colorplay The Year Ahead

Four days into the year and it’s all possibility right now. You have an idea of how things will go — what you’re looking forward to, what’s going to be challenging — but you’re working off archival material. Memory and experience, educated guesses. “2025 is going to be very difficult for me,” a friend said matter-of-factly the other night, before ticking off all the things she had to do this year: taking her business to a new stage, considering a move. To me, these things sounded exciting, interesting — the fascinating content of someone else’s life.

We’re all sitting here with the same year’s worth of days in front of us now, the same calendar. What activities and events will we fill it with? How will we greet the material of our days? What meaning will we give to it?

I recently saw Christian Marclay’s installation “The Clock” at MoMA. It’s a 24-hour montage of thousands of clips from movies and shows, each featuring a clock, a watch, a line of dialogue or other timepiece. The film is synchronized with the actual time, so every scene depicts the moment at which you’re watching it, making “The Clock” a functioning timepiece in itself. You’re watching a movie, but you’re also watching a clock, for hours on end.

The museum stayed open for 24 hours on Dec. 21 for a special solstice showing of “The Clock,” from 7 p.m. Saturday to 7 p.m. Sunday. On my way there Saturday night, I noticed myself rushing: It was 8 p.m., I was late! But then I stopped. It didn’t really matter when I arrived. People would be coming and going throughout the screening all night and into the following day. Here was an invitation to reconsider how I thought about time. “The Clock,” like real time, isn’t a performance with a beginning and end. It’s happening whether you’re there or not. You show up or you don’t. You pay attention or you don’t. You can’t do it wrong.

Sitting in the audience as three, four, five hours elapsed and somehow my attention never wavered, I considered this proposition again. Maybe you could do it wrong. Should I be paying attention to the plot of each clip, the characters and dialogue, or should I be paying attention to the timepieces? 11:22, 11:23, did I miss the clock on the screen showing 11:24 because I was trying to figure out what movie that last scene was from? (I’d discover afterward there was an entire wiki devoted to “The Clock” with each clip’s provenance identified — 11:24 includes scenes from “Shanghai Knights,” “Malice in Wonderland” and “Se7en.”) Can you do time wrong, by paying either too much attention to its passing, or not enough?

“The Clock” forces you to meditate on time, the way we compulsively turn the consecutive scenes of our lives into a narrative, project a cause and effect onto everything that happens, assume everything has meaning and decide if that meaning is positive or negative. We’re the artists and architects of our own lives, surveying the day or year ahead and trying to figure out what story we’re going to tell. Is this going to be a good year? Is it going to be hard? Who decides?

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In between, Mr. Trump invited Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer known for promoting Sept. 11 conspiracy theories, to join him at events commemorating the anniversary of the attacks. He urged a government shutdown, attacked a cornerstone of his own tax policy, declared “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on social media after she endorsed his rival and — at events intended to woo Jewish voters — said “the Jewish people” would be responsible if he lost the election, prompting fears of antisemitic reprisal.

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