After a celebrated, exhausting, exhilarating, and well-attended all-night screening of Christian Marclay's The Clock, this epic video work, now in LACMA's permanent collection, plays inside the museum lobby through July 31. While critical debate rages as to whether this 24-hour motion picture is a collage made of film or a film in its own right, really it's a durational experience infusing Post-Modernism with a giddy sense of joy and wonder which that much-mocked artistic movement rarely demonstrates. Lasting exactly 24 hours, the piece is always synced to the real time of day. It is constructed of thousands of individual clips from movies, television shows, and art-videos lasting between mere seconds and several minutes each — and each depicting the exact, real time through dialog and/or image, down to the second. An epic feat of research and patient craftsmanship, its segues are moving and witty despite the wild diversity of narrative and language, not to mention the pure fun of playing name-that-movie. Most importantly, the story moves — along the way addressing the differences between real and represented time, and the underlying armature of social rituals concerning when we eat, drink, fornicate, and duel, and ultimately doing what all great art does: showing the familiar world in a strange new way.

Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays-Sundays. Starts: May 26. Continues through July 31, 2011

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