Surreal, pacy and fun: Christian Marclay’s Doors, at White Cube, reviewed

Sliding doors may change your life, but there’s no mystery in their transparency. A hinged wooden door is another matter; you’re never quite sure what’s behind it.

Christian Marclay has a thing about doors; not an obsession, he insists, just a general interest ‘in things we don’t pay much attention to’. For the British launch of his new video montage ‘Doors’ he has filled the ground-floor gallery of White Cube Mason’s Yard with doors picked out of London skips, sawn up and reassembled into what could be taken for minimalist sculptures if the knobs, knockers, locks and hinges weren’t still attached: ‘I don’t want to mess about with their “doorness”,’ he explains. A solid wooden Victorian door is carved into a cross, while modern veneered doors are chopped and stacked in blocks, exposing their filling. ‘In cutting you discover what’s inside the door,’ he says.

In the film downstairs you discover what’s behind it, or you would if Marclay hadn’t messed around with its ‘filmness’. Like ‘The Clock’, the work that won him the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, ‘Doors’ is a collage of sampled clips from different films. Unlike ‘The Clock’, which had a surprisingly easy birth for a 24-hour film you can tell the time by, ‘Doors’ has been ten years in gestation. Marclay gave up twice. With clockfaces it was easy to jump cut from one image to the next, but doors presented particular problems of continuity. Was the hinge on the left or the right? Was the door opened by pushing or pulling, and how fast?

Without the inexorable passage of time, he could at least run the clips in any order. Genres switch from noir to comedy in the blink of an eye and sequences of non-sequiturs are cleverly paced, with hectic chase scenes intercut with interludes of ominous calm.