Gilding the Lily With a Bunch of Drapes
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates Project opened yesterday in Central Park:
So that is what 1.089 million yards of orange-yellow fabric looks like, floating and fluttering and flapping in Central Park.
The giant $21 million art project “The Gates,” which had already filled the park’s 23 miles of pathways with thousands of saffron-colored portals, blossomed yesterday at 8:31 a.m., just as the artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, had planned.
They watched as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg raised a long metal pole to release fabric from the top of a gate in the Sheep Meadow. Also watching was a crowd that chanted a countdown like the one heard each New Year’s Eve in Times Square – “Five! Four! Three! Two! One!”- before the mayor unfurled the fabric on the first gate.
The Times was on hand to gauge the crowd’s impressions:
By midmorning, the park’s circulatory system had taken on the bright color of veins twisting and twirling against the gray-and-brown backdrop of midwinter. The pleated nylon fabric pulsed and swayed at the whim of a 12-mile-an-hour wind – not strong enough to make it snap like a spinnaker on an America’s Cup challenger. The color was almost as fiery and fierce as the sun that had risen a couple of hours earlier.
“Look at the light,” Christo said. “Look, look.”
In the crowd, people tried to do exactly that. People who had tried to imagine what the completed project would look like finally had a glimpse.
Some described them as too-short window shades dangling in the breeze. Some mentioned squarish out-of-season butterflies. Some were intrigued by the play of light on the fabric: as the peekaboo sun came and went, the nylon had a touchable texture one minute and a one-dimensional look the next. Some echoed what Christo and Jeanne-Claude had said about a river of bright color against twigs and leafless branches. Some talked about exhilaration and exuberance. Some were more literal.
“A pleated skirt,” said Kathleen Catapano of Brooklyn. She looked again, and another idea came to mind: “I think it looks like Jeanne-Claude’s hair.”
We were there so Jed Perl didn’t have to be, and speaking of Jed, The Times’ Michael Kimmelman weighs in, giving a more positive appraisal after having actually seen the Gates:
Thousands of swaths of pleated nylon were unfurled to bob and billow in the breeze. In the winter light, the bright fabric seemed to warm the fields, flickering like a flame against the barren trees. Even at first blush, it was clear that “The Gates” is a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century. It remains on view for just 16 days. Consider yourself forewarned. Time is fleeting.
On a partly sunny, chilly morning, with helicopters buzzing overhead and mobs of well-wishers on hand, an army of paid helpers gradually released the panels of colored fabric from atop the 16-foot-tall gates, all 7,500 of them. The shifting light couldn’t have been better to show off the effects of the cloth. Sometimes the fabric looked deep orange; at other times it was shiny, like gold leaf, or silvery or almost tan. In the breeze, the skirted gates also appeared to shimmy like dancers in a conga line, the cloth buckling and swaying.
. . .
I hadn’t been quite sure when I first saw the project going up last week. From outside the park, the gates looked like endless rows of inert orange dominoes overwhelming Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s masterpiece.
But as the artists have insisted, the gates aren’t made to be seen from above or from outside. I stopped in at a friend’s office high above Central Park South yesterday and ogled the panorama, which was lovely. But it was beside the point. It’s the difference between sitting in a skybox at Giants Stadium and playing the game on the field. The gates need to be – they are conceived to be – experienced on the ground, at eye level, where, as you move through the park, they crisscross and double up, rising over hills, blocking your view of everything except sky, then passing underfoot, through an underpass, or suddenly appearing through a copse of trees, their fabric fluttering in the corner of your eye.
There are no bad locales for seeing them. But there are some spots at which the work looks best: around the Heckscher ball fields, where the gates are dense and lines of them swarm in many directions at once; at the base of Strawberry Fields, where two parallel rows march in tight syncopation; at Harlem Meer, where they cluster up to the shore and then clamber, helter-skelter, up the rocks. Also at Great Hill, near West 106th Street, where they encircle the crescent field, then descend a flight of steep steps.
And at North Meadow, a wide-open vista, where the gates wander off toward the horizon, separating earth and sky with an undulating saffron band.
And in the end, Kimmelman helps express what Christo and Jeanne-Claude either didn’t want to or couldn’t:
Some purists will complain that the art spoils a sanctuary, that the park is perfect as it is, which it is. But the work, I think, pays gracious homage to Olmsted’s and Vaux’s abiding pastoral vision: like immense Magic Marker lines, the gates highlight the ingenious and whimsical curves, dips and loops that Olmsted and Vaux devised as antidotes to the rigid grid plan of the surrounding city streets and, by extension, to the general hardships of urban life.
The gates, themselves a cure for psychic hardship, remind us how much those paths vary, in width, and height, like the crowds of people who walk along them. More than that, being so sensitive to nature, they make us more sensitive to its effects.
We didn’t need the gates to make us sensitive, obviously. Art is never necessary. It is merely indispensable.
At its best, it leads us toward places we might not have thought to visit. Victor Hugo once said, “There is nothing more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening.” This also applies to gates, which beckon people to discover what is beyond them.
With their endless self-promotion, and followers trailing them like Deadheads from one global gig to another, it’s no wonder that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made a few skeptics of people who often have not seen their art at first hand. New Yorkers are a notoriously tough crowd. But I was struck by what I overheard a stranger say. She was a doubter won over yesterday. “It will be fascinating when they’re gone,” she mused.
It took me a second to realize what she meant: that the gates, by ravishing the eye, have already impressed an image of the park on the memories of everyone who has seen them. And like all vivid memories, that image can take a place in the imagination, like a smell or some notes of music or a breeze, waiting to be rekindled.
Once upon a time there were “The Gates.” The time is now.
I’d like to go back and see some of the spots Kimmelman suggested — parts of the project look great, especially from the vantage point of one of the park’s rock outcroppings. And the bright orange (sorry, saffron) looks stunning against a clear blue sky. When there’s a wind, as there was yesterday, the effect of the fabric twisting in the wind is beautiful, but I have to agree with one of the people the Times quoted that when they hang there they sort of look like big drapes. In all, I liked it, though I can see what curmudgeons dislike about the whole enterprise.
One small quibble: the path we took — from 59th and Fifth to Belvedere Castle via the Mall and the Ramble — was, if memory serves, the way Olmsted and Vaux intended the parkgoer to move through, back through nature, as it were. I think Christo and Jeanne-Claude could have done a little more with that idea, though like I said, parts of the project are stunning as they are.
The Post’s coverage highlights a near calamity (“Adding a bit of chaos to the process, as the fabric was unfurled, the cardboard tube it was wrapped around crashed to the ground, sending spectators running and causing a few minor injuries. Bloomberg got bonked on the head by a falling tube. He wasn’t hurt, but elsewhere a man had his glasses shattered and a woman suffered a bloody nose.”) and also features another one of those crabby elderly people — do they actually exist? — who object to everything:
Not everyone was taken by the project’s siren song.
“They deface the park. Why gild the lily? This is the most beautiful park in the entire world,” one elderly man screamed at a woman as she described how much she liked the work.
“You know, art is supposed to provoke controversy, so I’d say that it worked,” the woman, Barbara Peabody, shot back, sending the man storming off.
See also: Daily News coverage; Newsday coverage.
