LACMA looking to buy Christian Marclay's video art hit 'The Clock,' a virtual history of film [UPDATED]

Christian Marclay's "The Clock" -- a 24-hour video that cleverly (and some say profoundly) tells viewers the current time by splicing together thousands of film and TV clips showing various watches and clocks -- was such a hit in New York this winter that people lined up in the cold outside the Paula Cooper Gallery to see it.

Now, the Art Newspaper reports that LACMA is one of three museums trying to buy the work, issued in an edition of six. According to the paper, director Michael Govan plans to project the work on the facade of one of LACMA's buildings, where it could presumably work like a clock tower for any passersby.

When asked about the artwork, Govan confirmed that he and Franklin Sirmans, LACMA's head of contemporary art, have followed Marclay's work for years, and that the department is presenting this work to donors in April during an event known as "Collectors Committee Weekend" to see if funding can be raised for it.

"Because it compiles a virtual history, though not chronologically, of film," Govan said, "it meets many criteria at once in terms of being a great artwork and a great artwork for LACMA."

But the potential location of the piece, Govan said, is far from a done deal. Although one might expect to see it in a museum theater, he said that any plans to show it in a more unusual location would "require working closely with the artist, and that's the next step after you buy it."

According to another Art Newspaper article, LACMA will in October become the first U.S. institution to display Ed Kienholz's intensely controversial artwork "Five Car Stud." The installation, dating from 1969 to 1972, shows "five white figures in grotesque rubber masks tying down and castrating a black man," the paper said. The museum owns Kienholz's 1962 tableau "Illegal Operation," a graphic exploration of abortion, and his 1964 installation "Back Seat Dodge '38," which was once called "pornographic" by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

[UPDATE 4:25 pm: The Art Newspaper had cited a price for Marclay's video of $400,000, which was mentioned in an earlier version of this post. But representatives of both LACMA and the Paula Cooper gallery, who decline to specify the price, say it is incorrect.]

RELATED:

Leading the eye by the ear

LACMA lands Ed Kienholz's "The Illegal Operation"

-- Jori Finkel
Twitter.com / jorifinkel

Image: A still from "The Clock" ©Christian Marclay. Credit: Paula Cooper Gallery

Comments

[Brady Westwater]

The Hammer did the first major survey of his work by an American museum in 2003 along with publishing a very comprehensive catalog, my copy of which was borrowed by someone who lost it in a fire. But LACMA getting the 'Clock' might justify a new retrospective and a new type of multi-media catalog more suited to his work. An on-line one that is less vulnerable to fire....

[Donald Frazell]

LACM on fire has the proper perspective on all this
http://blogs.artinfo.com/lacmonfire/
you practically ignore the real story for fluff. Why was the Keinholz hidden in a storage unit for forty years.? Revealed now with a black president to take teh shock away, and actually will be used by tha backlash against Obama and all African Americans that is on us. How many black actors do yo use anymore? The All State guy, here to save white america, and thats it.
Now THATS a story, if only there were real investigative reporters in art.

[Donald Frazell]

As you have on your blog about misguided fundraising for the levitating rock, and the faltered Koons hanging choochoo train, the film department and Watts Towers, supposedly under LACMAs care, have been ignored.

Nuestro Pueblo got a one time $500k gift from the Irvine foundation, which only makes up for three years of the City's cuts to the Towers upkeep, none has been raised towards the $5mil needed to repair the Towers or get any real publicity. Where are the vaunted fundraisers among the Hills wealthy patrons? Where are the tours, the PR, except for LACMAs "good will"? How many buses head down to Watts, or bring those local in to vist the north of wilshire crowds party pavilions? Where is connecting to any of our 12mil people outside of the confines of fundraisers abodes?

And please paint the damn buildings, the new ones are too tinker toy to fix, they are what they are. But Times Courtyard can be enlivened simply by painting the pillars and panels to makes them not blandly cohesive, as Mr Govan desires in taring down the perfectly useful complex with new sterile monstrosities, but enliven them and making them work as in real life? Like different trees that combine to make a beautiful forest of various textures and colors?

But the myopia on seperate trees, or giant rocks and getting a certain megalomaniac collectors toys, has stifled all true creativity. Real art is inexpensive, as Schukin said in collecting Matisse and Picassos work. Bad art of hubris are extravagantly expensive, and condemned for the dustbin of history.

art collegia delenda est