Christian Marclay - Doors 

6 – 30 September 2023, White Cube 

Doors and doors and doors and doors and doors! This is Marclay’s film and accompanying suite of sculptural works at the White Cube, Mason’s Yard. Matter-of-factly titled ‘Doors’ the show has two sides. On the ground floor a room of sculptures is made entirely of actual doors and down in the basement, a large screening room shows the artist’s film from 2022 of the same name. Both rooms house, in different vernaculars of wood and celluloid, Marclay’s contemplation on doors. Both engage with his bread and butter techniques; sourcing, clipping, splicing and repeating. The sculptural works are made with new doors and relics, and the film is made with footage of characters (and they are always fictional characters), opening, closing, moving through doorways, coming home, bursting in, leaving for good. The clips are drawn from a range of sources in the history of cinema. 

Enthralling and strangely funny, this uncanny exhibition where a familiar thing becomes strange over and over, is also uncanny because it deals with homely places; the literal portals and passages of the home, the corridors of apartment complexes and grand reception rooms; as well as the mundane spaces of work, offices, reception foyers and so on. The strangeness of these spaces is also strangely familiar. We sometimes recognise the film clips and remember their original context but, like a musical sample, are overpowered by a sense of their integration into a new schema and score. The integrations can be harmonious or discordant, what seems to unify them is the feeling of onward rush. Certain clips are repeated, further reinforcing the sense of shifting harmony, reappearing like a chorus or a subtly altered jazz riff. Unlike Marclay’s most famous film that deals with time, here clips do return and this use of considered repetition gives ‘Doors’ its nervous humour, as a phrase from a character in the film such as ‘pardon monsieur’ is spoken again and again, like a call-back in an off-kilter stand-up routine.  

The film is a continuous building of suspense and deferral of narrative conclusion, deferral is in and of itself the conclusion. This is montage but it is montage of a modular rather than liminal kind, sensitive to the patterns and proportions of mathematics, to the melodies of number and rhythm. Watching the film and remembering the cut up and reconfigured doors in the room above, I think of music enthralled to harmonic law, of the minimalist compositions of Philip Glass and of the treatise of old Arabic scholars and their attempts to reconcile musical composition with the balanced proportions of Pythagorean geometry (many of the sculpted doors have been divided into equal sized square pieces and rearranged as a grid). Perhaps these musical apparitions are conjured out of Marclay’s seamlessly shifting score, which is itself a latticework of seams, interweaving the soundtracks of countless clips into an aural river that carries the packed room of viewers along in its sometimes choppy, sometimes serpentine waters. 

In other ways the two sides of this exhibition are less connected. In the film we have the feeling of being lost in a labyrinthine system of passages. The upstairs doors are dormant by comparison, the cut-ups are less potent in terms of narrative and do not stir the same kind of intrigue. One of these sculptures is an exception, a door that seems to have been splayed on the wall and had quarters of its carpentry dissected, like flanks in mediaeval anatomical woodcuts, so that it resembles a sort of upturned cross. This unavoidably alludes to the Christ on the cross, a subject sticky with associations. But in its sparseness it echoes Bacon’s Crucifixion (1933), a painting said to be influenced by the emerging technology of the x-ray. While Marclay’s door lacks the sinewy strangeness of early Bacon’s Christ, it does perhaps try to make a skeleton visible. What connects the two halves of the exhibition is the involuntary, magnetic way that the mind attaches narrative, feeling, association, to matter, even matter as commonplace as a door. Plot and story run like a spine down the gallery staircase. Traversing this spine is a narrative of non-narrative, a story made of the atoms of other stories. Strangely, we are still pulled along, especially in the embracing cinema setting below, less so in the bright room above. 

It would be tempting to say that Marclay is driving at something symbolic: ‘it is not the door itself, but the anticipation of who might step through it.’ Instead, the sculptures seem to anchor any hint of symbolism in the material itself, no prayers to a realm of abstract form but an emphasis on the fact that mental associations, the colourations of feeling, are as much part of the object as its physical characteristics, be it the flaked paintwork, rust stained keyhole or spiralling wood grain. There is a formalism here but as it is a formalism that deals in the forms of representation. 

By dicing up the filmic narrative, arresting it from its seductive role and original context, Marclay lets us see the formal cues that seduce us in the first place. What’s revealing is that even when countless unrelated slivers of film are laid end to end we still find a way to relate them. We know that no denouement is possible, but we still watch with anticipation and hope. The show’s humour is from a revelatory type of joke, one that works because it cracks open the surface of something we take for granted and tickles the mechanics within. The disturbing side to all this is how powerless we are to resist it, how hypnotic it is even as a cautionary tale or formal experiment. I notice in the warm, crowded room, how quickly the spectators fall into the rhythm of the piece. When static they are enthralled, but at certain junctures – an Edwardian high society lady in feathered hat steps through a door and, with a well-timed cut, comes out as an American detective – a few viewers suddenly wake from the spell and urgently, melodramatically make their escape from the screening space, with the same pace and drama of the characters on screen. Our enthrallment to this seems to be similar to the workings of digital media and communication systems that surround us - the heady, ceaseless draw of the infinite scroll, what some have called the apparatus of limbic capitalism. By contrast, in the room above, viewers adopt the traditional, perhaps more analogue gallery pace, slower than the pace of the street as though burdened by aesthetic contemplation. It may not be Marclay’s aim to reveal to our weaknesses, to show us how susceptible we are to the seductive rhythms of form, but the experience of watching the film, if not the sculptures, did remind me strongly of Mark Fisher’s description of cyberspace, or as he says cyberspace-time: 

‘We can spend hours and hours on it but we are not immersed in it. We are endlessly driven. There’s this drive, immersion requires stillness [...] but on the internet there is this panicked time, as soon as you open the page the endless weight of network demand falls on you, the urge to click off onto another page at any time is immense [...] instead of having the ‘now’ we have the instant. But the instant is splintered into multiple windows at any time, the instant carries the sense of instant coffee, something that is endlessly available. This strange process happens, the more that things are instant and available, the more we defer them. It becomes a fantasy time […] we are constantly deferring the moment of immersion, in this endlessly hurried state we are always running away from things.’ [1]

We do feel the hurried rush of Marclay’s characters, the strange deferral of the instant, the fantasy time of the cinema and gallery. But unlike the drive of the internet, which often feels hollow and harmful and addicting, the experience of watching this film is that we get some nourishment. It seems to impart a coded bodily wisdom, a whisper that tells the secret of cinema and the magical pull of story. A crucial difference is that the screens of cyberspace are often solitary whereas this is determinately collective. The gallery is hot and packed throughout and it seems that the comings and goings of my fellow spectators have become part of the artwork, the sound of their arrival part of the soundtrack. We may not be immersed by the multiplying windows of the internet but we are in the case of Marclay’s ‘Doors’. 

[1] Online Lecture, Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism and Hauntology, last accessed 02/10/2023. Available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpyOonFtw4c