Clockwatchers

By Melissa Hantman

Scheduling Around the Apocalypse? And other novel uses of public art.

"Is it an advertisement for the Virgin Store-how many CD's they've sold?" -Dave Martin, trader

"I have absolutely no idea what it is, and I've asked all my friends and all the passers-by in the Square, and they have no idea either." -Petar Mrkic, personal trainer

"Is it how much time we have before the apocalypse? No, wait, the numbers are going up…" -Shari Martin, teacher

"It's the national debt. It goes up, it goes down, the clock adjusts." -S.E. Cupp, writer

"The numbers on the left go up, and they're the hours of the day. The numbers on the right go down, and that's the time we have left in the year. I have no idea why the smoke is coming out."- James Olivera, artist.

We've all seen the "Metronome," the high-tech mural adjacent to the Virgin Mega Store on Union Square South. It's distinctive for its jumpy display of 12 digits, flickering and leaping as if chased by the Number Muncher.

Maybe you’ve paused to absorb the digits, which are powered with 76,800 illuminated diodes in fifteen panels, each five feet high, embedded within a clear glass wall. Christened "The Passage," these numbers form the leftmost panel of Metronome's triptych.

The center wall (100 feet high and 60 feet wide), called "the Vortex," is built of terra-cotta bricks, both curved and angled, punctured with a hole that expels a plume of steam at noon and midnight. A gold leaf overlay swirls around the hole, tapering into ripple-like fragments. At the top, a hand, the hand of George Washington mirrors his outstretched hand of his statue across the street in Union Square, points over the city. A massive rock thrusts up through the wall. A bronze cone, echoing the form of a second hand on a clock, sweeps over the surface.

To the right of "the Vortex" is a lunar timepiece called "the Phases": a sphere of spun aluminum in gold and black enamel, designed to revolve with the phases of the moon.

Attempting to digest the collage of symbolism, we all want to know: what do the numbers mean? The scrolling clock actually measures, in two-digit units from left to right, the time transpired of the day in hours, minutes, seconds and tenths of seconds; and the corresponding time left in the day in tenths of seconds, seconds, minutes, and hours.

The meaning beyond that is up to us. Perhaps it's a remonstrance of our obsession with time. Time, after all, is fluid, ephemeral, always slipping away from us.

So why do we live and die by the clock? Why does it always push us forward, after we can't hold it back? We can't even wrap our minds around it before it's gone. Surely our lives are ruled by something more substantial, meatier, than that? Then again, this is the land of the New York minute.

The piece's creators, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, write in their artists' statement: "The work references the multiple measures of time that simultaneously inform and confound our consciousness of the moment within the continuum…Ultimately, the work is an ode to mortality and the impossibility of knowing time." At the heart of the clock, the center three digits "count fractions of seconds with the energy, the exhilaration and ultimate flux that is the essence of New York City."

In any case, most people can't decipher the numbers or guess the meaning, and so have missed the point. Or have they? Is the point to make us stop in our tracks? To forget about where we had to hurry? To be stoked by the thrill of a mind-bending enigma, hovering in plain sight, a silent challenge to everyone milling about Union Square?

In any case, now that you know, just try not to look over too conspicuously when someone asks you the time.

-Melissa Hantman