultimate validation of appropriation art, it thoroughly demonstrates how existing works of art — in this case films — become raw material for new ones.
“The Clock” counts off the minutes of a 24-hour day using tiny segments from thousands of films. Bits of “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Laura,” “On the Waterfront,” “The Godfather” and “A Clockwork Orange” speed past, mixed with early silent films and less familiar foreign ones.
As the action, music, sound effects and dialogue of one film bleed into those of another, each segment specifies a time, sometimes through spoken words, but mostly through shots of wristwatches, clocks, time clocks and the like. All are synced to real time. When it is 11:30 a.m. in “The Clock,” it will be 11:30 a.m. in the world outside. Exactly.
The first New York showing of “The Clock,” at the Paula Cooper Gallery in January 2011, had people lining up around the block in a relatively deserted west Chelsea in the dead of winter. Now, for 20 days starting on July 13, Lincoln Center will present the piece in a specially built theater in the David Rubenstein Atrium on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets. Admission will be first come first served in a setting — lined with movie-palace velvet curtains and outfitted with enormous couches that blur boundaries between living room and screening room — that accommodates only about 90 people at a time.
It may be a challenge to get in, even in the wee hours, which is when I want to go, but I intend to make every effort, and recommend that you do too. The piece will run Tuesday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and then settle in for three 38-hour weekend marathons beginning at 8 a.m. Fridays and running to 10 p.m. Sundays. It will be closed Mondays and ends on Aug. 1.
more information on the artist Christian Marclay can be found at the New Yorker here
enjoy, but i won’t be standing in line myself they give me the willies.
The Armory Show on Pier 94, for example, is in top form. It lacks the stylish comforts and city-wide branding of the Frieze Fair in London, but at least it is now being held under one roof, on one pier instead of two. And there’s always Chelsea, the world’s biggest nonstop art fair 30 blocks to the south. The Armory doesn’t have the balmy weather and exposed skin of Art Basel Miami Beach, but, hey, it is happening in March, not February — this year anyway. And while it lacks Art Basel’s older European dealers, with their booths full of choice modern masters, a sense of maturity seems to have settled upon the place.
Nearby, at the Derek Eller booth, the manic master draftsman Dominic McGill also meditates on modernism past and future, while adding collage to his arsenal in “Moloch.” In this enormous, new, volcanic drawing-collage, the words of Baudrillard, Santayana, George W. Bush and many others collide and combust around a fiery newsreel-like cluster of magazine images, all red. Their shape is based on the flailing monster at the center of Max Ernst’s “Fireside Angel,” which was inspired by the rise of Franco. Mr. McGill has mustered a commensurately apocalyptic tone. He makes the end seem near, and for much more than just art fairs.
A partial nude ascends a shadowy staircase, every inch of her shoulders, back and thighs covered with tattoos; a seductive blonde stands in mid turn, most likely toward our gaze, holding a glistening six-shooter in one hand, with a desolate junkyard as the backdrop. In these portraits and others, such as Night Hotel, in which Saint’s lovely subject grasps a drink and cigarette while lying prone on a white leather sofa, a story is being told that is for the viewer to decide, even inhabit if they’re so daring. While many photos of movie stars or models can feel fleeting, given the subjects’ built-in celebrity and all that entails, Saint captures a permanence with these women that is unmistakable.
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