Time, Kept: Why Artists Can’t Stop Making Clocks

The Art Lens is Dandelion Chandelier’s ongoing exploration of how art shapes the way we see, remember, and make meaning—examining artworks, exhibitions, and creative movements through culture, history, and lived experience rather than chronology or trend.

There are hours when time behaves itself.

Meetings start on schedule. Trains arrive. Dinner reservations hold. The clock does its job, and we agree—willingly—to obey.

And then there are the other hours.

The minute before midnight.
Or the second hand you watch instead of sleeping.
The museum gallery where you intend to stay ten minutes and emerge altered, surprised by how long you were gone.

There are moments when time loosens—not because anything changes, but because someone is missing.

Artists have always understood this. Across centuries, cultures, and mediums, clocks appear in art not to reassure us, but to unsettle us. They melt. They stall. They erode themselves. They synchronize with lovers. They outlast human lives. They mark presence, disappearance, labor, devotion, endurance.

Artists don’t use clocks to tell us what time it is.
They use them to ask whether time belongs to us at all.

This is why art about time endures: it gives shape to experiences—grief, love, labor, memory—that refuse to move in straight lines.

soft time, unfastened

When Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931, he gave us the most enduring image of modern anxiety about time: watches so fatigued they could no longer hold their shape.

The clocks sag. They drape. Appear embarrassed by their own authority. They are no longer capable of discipline.

Dalí called time “soft” here, but what he really did was remove its threat. These clocks cannot hurry you. They cannot command you. They have lost their usefulness—and gained something else entirely.

Tenderness.

Standing before them, you feel a curious relief. Time, Dalí suggests, only feels rigid because we’ve agreed to treat it that way.

when time tightens its grip

That relief doesn’t last forever.

Encounter The Clock by Christian Marclay and time snaps back into focus with unnerving precision. Every minute accounted for. Every second visible. The work unfolds across 24 hours, assembling thousands of film clips into a single, synchronized loop that matches real time exactly.

You always know what time it is while watching it.
What you don’t know is how long you’ve been there.

First presented in 2010 and awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, The Clock has never stopped circulating. Its current screening in Berlin, running through January 25, 2026, confirms its strange power. People still queue. Still stay longer than planned. Still emerge disoriented.

People often watch The Clock together—even when they arrive alone.

The work doesn’t invite admiration so much as submission. It makes you acutely aware of your own compliance, how readily your body bends to the rules of the clock. Hyper-awareness gives way to dislocation. The clock is right. Your sense of time is not.

i was here

If Marclay shows time as an enclosing system, On Kawara shows time as proof of existence.

For nearly fifty years, Kawara painted nothing but dates. Each canvas records the day it was made, rendered in the language and format of the country where he was physically present. If the painting wasn’t finished by midnight, it was destroyed.

No image. No explanation or narrative.

Just the quiet insistence: this day happened, and so did I.

Seen together, the Today series feels almost devotional. The paintings don’t commemorate anything. They simply confirm that a life was present long enough to mark the day.

a moment of arrival

When I saw About Time, the 2020 Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was during a season when I was not entirely myself.

I had lost my father only months earlier. I understood that fact, but I hadn’t yet absorbed it. Grief has a curious relationship to time: it compresses it, distorts it, leaves you capable of moving forward without fully arriving.

Walking through the exhibition, surrounded by historic clocks quietly marking their hours, something unexpected happened. I felt my father with me. Not as memory or metaphor, but as presence. It felt—as simply and as strangely as this—that we were moving through the galleries together.

The exhibition wasn’t about loss. It wasn’t designed to console. And yet it did. It gave shape to something I hadn’t been able to name: the way time continues even as a relationship ends; the way memory refuses to follow chronology; the way presence can linger long after the clock insists otherwise.

That afternoon clarified something I’ve come to believe deeply. Sometimes we don’t know which art we need until we are standing in front of it. And when we find it, it doesn’t explain anything away. It simply meets us where we are—and stays.

time as labor, time as erosion

Not all clocks in art are gentle.

In National Times, Agustina Woodgate lines a wall with synchronized clocks whose hands are tipped with sandpaper, slowly grinding the numbers off their own faces. One unseen digital clock controls the rest.

Timekeeping, here, is extractive. The clocks continue to function even as they erase their own meaning—motion without preservation, productivity without memory.

Nearby in spirit is Alicja Kwade, whose Against the Run clocks appear familiar until you try to read them. Faces rotate counterclockwise. Hands move “incorrectly.” Seconds seem frozen. And yet—the time remains accurate.

The authority of the clock, Kwade reminds us, is a design choice. The flow of time itself is not.

synchronized lives

Not every clock in art is adversarial.

In Untitled (Perfect Lovers), Felix Gonzalez-Torres places two identical clocks side by side, touching, ticking in unison. Created in memory of his partner Ross Laycock, the work accepts an inevitability that makes it unbearable: eventually, one clock will drift. Stop. Fall out of sync.

The artist instructs that the batteries be replaced.

The gesture feels less like denial than devotion. Love does not escape time. It is maintained within it.

time as the body

Some artists didn’t observe time from a distance. They surrendered to it.

Between 1980 and 1981, performance artist Tehching Hsieh punched a mechanical time clock every hour, on the hour, for an entire year. He never slept for more than sixty minutes at a time.

This was not spectacle. It was submission. Time as labor. Time as enclosure.

At the other extreme, Roman Opalka devoted his life to painting numbers in sequence, beginning with one and moving toward infinity. Over decades, the background lightened until white numbers were painted on white canvases. He photographed himself daily alongside the work.

To see the series is to watch a human being slowly disappear.

the narrowing corridor

Near the end of his life, Edvard Munch painted himself standing stiffly between a grandfather clock and a bed.

The clock marks what remains.
A bed suggests birth, intimacy, illness, death.

The space between them is everything.

It is one of the most honest images ever made about time’s proximity—aware, unsentimental, unafraid.

beyond the human hour

More recently, artists have asked what happens when time exceeds us entirely.

With Ice Watch, Olafur Eliasson placed massive blocks of glacial ice in public squares, allowing thousands of years of formation to melt away in a matter of hours. Climate change became audible, visible, undeniable.

And then there is the 10,000 Year Clock by The Long Now Foundation, now being built inside a mountain in West Texas—designed to tick for ten millennia with minimal human intervention.

It asks a quietly radical question: what does responsibility look like when time outlives us?

the instant

Photography approaches time differently.

For Henri Cartier-Bresson, time existed in fractions of a second. His idea of the “decisive moment” is crystallized in Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare: a man suspended mid-leap, reflection echoing his form, an instant that will never repeat.

This is micro-time.
The opposite of endurance.
The flash where meaning appears—and vanishes.

why artists keep making clocks — and why art about time endures

Taken together, these works don’t offer a single definition of time.

They offer experiences.

Time as discipline.
Time as proof of life.
Time as labor.
Time as love.
Time as erosion.
Time as legacy.

Some works don’t change how we think about time. They change who we feel beside us while it passes.

Artists keep making clocks because clocks are where abstraction becomes intimate—and where art about time becomes inseparable from how we live. They sit in our homes. They govern our days. They tell us when to begin and when to stop.

Art interrupts that certainty.

It gives us moments—rare, luminous ones—where time loosens its grip and allows us to see it clearly. Not as a ruler. Not as a threat.

But as the strange, shared medium through which we live.

And sometimes, if we’re lucky, linger.

This is why art about time and clocks endures: it reveals not how time passes, but how we live inside it.

All photographs by Pamela Thomas-Graham unless otherwise noted.