NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present the US premiere of Christian Marclay’s groundbreaking new 24-hour video work The Clock. Called “an abundant, magnificent work” (The Financial Times) “relentless and compelling” (The Guardian) and “utterly transfixing” (The Huffington Post), The Clock has garnered rave reviews from art critics and the public alike after its first showing in England. The exhibition will open at 534 West 21st Street on January 21 and will close on February 19, 2011. Several 24-hour screenings will be organized during the course of the exhibition. Exact details about these screenings will be posted shortly on the gallery’s website.

In The Clock, Marclay samples thousands of film excerpts indicating the passage of time. Spanning the range of timepieces, from clock towers to wristwatches and from buzzing alarm clocks to the occasional cuckoo, The Clock draws attention to time as a multifaceted protagonist of cinematic narrative. With virtuosic skill, the artist has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to form a 24-hour montage, which unfolds in real time. 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.

Itself a varied part of this artist’s output in a wide range of media (which includes sculpture, photography, collage, painting and performance), Christian Marclay’s video work often takes the form of virtuosic audiovisual collages made from film fragments. Starting with Telephones (1995), a rhythmic montage of clips from Hollywood films showing characters engaged in phone conversations, and continuing with the celebrated multi-screen masterpieces Video Quartet (2002) and Crossfire (2007), Marclay has consistently mined our movie culture and re-contextualized its fragments into compelling sonic and visual wholes.

Christian Marclay has exhibited his work for more than three decades in museums around the world. His 2003 retrospective, which originated at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, traveled to other North American institutions as well as venues in France, Switzerland and Great Britain. The touring exhibition Replay, focusing on his video work, originated at the Cité de la Musique, Paris, in 2007 and was presented at DHC/ART in Montreal (2008). In 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized “Festival” a one-person exhibition organized around Marclay’s “graphic scores,” works to be interpreted by musicians as scores for performances. As a pioneering turntablist, performing and recording music since 1979, Marclay made a significant impact on the new music scene. He has performed internationally, alone or in collaboration with musicians John Zorn, Zeena Parkins, Butch Morris, Christian Wolff, Shelley Hirsch, Günter Müller, the Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth, and many others.

WEEKDAY SCREENINGS
Tuesdays – Thursdays, 10am - 6pm

24-HOUR WEEKEND SCREENINGS
Friday January 28, 10am – Saturday January 29, 6pm
Friday February 4, 10am – Saturday February 5, 6pm
Friday February 11, 10am – Sunday February 13, 10am
Friday February 18, 10am – Saturday February 19, 6pm

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com