I feel weird — sometimes giddy, sometimes nauseous — about time these days. Like many people, I stood in line for hours to become immersed in Christian Marclay’s 2010 art installation, “The Clock,” a twenty-four-hour montage of film clips that synchronized onscreen time — conveyed via images of various timepieces — with actual time. Oddly, vertiginously, although the time onscreen was identical to the time on the street, no matter if one watched for an hour or five one left the theater feeling as if time had come unsprung, as if one had been plunged into another dimension, a great vertical depth, that made real time seem mysteriously thin and weightless. Lines snaked around blocks to see “The Clock”; some people camped out in sleeping bags overnight outside venues where it was to be shown in order to be first on line. It was a brilliant work of art, but the overwhelming hunger for it suggests that there is a widespread nostalgia for the dominance of clock time, akin to the rise of the nature special as species were disappearing at a rapid rate from the planet. There are more clocks than ever — clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second — but they all seem to matter less. Sometimes, the time looks like one more graphic element on a buzzing surface crammed with them, a vestigial bit of design, like watch pockets on jeans.
Stacey d'Erasmo
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