Quite a Way to Spend a Day - A Recommendation

Third in a series

I'll get to my recommendation in a bit, but first I’ll set the scene by mentioning three other artworks that share a key attribute in common with it, namely their excessive duration. In all three cases, but for different reasons, I’m not suggesting you seek them out, but at least in concept, they’re worth a minute of your time…even though they ask for much more than that.

For reasons which I can’t quite explain, but will try to do so here, I’m attracted to the artwork that can be fully described in a few seconds but takes hours and hours in real time to unfold. Here’s perhaps my favorite:

The concept of Christian Marklay’s “The Clock” is simple, and intriguing. Marklay edits together clips from movies that display the time, usually in the form of a clock, such that Marclay’s film is 24 hours long, and designed so that the time you see in the clip onscreen is the actual time in the museum gallery where you are viewing the film. I went to see “The Clock” in Lincoln Center in New York shortly after its first showing, imagining I might stay for an hour or two. Four hours later, I emerged to the outside world, thoroughly entranced by what I’d seen, and a tad saddened that I had some other place I needed to be, rather than being able to continue viewing the film. When the Museum of Fine Arts showed “The Clock” a couple of years later, I was back, tempted to try to watch it all day and night, but again, real life intervened. The only reason I can’t enthusiastically recommend it to you is that you have to find a museum that is exhibiting it. Delightfully enough, in researching for this post, I discovered that the Museum of Modern Art in New York is showing it through May 11 of this year (2025). Try to spend some time with it if you’re in the Big Apple between now and then.

In describing the concept of a 24-hour artwork, I suspect some of you will say, “Wow! How can I experience that?” and others of you will say, “How boring.” Here’s an example I can’t recommend because I suspect it would drive me a bit insane to experience, as it would exceed my tolerance for boredom:

French composer Erik Satie, whose music for piano tends to be dreamily evocative and restful, composed a brief work called “Vexations” in 1893. Satie complemented his dreamy side with a playful one, indicating in the inscription to the piece that it should be performed 840 times in succession. One of the first CDs I ever bought was a collection of piano music of Satie performed by Aldo Ciccolini, which included “Vexations,” timed at 1:37. The liner notes suggested that thanks to the “repeat” function on CD players, the home listener could listen to the piece as intended by Satie, although I’m quite sure Satie intended us to hear the piece with subtle differences at each repeat, especially as the pianist became more and more exhausted. Regardless, Ciccolini on repeat 840 times would come to 22 hours and 38 minutes. Be may guest if you want to try; I’ll spend my time more profitably at “The Clock” thank you very much.

One more example before I finally give you a recommendation:

Regular readers of these Musings know I’m participating in the Massachusetts Center for the Book’s Monthly Reading Challenge, where for February, we are to read a book with a place name in the title. “Ducks, Newburyport” has been sitting on my to-read shelf for a while now, so I figured what better time to try to read it than now. While the book is not intended to be read at a sitting, it does feel like the effect of doing so would be similar to spending 24 hours with Marclay or Satie. Here’s the perhaps intriguing, perhaps off-putting description of the “formula” that generates the text of “Ducks, Newburyport”: string together a stream of consciousness flow of observations from within the mind of the protagonist, a middle-aged, more than slightly harried mother of four, prefacing each branch of the narrative with the words “the fact that,” interspersed with countless thought-association chains of single words or small phrases, and spin the narrative out for a thousand pages, with no sentence-ending period. Yes, the book is a thousand-page sentence that so far, 240 pages in, is thoroughly engrossing, with multiple times every page that I say to myself, “Yes, I’ve felt that same way, exactly!” The only reason I’m not recommending it yet is I’m not even close to finished, not to mention that you’d probably ignore any suggestion that this brick-of-a-book is for you. If you have a long car commute to work, you might try the audiobook, which runs for 45 hours and 34 minutes.

Finally, here’s my actual recommendation for you, a 24 hour long theater piece from multi-talented writer and performer Taylor Mac, descriptively titled “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.” For each hour of the piece, Mac and his ensemble explore the music of a decade of American history from the founding of the United States to the present day of its presentation (2016). Mac incorporates 246 songs in whole or in part in his telling, with some other concepts in his staging that I’ll let you discover on your own. No, I’m not suggesting that you find an actual performance to attend (although I’d seek it out if Mac ever revives it), but instead check out the documentary film on Max documenting its conception and staging. The film does an excellent job conveying the emotional payoff for an audience member of any of the four epic-length projects I’ve discussed. Here’s a preview, and enjoy your day: