Today, I have been made aware of time at numerous points in the day. It started with Geoff Dyer – someone I have ‘limited’ time to interview to ensure he appears in the next LeftLion. He’s doing a talk with John Hegley at the Nottingham Contemporary on 10th June about D H Lawrence and so it’s a great opportunity to get one of my favourite writers in the magazine. Dyer is a brilliant public speaker who enthrals audiences with his idiosyncratic moaning (like an intellectual Victor Meldrew) and so I started by checking out his talks at various festivals on YouTube. The first one I came across was a sermon on punctuality…

I ‘didn’t have time’ to listen to all of his talks as Aly and I were doing a food review of Iberico – which is easily the best tapas bar in Britain, let alone Nottingham. So I legged it down to the Lacemarket. I arrived on time but my girlfriend was fifteen minutes late (which is early by her terms – time is relative). As I sat cursing her and going over Dyer’s sermon in my head, I opened up my copy of the New York Review of Books and on the front page was a feature about Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’. This was first shown at the NAE as part of the British Art Show but as you can probably guess, I didn’t have time to blog about it at the time. It has since shown at the Hayward Gallery in London before moving on to the Tramway in Glasgow from May 27 to August 21. I urge you, find time to see it.

‘The Clock’ is simply the most magical piece of artwork I’ve ever seen. Unlike most art, it’s something that is both aesthetically and technically pleasing. It’s a 24 hour film sutured together with film clips from around the world. For every minute, there’s a different scene. Sometimes you see the time on a wall clock or watch, other times it is referred to by a character. It sounds tedious but it is unbelievably addictive. The excitement when you recognise a film or actor or a particular scene that transports you back to childhood is suddenly taken away from you as the next edit kicks in. People sigh, laugh and even talk to the person next to them – something you don’t usually get in the silent, clinical galleys of a gallery.

‘The Clock’ works on numerous levels. Unlike the films that it shows, it works in ‘real’ time, but when you watch it, you forget about time. The clips are temporal, nudging you back to specific moments in your life, you want to see more but can’t – a fitting metaphor for many things I don’t have time to write about now.