Inigo Manglano-Ovalle
Clock
on view Dec. 1999-Jan. 2001 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH

      This piece is an installation comprised of a series of video monitors aligned horizontally. Across each monitor, shots of various people viewed from the neck up alternate. Each monitor represents a single digit in a clock that displays the time to a fraction of a second, and the date and year. Each different face stands for a single number, so that with ten different faces, the exact date and time can be encoded simply by displaying them accordingly. This results in some faces remaining constant over a large span of time--those standing in for the calendar date, others changing within the span of a visit, and the ones for a tenth or hundredth of a second switching almost too quick to view. The switching is controlled by the signal from a Global Positioning Satellite that reads that movement of the earth. It was activated in December, 1999, and will remain running until January, 2001.
      The people, both male and female, appear to be a deliberate multi-racial selection--it seems as if every major ethnic group is represented, though this isn't done in a proportional representation of world population--more faces are caucasian than any other group. Perhaps the artist believed that human diversity was the most appropriate image to encode time with, though the thought of there being a pun on the idea of a clock ÒfaceÓ is unavoidable. Racial diversity is the only diversity displayed--all of the people viewed are young, and reasonably attractive. They are staring straight ahead, and seem relaxed (each was given a professional facial massage before being recorded), with no facial expressions. The backgrounds are bright, intense, and monochromatic, with a different color for each face.
      Part of the artist's intent was to comment on the arbitrary signifiers we use to record or stand for the passing of time, a particularly relevant issue, he felt, after all the hype about the changing of the millennium. The clock installation does limit itself to displaying the particular time zone it is in, and uses the western calendar for determining year and month, but by the replacement of numbers with faces, uses an ostensibly unsuitable symbol that is nevertheless functional. Part of the experience of the work is learning how to read time by it, and eventually the logic of which face corresponds to which number does become evident. This is the challenge that everyone faces in childhood with conventional clocks, even with the familiarity of numbers as the symbol for measuring quantity or progression. Traditional analog clocks make this especially true, with the key device being the relative angle of two lines on a round clock face, occasionally with the numbers even absent. The circularity of time, evident on the face of a clock, is also evident in the succession of the ten faces in the installation. We are used to counting with numbers, and so don't often reflect that we are using and reusing the same ten digits over and over again in different combinations--with the alternation of faces, it is easier to focus on the cycle.

postdlf
2000

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