As we touched upon in our roundup of Venice Biennale artists you should know, Christian Marclay achieved art world stardom over the past year for The Clock. The 24-hour film montages clips from movies, each featuring a timepiece, to clock the cycle of an entire day, minute by minute. Described by critics as “utterly transfixing,” “magnificent,” “relentless and compelling,” and perhaps most intensely, “the most staggering, complex thing made by any artist so far this century” (emphasis mine), The Clock explores how representations of time in movies shape our own conception of it: What is seven o’clock supposed to look like (Marclay shows cocktails, the end of the workday, getting dressed for dinner, stricken commanders preparing for an alien invasion)? What happens — or as Marclay’s film insinuates — is supposed to happen at 3am? 7am? 1pm? How do representations of time in movies influence the activities we perform, ways we present ourselves, conventions we abide by? Surveying nearly a century of movies, The Clock seems to suggest that films inform the routines and customs of our own lives as much, if not more than, we inform the narrative of time in film. How meta we have become.
Exploring the influence of a certain object through movies is a central trope in Marclay’s work. The Clock sits aloft a long line of films that each explore the socio-cultural identity of a much represented but rather banal device. What Marclay has done to hourglasses, alarm clocks, and watches, he has also done to guns, guitars, and telephones, among many others. In the wake of Marclay’s über-prestigious win at the 54th Venice Biennale last week (he received a Golden Lion for Best Artist), it’s worth ticking through some of his earlier works.
Come one, come all, bring your trash heaps and postmodern conceptualism under the big top of the Whitney Biennial 2010. Edited down to 55 artists from the 2008 version’s “sprawling” 81, the exhibition includes a lot of photography, a strong showing of paintings, and a majority of women. (Yes.) Curator Francesco Bonami — with the help of Whitney senior curatorial assistant Gary Carrion-Murayari — has chosen not to tease out any particular theme, instead concentrating on what “represents the range of ideas and materials American artists are now working with.”
As it happens, Charles Isherwood pointed out in a New York Times column last week that past Olympiads also included honors for the arts — specifically architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature. Applying a similar rubric to a bright and shiny Biennial, we picked a selection of competitors* with the stuff for gold medals. Winners after the jump.
Video art was a suspicious, outsider’s medium not long ago. To be sure, it has paradigms, heroes, and conventions — which new generations are feeling confident enough to subvert — but from the ancient perspective of the art-historical canon, it’s an adolescent. Perhaps due to this aura of youthfulness, or maybe because video-based art is very like tiny, short movies, we can’t get enough of it. And at the center of all the fuss is Remote Viewing curator and Art Cinema author Paul Young, whose current LA exhibition culled from the LOOP Video Art Fair is the equivalent of an indie blockbuster.
15 second HD video loop, no audio, by Borna Sammak (2009).
Curator Thomas McDonell is a 23-year-old artist based in Williamsburg. While studying visual art in college, McDonell traveled across the world — Europe, West Africa, Southeast Asia — which informed the sense of global Aukflarung so prevalent in his work. Based in cosmopolitan Shanghai to research contemporary art, curator met fellow artist Borna Sammak and a partnership was born. We spoke briefly with Thomas about Sammak’s high-definition video work, launching for one day only at the Best Buy at 622 Broadway in New York City. Read More »
This video reminds us of the footage that Chuck sees as the government’s Intersect computer is uploaded into his mind. According to the artist, “I aimed to take pre-existing media (music and video) and juxtapose them in such a way that would take them out of their context and put them into my own, borrowing from the rightful artist Marcel DuChamp who first coined the term ‘readymade’.” What do you think?
