On The Clock and Christian Marclay’s Instrumental Logic of Appropriation

After a century of creating the basis for an audio-visual technical memory, a new cultural practice of mnemonic immediacy is about to emerge: the recycling and feedback of the media archive (a new archival economy of memory). With new options of measuring, naming, describing and addressing digitally stored images, this ocean needs to be navigated (cybernetics, literally) in different ways and no longer merely ordered by classification (the encyclopedic enlightenment paradigm). Such a media-archaeology is the opposite of iconographic history: What is being digitally “excavated” by the computer is a genuinely media-mediated gaze on a well-defined number of (what we still call) images.

—Harun Farocki and Wolfgang Ernst, “Towards an Archive of Visual Concepts”

How many stories have I seen on the screen? All those “characters” carrying out dumb tasks. Actors doing exciting things. It’s enough to put one into a permanent coma.

—Robert Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia”

When Christian Marclay accepted the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, he thanked the jury for giving The Clock its fifteen minutes. His joke will ultimately be unsubstantiated. It will be considered a monumental work of art in the twenty-first century due to its scale, labor intensity, and aspirations towards a total reflection of time in narrative cinema.

It seems incontrovertible that The Clock does not provide an exploration of the dynamic expressions of duration in cinema, due to its rigid parameters and structures. This is because its constitutive materials are split between shots of timekeepers and numerous motif clusters—that is, alarm clocks waking disgruntled workers, rushing travelers narrowly missing train departures, school bells ringing and emptying classrooms, angry housewives waiting for husbands to arrive at dinner, and so on. While this certainly conveys the hailing function of the clock, the administrative functions it serves modernity, and the many dramaturgical devices of narrative cinema itself, in the nearly twelve hours of The Clock I was able to watch time appears organized only in the terms of task-orientation. One finds oneself focused on The Clock’s obsessive assemblage of iconography, daily routines, dramatic exposition, and what appears to be an index of the gestures of narrative cinema.

These themes offer some of the most interesting entry points to The Clock and help to map the present landscape of found footage work and a move towards the atlas, the encyclopedic or archival ordering of cinema’s constituent motifs, gestures, and iconography. The last two decades of found footage have increasingly moved from the refuse of cinematic materials (leader, production discards, B movies, ephemeral cinema) towards the film canon itself. Iterations of such work have been referred to both in the terms of Lev Manovich’ database, online as the supercut, and in cinema-encyclopedia projects.¹ The found footage films discussed in this essay harmonize with what Christa Blυmlinger has elsewhere called “cataloguing, iconographic-serial work.² The Clock is the most monumental cinematic contribution to this mode of filmmaking to date.

In broader art practice, iconographic seriality reflects an approach to the archive as a “system of discursivity”³ engaged with the logics and structures of taxonomy and classification. Frequently employed to present intertextual interpretations of art and mass-cultural objects, this archival discourse interrogates how art history might produce cultural memory and how media archives become “centres for interpretation.”⁴ These priorities and drives form the crux of a broader crisis in the landscape of found footage today and a move towards a database aesthetic where film fragments are serialized through an archival discourse according to iconography and narrative motifs. The central question of digital platforms in relation to the digital archive for Lev Manovich is: “how can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search and instantly retrieve it lead to new kinds of narratives?”⁵ It goes without saying that the expedited opportunities for the cataloguing, classifying, and ordering native to digital technologies have advanced the database strategies we see in found footage work today. Rembert Hυser uses the term QWERTY cinema (the typewriter’ statistically...