Managed to see Christian Marclay’s Clock at Tate Modern 3 times in the past week. The idea is brilliantly simple and completely audacious. It’s literally called “The Clock” and lasts 24 hours, and potentially the world’s most popular piece of conceptual art is a gigantic collage of film clips – old and new, black-and-white and colour – showing thousands of glimpses of clocks, watches, sundials and snatches of people telling each other the time, all set up to correspond to real time wherever it is shown, right round the clock. It’s been really fun to be able to pop on for 20 minutes or so and see something different.
While there we also got to check out Tanya Bruguera’s new turbine hall commission. It’s probably the least visually spectacular work in the Turbine Hall so far we’ve ever seen; no giant slides, no vast yellow sun. Yet it might be the most radical. Through “stealth interventions”, Bruguera asks us to wake up to the migration crisis.
Thunderous rumbles intermittently shake our bones. In a “crying room”, tears flow from our eyes, induced by chemicals; a sardonic response to superficial or even absent empathy. The work’s title — the number who migrated from one country to another in 2017, plus those who died trying — is literally stamped on our skin and will rise as more perish. Bruguera has involved Tate’s neighbours too. The Tate’s north building has been renamed in honour of local activist Natalie Bell. Bell has also suggested the subject of a photographic portrait concealed in the Turbine Hall floor itself — Yousef, a Syrian migrant who found support through Bell’s SE1 United charity. The portrait is hidden under a heat-sensitive floor. If enough people pack onto it and then rise up as one, the portrait will be revealed.
