NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art will present Christian Marclay’s The Clock for the first time in New York City since its last presentation at the Museum, which took place from December 2012 to January 2013. Encapsulating 100 years of moving-image history, The Clock (2010)—on view in MoMA’s second-floor collection galleries from November 10, 2024, through February 17, 2025—is a 24-hour montage composed from around 12,000 film and television clips depicting clocks and other references to time. With each clip synchronized to the local time, The Clock is both a functioning timepiece and a cinematic tour-de-force. Building on his background as a musician in Boston and New York’s underground scenes of the late 1970s and 1980s, Marclay has for five decades combined visual and sonic fragments to explore the complex relationships between image and sound. With the help of assistants searching for footage, Marclay spent three years meticulously editing The Clock—a singular example of his innovative approach to looking at the world anew through found material. Christian Marclay: The Clock is organized by Stuart Comer, The Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance, and Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance, with Abby Hermosilla, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Curatorial Affairs.
The Clock will be shown during MoMA’s public hours (10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m., seven days per week) throughout its run, and is free with Museum admission. Visitors will be invited to join a digital queue once they arrive at the Museum. Members will have the opportunity to preview the work from November 7 through 9, 2024, and will have access to the installation during Member Early Hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m.
The Museum will host two special screenings on the Winter Solstice (December 21) and New Year’s Eve (December 31), giving visitors the opportunity to view the work outside of MoMA’s public hours.
• Winter Solstice (December 21–22, 2024): The Clock will remain open as a part of a ticketed overnight screening.
• New Year’s Eve (December 31, 2024–January 1, 2025): MoMA will keep the work open as a part of a New Year’s Eve party on December 31, 2024, and into January 1, 2025.
“Although Christian Marclay made The Clock over a decade ago, it can now be seen as a harbinger of a time to come,” said Stuart Comer. “Seen in 2024, the work speaks to a rich history of cinema, one that is more easily accessible in today’s era of instant broadcast and streaming services. However, The Clock grounds us through its constant reminder of the passage of time, heightening our awareness of the present moment—always elusive and unfolding. The work brilliantly highlights a world in which our relationship to a digital world of pervasive images has taken on 24/7 dimensions.”
"I can’t believe a decade has gone by since The Clock was last shown at MoMA. We’ve all aged except the actors on the screen who never age,” said Christian Marclay. “They may die but on the screen they live forever.”
Christian Marclay (b. 1955, San Rafael, CA) has been exploring the connections between vision and sound for over 40 years, creating works in which these two sensibilities enrich and challenge one another. Marclay garnered international acclaim at the 54th Venice Biennale for his masterpiece video work, The Clock, for which he received the prestigious Golden Lion award.
Marclay’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including one- person presentations at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (1990), the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (1995), the Kunsthaus, Zurich (1997), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2001), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002), Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2008), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2010), Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2011), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2019), and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2022).
