“When I first started on this project, I thought it would become a public art piece,” Marclay said. “I thought, What a great thing, to be in a train station waiting for a train and being able to watch a movie. It would inform you what time it was, and at the same time entertain you. But I realized it was impossible—there’s lighting issues, sound issues, you have to hear the public-address system. And Grand Central, for example, closes for a few hours, late at night, when they clean up the place. Then there’s the occasional nudity and swearing. How do you show that at Grand Central? And then you start censoring yourself, and you can’t do it.” But there was a more important reason that the video needed to exert a tyrannical hold in a dark gallery. Shown amid other distractions, it became an ambient object: just another clock.

Marclay assembled his edit in hour-long chunks, the 24-hour cycle giving him enormous scope, but also confining him to a minute-by-minute grid. “A 10.01 clip has to be within that minute, at 10.01,” he says. “But within that minute I can place it anywhere – a minute is long in film, or it can be very fast. Then, in between, I have these joints – scenes that are not time-specific, but have to relate to the previous clip and the next one and articulate those fragments and create a flow. What I put in those joints is very much personal interests. Then there’s the more general idea of time – so someone waiting has a body language that expresses impatience or longing or boredom. Sometimes it can be more symbolic – memento mori images, like a flower wilting, a petal falling, the sun setting.”

It’s time. The winged chariot at my back, and all that. Taking a seat on one of the comfortable couches at the National Gallery in Ottawa, I mentally strap myself in. It’s time to take a time bath, to run a time marathon, by watching Christian Marclay’s 24-hour-long installation, The Clock, in a single sitting. The artist doesn’t actually recommend it, but an artwork of this size demands a big response. The piece is an exercise in surrendering oneself to controlled chance, a precisely edited jumble of visual material, classic films, forgotten mediocrities and television shows, without context or backstory, all telling the time in real time. If it’s 8:17 on your watch, it’s 8:17 in The Clock. There is no beginning or end to The Clock. I step in midstream.