Tick/Tock / Now/Then

Again, my reviews come late. But what is lateness but a deferred present.

The British Art Show 7 is touring so my day at the Hayward a few weeks ago is not too out of date, and I did take a few notes, mental and otherwise, so anyway...what was there and what did I think of it?

Seeing this exhibition, as a snapshot of where British Art is at right now (not alternately titled Now That's What I Call Art 2005-2011!), according to the curators anyway, I was encouraged by the presence of drawing and painting, alongside the expected YBA influence, heavy with readymades. A sense of narrative is the other noticeable feature running through many artists' work.

George Shaw's austere urban wastelands in Humbrol enamel paints, sensitive but they not only depict but embody a lack somehow. Maybe just cos they depict Covva.

Alasdair Gray's simplicity of image, drawings worked on in the 1980s returned to in the 2000s, sophisticated but they leave me cold.

Phoebe Unwin's painterly intriguing images are more my cup of tea, playful and enigmatic.

The star of the show though and something I've been gagging to see for a while, having missed its earlier showings in other venues is Christian Marclay's Clock. This is film art comprising a 24-hour montage of short clips mainly from well-known motion pictures each clip hinging minute-by-minute on reference to the actual time.

I decided to treat it as a feature length matinee showing, by my timepiece (clock on mobile phone - 3mins slow) between 12.10 and 1.40, then popped back for some more in the build-up to 3.10pm. As a viewer you start to fall into a sort of obsession with the time. Mundanity and drama play out but always with the presence, foregrounded and emphasised or tangential and backgrounded, of a succession of time-pieces and time-tellers. Highschool classroom clocks, train stations, waiting rooms, tannoy announcements, clock-watchers of the world unite.

It's all there - death, sex, pain and joy. Also waiting - waiting for trains, for appointments, for rendezvous with fate, or just the seep of time through the cracks between events. Time that people want to stop, defer, speed up. Drive, Eat, Drink, Wait.

There is a strong sense of time as implacable, democratic, multi-denominational (images of Judaism and Islam are juxtaposed).

The playfulness of the montage creates a series of unwitting collaborations from a dream cast : Jason Statham, Isabelle Huppert, James Mason, Klaus Kinski, Julian Sands, Roger Moore, Dirk Bogarde, Paul McArtney. TV gets in there too with ER, a time of death being called, also more than one McGyver, and Columbo (alibis rely on pinpointing and questioning of time), and The Prisoner. The Kevin Bacon game has perhaps been made even easier by this project. There are glimpses of Anthony Hopkins in at least four different decades. Time marches on. The ageing process is remorseless and recorded.

We have clips from the great clock-watching movies - The Taking of Pelham 123, 3.10 to Yuma. It becomes a rather brilliant movie criticism seminar with a loose anecdotal mashed-up style, shamelessly slipping from originals to their remakes: Glenn Ford or Russell Crowe? Glenn Ford please. Also cut in are some of the greatest hits of clock referencing - we have Orson Welles as The Third Man in Vienna give his cuckoo clock speech.

Sound editing juxtapositions and elisions have an impact too, soundtrack bleeds from one clip to the next. In one sequence of intercuts, implicating Woody Allen in Shaft's trailing of a suspect. The humour and drama and the wonderful happenstance that the mix of disconnection of narrative and pure chronological connection builds is rather beautiful and witty, and oddly moving.

This is a rare piece of work, elegant and profound (and funny), resonant in the act of viewing it and afterwards like a layer of thought around one's lived experiences. I've never been a watch wearer and as a late adopter of mobile telephony my own sense of precise(ish) time has always been snatched naturally and loosely from glimpses at public clock-faces, the station, the clock-tower, the cafe, the pub. The film struck me as the ultimate cinematic version of how I've experienced time, its dual nature, both the precision of it and its looser interminable unwinding.

If the internet and its infinite hours of frippery is for anything, there should be space for this, on non-stop real-time streaming. For other casual fans of the real-time there's this.