Barbara Koenen’s collection of 800 stopped clocks is at the Design Museum of Chicago. And you can add to it.
When Barbara Koenen describes her revelation, you picture time slowing, time stopping, time pausing on its unending march to oblivion. You imagine a young woman in Chicago struck suddenly with a single overwhelming sense of purpose and mission: She must collect broken clocks.
Every broken clock that comes her way, she must have.
She had a great idea.
This was back in 1989, years ago. Like 17.7 million minutes ago. Back then, Koenen — now a longtime Chicago artist and executive director of the Creative Chicago Reuse Exchange — was a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute. She was listening to a lecturer when he repeated a familiar saying: Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Koenen, incredibly, had never heard this. The point fascinated her.
It didn’t stop fascinating her.
The other day, decades later, she stood in the Design Museum of Chicago in the Loop, which is now showing the 800 broken clocks she’s collected since 1989. Her goal then — her great idea — was to gather so many clocks, stopped at so many different times, she would have a broken clock representing every minute of 24 hours. Or 1,440 clocks.
Unfortunately, the 800 broken clocks represent only about 13 hours.
But then Koenen is 62.
She has time.
Eventually, she may even have all the time in the world.
The Design Museum’s exhibition of her clocks — recently extended to Oct. 17, and ironically titled “The Correct Time” — has been a chance for strangers and friends (and Design Museum founder Tanner Woodford) to bring her even more broken clocks. Since the show opened last summer, Koenen has been gifted 100 additional broken clocks.
OK, so right about now you’re either all in on this and think it’s incredible, clever and profound, or you’re screaming that Koenen needs another hobby. For instance, her husband, former Chicago city historian Tim Samuelson, collects player-piano rolls, jazz records, lost building décor. That you get. But as Koenen explained, her clock project was conceived in absurdity. Should you need a little more background, a basic why, she continues: “I suppose it’s a metaphor, for the drive of humanity to try to create a system or mechanism to capture and quantify nature and forces that are larger than ourselves.”
On the other hand, she also thinks it’s just kind of hilarious that “somewhere on these walls, any time of the day, will be the correct time. You will have to find it, but it’s there.”
Time, of course, is among an artist’s blue-chip subjects.
It’s grander than a bowl of fruit or languid Sunday in the park — though even with those, time is partly of the essence. Koenen’s broken clocks — half conceptual extravaganza, half stunt — is maybe closest in practice to another clock spectacular: Swiss American artist Christian Marclay’s 2010 opus “The Clock,” a 24-hour-long film composed of 12,000 film clips showing clocks at various times of the day, edited and projected so that the time on-screen corresponds to the time in real life. There is also Author Clock, designed by engineers in Chicago who raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter this year; it’s a digital clock that tells time using quotes from books, each one including a different minute of the day.
The Design Museum, playing off Koenen’s collection, slipped an Earth Clock into the show, a digital, online clock using Google Earth images of landscapes that resemble numbers. Art about the march of time tends toward austere meditations on impermanence and age — Koenen said her own art is often about “the ultimate futility of anything we do at all” — but works like the broken clock collection and Marclay’s “Clock” attempt to hold time in place, assign it an image. You might even say the same of your friend who compulsively posts on Instagram all morning, afternoon, late into the night.
All are trying to wrestle the hour, the minute, the second, to the ground — stay!
But Koenen, in 1989, had few art-world precedents to reference, and no internet to solicit broken clocks. She posted flyers on telephone poles and handed out business cards explaining her project. She mailed press releases asking reporters to ask their readers to donate broken clocks. She went on radio shows at three in the morning. She asked friends, family and colleagues. She went to the Mallers Building, which houses dozens of jewelers in the Loop, and “introduced myself to the watch repair people, so they opened a drawer of unrepairable watches. They thought I was weird.” Since this was at the time a fellow student, the Chicago artist known as Dread Scott, made national headlines with an exhibition that seemed to ask viewers to step on a United States flag, boxes of broken clocks mailed to Koenen at SAIC were sometimes mistaken for bombs.
“This was one of those clocks,” Koenen said, bending down in the Design Museum gallery to show an elaborate, two-level clock constructed of popsicle sticks. Conversely, nearby was a clock the size of a fingernail, so tiny one could only assume it stopped.
Koenen gathered so many clocks that she began to keep a ledger of who donated and the time that each clock stopped. Jeanne Broussard’s stopped at exactly 6:00. Tony Phillips’ stopped at 7:51. The late Chicago artist Ray Yoshida’s clock stopped at 3:32.
And so on.
The exhibition includes everything she’s collected, plus every clock donated in the past several weeks. Some look ready to start again, some look very broken. Some are scratched, some are missing everything but their slight resemblance to a clock.
There is a long row of wristwatches, a bunch of cuckoo clocks, a grandfather clock, old flip-number bedside clocks, marble clocks, wooden clocks, plastic clocks, glass clocks, handmade clocks, industrial clocks, foldable travel clocks, clocks that look like the clock your grandmother owned for 60 years, clocks shaped like airplane propellers and toilet seats. Schlitz promo clocks and a drug manufacturer’s freebie clock that for some reason shows the face of Sigmund Freud. Clocks featuring Charlie the StarKist tuna and Mickey Mouse and the Joker and a fish-theme clock that once bubbled on the hour.
When she started the project, she would routinely adjust the times to fill in the minutes she hadn’t yet collected. “We can play around with time until we get it right,” Koenen said. But over the decades, she has been more likely to leave the clocks as they are; which means, she has a handful of duplicates.
Paired with the clocks are an assortment of letters written by their donors, often touching memories of long-ago lives. The clock donated by an Irish immigrant. The clock that traveled with its owner around the world. The clock that kept watch over a family’s holidays, arguments and dinners for decades. Many mark an owner’s transition to adulthood: “My first serious watch bought for my first serious job at the Chicago firefighter’s union.” Almost every watch she has “came with a great story,” Koenen said.
As part of the show, the Design Museum invited artists to create new clock faces; there is also a smatter of Chicago clock history, and recently included, remarkably, the original wooden hands from the Wrigley Building’s clock face, located by Samuelson on eBay.
But Koenen — whose history of conceptual art includes hand grenades nuzzled in knitted cosies, a gumdrop tree in Skokie and Afghan-inspired war rugs made of spices — dominates through sheer volume. The problem is, when the show ends, these 800 broken clocks need a new home. Koenen no longer wants to keep 800 broken clocks in her studio. Go figure. She’s been wondering if someone in Chicago would give them a permanent artful installation. A CTA station would be perfect, she said.
After all, time, like the Blue Line and the 147 bus, waits for no man.
