Des Moines’ time has come

Oyoram

September is a self-contradiction. It is our ninth month, yet named as if the seventh. It marks the end of summer and the beginning of the end of all things perennial. It is the time of year that makes us most conscious of time. 

Time measures, organizes and judges everything else. That is why the world’s most famous clocks tower above the places they watch over. The Makkah Royal Clocktower in Mecca is the tallest structure in Saudi Arabia and the tallest clock in the world. Each of its four faces is 35 times larger than Big Ben. It beckons pilgrims from as far as 19 miles away and even further five times a day when 21,000 additional lights flash to mark prayer calling. 

In the arts world, this last month of the third quarter escorts the beginning of new seasons. In Des Moines, a magnificent new electronic neon clock, with 12 rotating faces, now watches over the Western Gateway from the north face of the Fitch Building and its artist studios. “Timepiece” is from French-Israeli artist Oyora (nee Yorame Mevorach), who has a house and studio in Sherman Hill and a place in most maisons of the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy empire, the world’s top luxury goods conglomerate. Oyoram’s clock metamorphosizes at the top of each hour: Its hands fall off, its face disintegrates, and all is reborn. 

Giorgi Andonov’s “Black Sea”

It is a fabulous addition to its arty neighborhood and should become as luring an attraction and civic symbol as the Plensa “Nomad” a few blocks away. 

“Seeing time”

Kelly Crow, who usually immerses herself in the intricacies of world art markets and auctions for Wall Street Journal, published a wonderful essay this summer about efforts to keep time with the Givenchy Gardens created and immortalized by Claude Monet. Monet was obsessed with time, painting the same scenes in different hours of the day, or months of the year, “to see time.” Crow tells us that today’s head gardener and his 12 assistants must grow and nourish at least 520,000 plants each year to re-create the historic grounds. “Each year, at least 10 seed varieties he selected the previous season will have disappeared.” 

The “beautiful sadness” of such ephemerality is expressed in Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum “Monet’s Garden and the Secret Language of Flowers.” Monet observed and painted the same things at different times to emphasize time’s power to do what it wants with things we would rather preserve. The Monet paintings in the KC show will change annually, “encapsulating the essence of transformative artistic exchange.”  

Bittersweet ephemerality also is explored in a new exhibition in metro Chicago. “Hokusai & Ukiyo-e: The Floating World” at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn offers an immersive journey through Edo-era Japan, including original works by Hokusai and Hiroshige. It features a recreation of the Yoshiwara Main Gate, a samurai costume from a Warner Brothers film, and an interactive manga exhibit. Through Sept. 21.

Touts

Des Moines Symphony Orchestra heralds its new season with the appropriate fanfare of Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture.” The brass section alone calls for “four horns in F, three trumpets in B-flat, two trombones, a bass trombone, and a tuba.” That same concert welcomes “Eighth Blackbird,” Chicago’s four-time Grammy-winning sextet named after Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Their “lucid, inescapable rhythms” (Stevens’ words) will express Viet Cuong’s “Vital Sines.” Tchaikovsky’s “throwing myself before Providence” Symphony No. 5, with an ominous “fate” motif in all four sections, closes their season debut Sept. 27-28.

“In Surreal Life,” a group show, debuts Sept. 21 at Moberg Gallery featuring Bulgarian artist Georgi Andonov, and a selection of works by gallery artists. Andonov works in many mediums and genres, and his paintings draw from the inclination to nostalgia.  

“Notes from the Sea” an invitational show with Sara Sato as curator plays, through Sept. 24 at Polk County Heritage Gallery.