A “timely” video installation that’s been intriguing audiences throughout the world is being presented in the Midwest for the first time at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus.

“The Clock,” which was the winner of the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, was recently viewed by 48,000 people at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Artist Christian Marclay, who lives and works in London and New York, came up with the innovative idea of creating a 24-hour video that would literally tell the correct time at any given moment. He spent three years researching films and splicing together thousands of movie scenes featuring clocks, watches, timepieces and references to time. The entire video is synced to the local time. So if you glance down at your watch while viewing it —and you can’t help it — the times will always be identical to the time in the video clip on the screen.

Marclay, who was in Columbus for the opening of the exhibit, said he is fascinated by the subject of time.

“I think more than ever, we’re obsessed with time,” he said. “Everybody is more or less a slave to time.”

If you’re a film buff, you’ll recognize a lot of the films and the actors in them: Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Charlie Chaplin, Nicole Kidman, Robert Redford and hundreds of others. There are foreign film clips as well, presented in the original language without subtitles.

Marclay said he could never have imagined that his project would be so successful.

“It took on a life of its own,” he said. “There’s been amazing interest in it, and every museum wants to show it.”

What makes his video different from the average film and movie-going experience, he explained, is that audience members enter when they want, watch as long as they want and leave when they want. That’s dramatically different from a traditional movie experience in which start and stop times are strictly set.

Audiences at “The Clock” are seated on couches to suggest a living room environment. You can come and go as you like, assuming there aren’t crowds waiting in line for a spot. Once you leave, you’ll need to get back in line to re-enter.

“This allows movement through space,” Marclay explained. “And because you’re on a couch, you don’t have to disturb a whole row of people to go in or out.”

Nancy Elam of Washington, D.C., had read about the film in “The New Yorker” and was anxious to see it. She timed a visit to her family in Columbus so that she could come to the 24-hour screening on the Wexner’s opening weekend. She ended up staying at the event from 5:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.

“I only got up once to go to the bathroom at 2 a.m.,” Elam said, adding that there was only one other person in the screening room at the time. “I kiddingly said to him: ‘I hope I can get back in!”

Elam says she’s planning to return to watch the daytime hours.

“In the middle of the night, there were scenes of people going to bed or getting awakened by a phone call in the middle of the night,” she said. “There would be a lot more action during the day.”

She’s correct. When it came to finding films clips to match every minute of the day, Marclay said the most difficult times were 5-5:30 a.m. and that there was also a lull after lunchtime.

Marclay, who has collaborated with musicians and choreographers over the years to create new work, said he doesn’t think of the video as a “marathon” and doesn’t expect the average audience member to stay for 24 hours.

“Once you enter the space, you become a participant,” he said. “In a movie theater, you know you’ll be there for two hours and you forget about time. Here, you’re going to be reminded… I’m telling you what time it is. You have to decide: should I stay or should I go?”

He spent three years working on the project full time, and had research assistants watching movies for him. Surprisingly, he’s not a film buff.

“If I were a film nut — a real fan — I wouldn’t allow myself to cut these films apart,” he said. “My work is about collaging— taking ready-made stuff and reforming it. Today’s technology allows anyone to edit. I just manipulated it and transformed it to make it relevant in a different way.”

This isn’t Marclay’s first association with the Wexner. He was one of the first artists exhibited there in a 1990 work also titled “The Clock.” That installation involved 25 hammer mechanisms that were mounted on the center’s scaffolding and sounded each hour in time with other clocks on the Ohio State campus.

He later returned to work on “Telephones,” a precursor to the current exhibit, which featured montages of clips drawn from Hollywood films of people dialing, answering, speaking and hanging up telephones.

While in Columbus he was asked how film folks feel about his show.

“The film industry is behind it; it’s a celebration of cinema,” Marclay responded. “It has very positive energy. It might incite you to go and rent that movie.”