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February 14, 2005
The Gates
I am obsessed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude's saffron gates in Central Park. Last Thursday I walked through Central Park from the West Side, entering at 64th Street and Central Park West and exiting at 96th Street and Fifth Avenue. The 16-foot high gates were not unfurled yet, but I was awestruck and overwhelmed with the monumental engineering feat of erecting over 7,500 gates. I went by the Boat House and bought two of every item that was being sold--T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, maps, and black baseball hats with "The Gates" emblazoned on them (as were the T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts). I stopped and watched as a crew put together one of the gates and raised it--the onlookers and all the crew had smiles on their faces. New York was grinning in anticipation.
Friday I took a brief walk among the skeleton gates to try to absorb the images of how the park looked before the unfurling. Again, I was exhilarated by the massive project, the pre-natal beauty. When I got home I e-mailed several close friends and my daughter, Megan, that my wife, Julia, and I would be walking the park on Saturday morning beginning at 8:00 a.m. and invited everyone to come by our house on 95th Street for coffee and bagels to celebrate the most important art event so far in the 21st century.
Saturday morning was bitter cold, but Julia and I arose early (only such a momentous event could get us up at 6:30 a.m.), dressed, and eagerly headed toward the park. I was incredibly excited, just as I would be if I were going to see one of my grandchildren's birth. This was going to a birth of a magnificent gift to New Yorkers that would live only sixteen days. I knew I couldn't miss one day of experiencing The Gates.
We walked with some friends and their three-year-old daughter in a pram up to the Great Hill and watched as a happy, competent crew began unfurling the billowing saffron-colored panels. Applause. Joy. Gasps of appreciation and awe. We then walked with my daughter, son-in-law, and almost two-year old granddaughter around the Harlem Meer. Spectacular, monumental, gorgeous, breathtaking.
The Gates are a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, a miracle of art, a joyous gift to New York and the world. You must come to New York to experience The Gates. You can't get a sense of them in pictures, you have to experience them. My step-daughter, Helen, said they were tranquil, like watching the saffron sails on a land-bound sailboat. My friend Chuck Wooldridge (my step-niece, Anjali's, fiancé), who is Chinese history scholar said he felt like he walking in an ancient, triumphant parade and was waiting for the trumpets heralding the arrival of the emperor. Each person will have his or her own, individual, and unique reaction. But a reaction that will last a lifetime, like the entire experience will. Come.
Posted by Charles Warner at February 14, 2005 06:38 PM
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Comments
Charles Warner at February 16, 2005 12:25 AM writes:
And I thought I was a curmudgeon! Bill Grimes has just become the 21st Century's most acid art curmudgeon. It's a good thing he didn't come to our Saturday morning party, he would have been mugged. Ex-Park commissioner Henry Stern had an article in the New York Sun today that gave The Gates a luke-warm--no, cold--review, so at least Bill Grimes has curmudgeonly company.
Bill Grimes at February 16, 2005 12:18 AM writes:
This unimaginative display of Orange Red metal and cloth is an ugly assault on Manhattan's bastion of Nature and visual tranquility.
In a cityscape captivated by sky-blocking structures of steel and glass Central Park refreshingly maintains its unspoiled innocence and beauty. Each of the four seasons produces within this visitor different feelings of mood, color, surprise and discovery. The Park's Winter exhibits to the eye the ebony limbs of leafless trees straining above like lonely stick figures, the barren black rocks seemingly doubled in size since summer, the evergreens more visible but lacking their vibrant hues, the earth abounding in muddy brown pools of soil, and, occasionally, new-fallen or senescent snow tracts reluctantly revealing captive shards of napping grass. A sense of subdued peace consumes one. A respite from our creature comforts of soothing housing and comforting offices rewards Central Park's Winter visitor in Manhattan's only santuary from itself.
No more.
Today, and for two more agonizing weeks, our Park is plunderd by 7500 artless Orange Red steel intruders signifying what? I am reminded of childhood mornings after Halloween when sighting the telephone wires and trees on our street strewn with countless rolls of toliet paper administered by mindless adolescents like myself. Only the "Gates" is so much worse because it denudes a Great City's oasis of Nature and it does so with its hideous redundancy of color and shape.
At the very least the two creators of this hallucination could have inserted on the cloth sheath of each of the 7500 stanchions a famous quotation from the world's great thinkers and leaders. A line from Plato, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Karl Marx or whomever would have possibly triggered in the minds of one or two and, maybe many more, of the Park's present unfortunate visitors a thought, an idea, a memory of meaning that might provoke some modest positive change in their lives. Wishfil thinking? Maybe but Gates is a nihilistic invasion of Nature with no intellectual return.
Chuck Wooldridge at February 15, 2005 10:43 AM writes:
Thanks for the shout-out Charlie. I was walking through again this morning. I think your post captures a lot of the atmosphere. When I'm in the park, it also feels kind of carnival: I'm giddy. I say hello to random people. I want to chat with any and all. Part of The Gates is the aesthetics of the thing, but part of it is also the sheer foolhardy absurdity; The Gates is a grand gesture, like sending a too-large bouquet for Valentine's Day, or proposing in Madison Square Garden. I remember when I was five or so, I saw my first hot air balloon. What a beautiful thing it was, all that color floating in the air. That's how I feel when I see The Gates.
Once in a while, I also get a contemplative moment. Last night when it was rainy and very, very windy, or this morning as I returned from moving my car. I read somewhere that the Gates just make you want to record whatever you are thinking about at the time, so all your ideas get recording as saphron banners. I think that's right, too. In this way, the walking through The Gates is like internal blogging.
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