Time Will Tell: Adaptation Going Forward and Film at the Art Museum (Christian Marclay’s The Clock)

Abstract

Christian Marclay’s 2011 video installation The Clock, a 24-hour film comprised of thousands of film and video clips drawn from the history of cinema and television, stretches the idea of adaptation into the realm of avant-garde art. Synching the clocks and watches featured in each clip to real time over the course of a 24-hour period, The Clock exemplifies an idea of adaptation that fully divorces the process of revisiting earlier texts from a dyadic model (origin/adaptation). Like immersive theater, The Clock assumes its viewers to be utterly part of the film, challenging not only the idea that the viewer or audience is distinct from the art itself but also the notion that film is opposed to life. Instead, viewers’ lives correspond to filmed fiction: the very moments experienced by the viewer are represented within the film, thus exemplifying the world-making Jenkins describes in his analysis of transmedial adaptations: “More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium” (414).