NYC’s MoMA a great place to pass time

I tend to write about New York City a lot. And I do so largely because my wife and I visit the place a couple of times a year. Or more.

Sometimes it’s because we want to see friends. Most often, though, it’s because we want to spend time with my daughter and her family. As I pointed out in a previous post, she moved there in 1997 after graduating from high school in Spokane. And other than the first couple of summer vacations, she’s never come back for more than a week or two at a time.

So, we go there. And are happy to. Because as anyone who has spent time in the city knows, it’s the greatest metropolitan area in the world. Maybe not the prettiest. Maybe not the easiest to get around. And it’s far from the cheapest.

But for all it has to offer, New York City is the rival of anyplace.

Case in point: On Monday of this week, my wife and our granddaughter took the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan. Our destination was the Museum of Modern Art, better known simply as MoMA. And our plan was to see a specific exhibit called “The Clock.”

As unique an art exhibit as you apt to see anywhere, “The Clock” was dreamed up more than a decade ago by the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay. It consists of 12,000 or so (mostly) short scenes taken from a range of international movies and television shows.

That in itself isn’t particularly novel. What’s original is that Marclay, who took three years to edit the exhibit, has arranged the scenes in a continuous 24-hour format that is synchronized with the timeline of the city in which the exhibit is being shown.

As the MoMA exhibit notes explain, “James Bond checks his watch at 12:20 a.m.; Meryl Streep turns off an alarm clock at 6:30 a.m.; a pocket watch ticks at 11:53 a.m. as the Titanic departs.” As you sit in the audience, you can check the time with your own personal timepiece.

Not that every scene includes some type of clock. But everything suggests the passage of time, whether it be something out of a Marx Brothers comedy, a French noir, an Audrey Hepburn romance or a James Bond spy film. It could feature a race through the London Underground or Orson Welles (in Carol Reed’s “The Third Man”) snidely commenting that “500 years of democracy and peace” in Switzerland produced only “the cuckoo clock.”

An added feature to the exhibit is how clever Marclay and his assistants have woven together the scenes. When the exhibit had a run in 2018 in London’s Tate Gallery, a New York Times article noted how Marclay cleverly “stitches time together, finding sly visual rhymes across clips.”

Examples: “A door opens in a scene from a silent comedy and a ’90s movie star walks through it. Tea is poured in one decade and drunk in another; a bomb goes off and a petal softly lands.”

Fans of movies from all eras will have fun trying to name both the many stars (River Phoenix to Bette Davis) and the films that they appear in (“My Own Private Idaho” to “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”).

That is, they will if they can get in. We neglected to call ahead and see about getting a reservation. And we showed up later in the day (around 3:30). So when we reached the entrance, the guy handling admission told us, sorry, but no can do.

“Why not?” Mary Pat asked. The guy responded that there were a limited number of seats and that there just was no room … and though he didn’t say it, the unspoken implication was “at the moment.”

“But we came all the way from Spokane!” Mary Pat explained. Sorry, the guy said again, directing his attention to someone else whom he also turned away.

So we left, disappointed. But I then decided to share with my granddaughter the three works of art that I always try to see whenever I visit MoMA. I say “try” because sometimes they’re on loan somewhere else, which was the case with Andrew Wyeth’s haunting 1948 painting “Christina’s World.”

We had better luck with the other two. The first was Jackson Pollock’s massive (8 feet 10 inches high, 17 feet 6 inches wide) “One: Number 31, 1950,” which has always amazed me (and which my granddaughter appreciated as well).

The second was something far more famous: Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (Saint Rémy, 1889). As always, the painting was surrounded by a crowd of people, many of whom were taking selfies. My granddaughter was less enthused, Van Gogh’s harsh brushwork (so to speak) simply not to her liking.

And our story might have ended there. But Mary Pat is not one to give up. As we were leaving, she insisted on heading back to the entrance to “The Clock.” And this time a young women was sitting there. When Mary Pat made her plea, the woman smiled, asked how many were in our party and then just waved us in.

That’s how we got to see a bit more than a half hour of Marclay’s creation (before we had to leave to make a dinner date). Almost all of the seats (three rows of Ikea sofas) were full, so we were forced to stand in the back. But that was no problem, as the images worked their magic on us. It was the perfect ending to the day’s adventure.

As the old television show “The Naked City” used to proclaim, “There are eight million stories in the naked city.”

This one was ours.