Christian Marclay’s video montage Doors, from 2022, made its London debut at White Cube in September and I was determined to catch it. The video played in the downstairs gallery while a collection of sculptures were on display upstairs.
I liked their playfulness aligned with mathematics.
The inside-outsidedness of beautifully sliced and stacked doors.
All the elements of a door remain even though the initial function has been removed. It’s a weird interplay of form & function.
They are both less and more than the sum of their parts, retaining their essential doorness despite the removal of their function.
Look at the innards, like an anatomical and architectural dissection.
At 54 minutes long, Doors is a non-linear loop, making for unnerving watching. The repetition of the same clip in a different sequence makes you unsure if you have already seen it or not. It’s very unsettling yet compelling at the same time.
Marclay is a conceptual artist most famously known for The Clock, a video montage from 2010 of clocks in films. It runs for 24 hours, showing the time in the audience’s real time. With no beginning or end, it is a memento mori for our times.
