Edited by Honey Luard
Designed by Laurent Benner
Text by Darian Leader
 
Printed by Druckerei Odermatt, Switzerland
240 x 170 mm, softback
720 pages, colour illustrations throughout
ISBN 10: 190607237X / ISBN 13: 9781906072377
 
Published by White Cube 2010
First Edition, from a limited edition of 1,000

A rare opportunity to own a first-edition copy of this highly sought after book, published to coincide with the inaugural presentation of the masterful video work The Clock.

This fully illustrated catalogue, first published to mark the exhibition ‘Christian Marclay: The Clock’ held at White Cube Mason’s Yard (October – November 2010), presents a selection of 1,440 stills excerpted from Christian Marclay’s acclaimed 24-hour video work The Clock (2010). Constructed from moments in cinema where the face of a clock or watch appears, or a specific time is referred to in dialogue, Marclay extracted thousands of these fragments and edited them to flow in real time. 

While The Clock examines the depiction of time, plot and duration in cinema, it simultaneously functions as a fully operational timepiece, synchronised to the viewer’s local time zone. At any given moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching The Clock experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the span of a few minutes, causing time to unravel in countless directions at once. Even while The Clock tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence. An essay by psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader examines the multifaceted role of clocks, considering them both as devices that measure time and as conceptual markers that condition, shape and orient human existence. Leader interprets their manifestation in the cinematic moments of Marclay’s The Clock, where time operates as the prevailing engine driving narrative tension.

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst practising in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of the College of Psychoanalysts, UK. He is the author of Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction (2021); Strictly Bipolar (2013), The New Black (2008), Stealing the Mona Lisa (2002), Freud's Footnotes (2000), Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late (1997) and Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post? (1996), and co-author, with David Corfield, of Why Do People Get Ill? (2007).