The Polygon holds two more 24-hour screenings of The Clock
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 18:05:35 +0000
The Clock is such a unique art work that almost everyone remembers their first encounter with it. Reid Shier, director of The Polygon where the film is now screening, certainly does.
In 2011, he was at the Venice Biennale, the world’s biggest art festival that is held every two years in Venice. The Clock, by artist Christian Marclay, was being shown in the main exhibition hall, as well as in a theatre in Venice.
Shier and a friend attended one of the 24-hour screenings “very, very late” one night.
“We went in, not really understanding what we were about to watch,” he said. “Like many video installations, we thought we would sit down for five minutes or something. We ended up staying for 2 ½ hours.”
Shier knew he was seeing something unprecedented.
“It was one of those things — you know when you’re watching it that it’s something you’ve never seen before.”
At the Venice Biennale that year Marclay won the Golden Lion award for the best artist for The Clock. Since it was first screened The Clock has been wowing audiences around the world.
The Clock is a 24-hour film made up of fragments of watches, clocks and timepieces from hundreds of different TV shows and films. The fragments have been edited together to create a visual and auditory montage that flow seamlessly into each other. The Clock also functions as a timepiece synchronized to real time: When it’s 3 p.m. on screen in The Clock, it’s 3 p.m. in the time zone it’s playing.
At The Polygon, The Clock is playing during regular opening hours Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Friday (the gallery is closed Monday).
The Polygon also has two more 24-hour screenings. They take place on Friday, Sept. 6, and Friday, Sept. 13. The exhibition of The Clock ends Sunday, Sept. 15.
Entrance is on a first-come, first-serve basis. Attendance has grown during the previous 24-hour screenings and Shier expects the same to happen for the next two.
“For the first 24-hour screening, it was very crowded up to midnight when there’s a kind of climax to the piece. Not that many people were there in the middle of the night at three and four o’clock in the morning,” he said. “That’s beginning to change. During the last 24-hour screening, it was fairly full all night long.”
The Clock also attracts visitors from outside B.C. On opening day, The Polygon ran The Clock for 24 hours. When the gallery opened at 10 a.m., a husband and wife from Phoenix showed up wearing ‘his-and-her’ The Clock T-shirts. The film had been on their bucket list to see. They lasted 17 hours.
Since then, the 24-hour screenings have attracted people who have flown into town to watch it for the first time or to catch parts of it they’ve missed. For many, the hours from 2-5 a.m. are the most challenging to watch because of the late time.
The copy being screened at The Polygon is co-owned by the National Gallery in Ottawa and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition at The Polygon is only the 32nd screening of The Clock since it premiered at White Cube in London, England, in 2010.
“It is a very rare opportunity to see one of the most important art works produced in the last 20 years,” Shier said. “It’s not going to be coming back anytime soon.”
The Polygon, formerly called Presentation House Gallery, is in a new building with reflective, silvery cladding designed by Patkau Architects. It’s at the foot of Lonsdale at 101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver.