Time Won't Give Me Time

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The romantic and impulsive side of me really wants to jump on a plane to New York tomorrow to catch this while I still can: Christian Marclay's The Clock at Paula Cooper Gallery, which closes this weekend. The work is a 24-hour film, composed entirely of cinematic excerpts depicting varying encounters with time. It also unfolds in real time, Warhol-Empire-style, so that the depiction of time on screen tracks that in real life, and vice versa.

I've always had kind of an obsession with the concept of time – its elasticity and elusiveness, and the stubborn mystery it creates for our understanding of the universe and our place in it. So the idea of experiencing time in the way that Marclay's piece presents seems exciting and potentially revelatory. I also love the idea of mining disparate moments from the past to tell a story that exists completely in the here and now. From a viewer's perspective, it seems to offer the possibility of simultaneously perceiving presence in both the physical world and the one that is unfolding onscreen.

But I'll never know ... not enough time.

From the gallery's website; more info here:

While constructed from a dizzying variety of periods, contexts and film genres whose storylines seem to have shattered in a multitude of narrative shards, The Clock uncannily proceeds at a unified pace as if re-ordered by the latent narrative of time itself. Because it is synchronized with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities.

And while we're at it, on this Valentine's Day:



Culture Club, Time (Clock of the Heart) (1982)
(Solid Gold #1!)