How do you judge a work of art that you can’t really see? Anyone who’s been tempted to lie flat on their back on the floor of the Sistine Chapel, or who’s waited impatiently for someone with the right change to pay for the light to come on in a gloomy Italian side chapel will know what I mean. But those are historical problems. What about today, when the conventions of the public gallery can come into conflict with the intentions of artists? Ai Wei Wei’s work last year for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, Sunflower Seeds lost half its point and impact when the Health and Safety police prevented visitors from walking on the ceramic ‘seeds’ for fear that the dust would be harmful to breathing.

That’s an extreme example of an enforced restriction. But often simply the norms of gallery-visiting can militate against the full experience of an artwork. This was brought home to me forcefully last Friday, when, after a morning of meetings in Glasgow, I had decided to catch a later train north, allowing me to see at least part of the British Art Show, or BAS7 as its organisers refer to it. The British Art Show has been held roughly every five years since 1979, and each time tours to several cities. It is said to be ‘widely recognised as the most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British Art’.

And there’s where the problems begin. Today’s artists are increasingly working with moving images, and indeed a number of them have now made the transition to mainstream cinema, such as Steve McQueen with Hunger and Sam Taylor-Wood with Nowhere Boy. That’s not how video art started out. The grand master of the video installation, Bill Viola, creates pieces that are either short (5-10 minutes at most) or are circular, and the viewer can start to engage at any part of the cycle. That fits comfortably with the experience of viewing a ‘static’ picture or sculpture. But, at the CCA, its share of BAS7 included three videos which were, essentially, narrative (one was even directly referencing sitcoms) and therefore demanded to be watched from beginning to end. To do that with all three, I calculated, would have required two and a quarter hours of my time, and that’s assuming that it was possible to phase the starting times of all three appropriately!

I did step into the middle of each, and watched them for long enough to appreciate that, if I was going to get anything of substance out of them, it would be essential to start watching from the beginning. Now for me the essence of the gallery/exhibition experience is movement: the rhythm of moving through a space, stepping back, then forward for a closer look, then scanning round the gallery as a whole, and moving on to the next work, or at least the next work to catch my eye. In an exhibition I’m simply not in a mental state to sit still for as long as it would take to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (and possibly for as little reward).

So, should artists and galleries instead make these works available on DVD to watch at leisure on home TV? Well, no, that’s not the answer either. Some of these works require the setting of a blacked-out, soundproofed space, and the sheer scale of a large projection screen, and many of the artists, I’m guessing, would argue that it’s the very context of the gallery setting which defines the videos as artworks.

So this seems an intractable problem. Artists are making artworks which, by their very nature, and by the norms of gallery-going, are unviewable by all but the most dedicated, or by those with a great deal of time on their hands. But at the CCA one artist, at least, has turned this problem into a virtue and in making a video that is, almost by definition, unwatchable in its entirety, has created a masterpiece–perhaps the Sistine Ceiling of the video age.

Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ is a 24-hour-long video that is made up of thousands of clips from old movies and TV dramas from around the world which show watches or clocks, or reference times of day. These have been edited together in sequence so that, if shown in ‘real time’, the video functions as an actual clock, marking the passage of time for those viewing the film. Sometimes the ‘clock’ theme is hard to spot. One shot of 60s London street traffic puzzled me until I spotted that there was a clock on the facade of a building in the far distance. I’m sure, if I’d been able to look closely enough, that it was at the right time.

If that were all, it would be an astounding piece of collation and editing, but perhaps nothing more. What makes ‘The Clock’ a riveting work of art is the poetry, wit and humour with which Marclay has assembled his multitude of clips. Themes will emerge and disappear, such as train journeys or mealtimes, and tiny mini-dramas will present themselves through the interaction between the clips.

Let me try to explain how this works. In black and white, a young Karl Malden drives a convertible up to a house and starts yelling obstreperously for his ‘baby’ to come down and join him—they need to be somewhere by 2.00 (there’s the time reference). ‘The Clock’ then cuts to Vincent Price, in colour, sitting on a garden bench and, though clearly in a completely different film, so angled that he could be assumed to be observing Malden’s boorish behaviour. Here’s where it gets really clever. The soundtrack from the Malden clip continues behind the Price clip, so that Price’s obvious increasing annoyance and impatience seem to be a reaction to the noise Malden is making. That’s just a few seconds out of twenty-four hours. Given my limited timetable, I only had the chance to watch less than one fiftieth of this astonishing epic, but even that was an unforgettable experience.

And here’s where we come back to my theme of unviewable art. ‘The Clock’ runs for the full 24 hours of the diurnal clock. But, of course, the CCA keeps normal gallery hours and is only open between 11.00 and 18.00. It is, simply, impossible to see the work as a whole, even if you wanted to, except for one day, 18 June, when the Centre will remain open for the full 24 hours. Bring a flask and some sandwiches.

And of course it’s harder still to see even enough of ‘The Clock’ when it’s just one exhibit in an exhibition that’s so large that it needs three separate galleries to house it: CCA, GOMA and Tramway. Moreover, it can be difficult to present such immense catch-all surveys without the prop of some sort of theme. BAS7 has the rather pompous and obscure sub-title ‘In the Days of the Comet’, taken from the title of probably the least-read of H G Wells’ ‘scientific romances’ (though I do have a copy, I can’t remember if I’ve read it). The organisers do attempt to justify this choice of title, but I’ll settle for ‘pompous and obscure’, as that’s how I found much of the work in BAS7.

Fortunately, my schedule for the afternoon included another exhibition which restored, as Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ had also done, much of my faith in contemporary art, and the use of video as a medium. I had played a small part in helping artist Victoria Clare Bernie to get a residency at the Scottish Association for Marine Science’s research laboratory at Dunstaffnage, north of Oban, and this exhibition at Street Level, ‘Slow Water’ was the outcome of that residency. The ‘unviewable’ issue came up again here, as the core of the exhibition was three videos, each lasting about 40 minutes, and shown sequentially. But fortunately, although the films clearly have a linear flow, they are not narrative as such, and I found I could get a great deal out of them from even partial viewings. That’s because, without hitting the viewer over the head, Bernie nonetheless clearly conveys the underlying ideas and philosophy that drive her work, and especially because the resulting films (unlike almost everything I saw in BSA7) are reflective, quiet, and very, very beautiful.

© Robert Livingston 2011