Sunday, February 13, 2005

The Gates

Anyone who has moved from Europe to New York knows that one of the most dazzling things about this city, quite literally, is the winter sun. We Europeans are used to drab, gray winters, where the few hours of purported sunlight are invariably overcast and usually drizzly as well. In New York, you wear sunglasses in the freezing cold, something Europeans only normally do when they go skiing.

It's only natural, then, that Christo and Jeanne-Claude, both Europeans in New York, would want to create for New York an artwork which captures the sunlight. The way they did that was by taking their trademark fabric and making it free-flowing, rather than wrapped around or on top of something. If a Gate is in the sun and you look at it from a northerly angle, the sun sets it alight; if you look at a whole pathway of Gates from the north, it is transformed into a river of fire and light.

Jake Dobkin has taken some of my favourite photos of the Gates; here you can see in one photo just part of the range of colours and textures that the Gates form in concert with the New York winter sun.

The Gates isn't just about colours and textures, however. It's an aural piece, too: every time the wind blows through a Gate, the fabric rustles and snaps, and you're reminded afresh of how these totems, so magnificent to look at, are also a very impressive physical accomplishment. The numbers are so big as to be meaningless, so I shan't bother you with the familiar litany; I'll restrict myself just to mentioning that there are over 7,500 of these things, any one of which on its own would be a Central Park landmark in its own right.

Most of all, the Gates are not something to be gazed at, or listened to: they're something to be walked through. This is ambulatory art: anybody buying one of the special Gates packages at the various hotels overlooking Central Park is likely to be disappointed. Staring at the things through binoculars is no substitution from reaching up and touching them yourself; what's more, as one look at any of the aerial photographs will show, this particular work of art is no more suited to being seen from above than is a Picasso.

Christo has been saying that the Gates aren't something to be talked about, and that if you want your questions answered, you should just walk the 23 miles of Gated pathways. In fact, although that would be an interesting exercise, it would also be unnecessarily constraining. The Gates are great to walk under, to be sure. But they're also great to view from a distance, to walk away from, to see out of the corner of your eye from a part of the park which has relatively few of them – the Ramble, perhaps.

In fact, one of the most surprising parts of my visit to Central Park today was when I wound up walking through the zoo, and briefly found myself in one of the few parts of the park where no Gates were visible at all. Suddenly I felt very sad: the Gates had really brightened me up, and their unexpected disappearance, even if it was temporary, hit me quite hard. I have a feeling that when the Gates come down forever in a couple of weeks' time, New Yorkers will mourn their departure.

Christo, of course, knows all about temporary art projects – he specialises in them. Ane he also specialises in their politics. I have a feeling that one of the reasons why he is encouraging the public to walk along the Gated pathways is not because that's the "best" way to view the art, but because he knows that one of the ex ante criticisms of the Gates – that the crowds would damage the park – might turn out to be justified. Even after only 24 hours, the grass to the side of many of the pathways has been turned into large patches of mud, as people walk off the paths to get the perfect camera angle, or just to walk around the slow-moving crowds. The park is heaving with people, which is great for Christo, and makes for a very festive atmosphere, but which might not be so good for the turf.

In fact, the general mood in Central Park these days is like nothing so much as that of Ueno Park, Tokyo, during the Cherry Blossom festival. Everywhere you look are the wondrous splashes of colour which visitors come to see from miles around; the commercial side to it is large-scale but tastefully done, and the crowds are heavy but not oppressive.

Interestingly, the crowds are also very monochromatic. New York City is a wonderfully multicultural city, but the Gates crowds are nearly all white. Art tourists will come from all around the world to see this piece, but I do worry that New York's black population, much of which lives very close to Central Park, has yet to get as enthused by this piece as the rest of us have. I can't think of a single friend of mine in New York who won't go to see the Gates; yet the total number of visitors, I have a feeling, is going to end up a mere fraction of the total population of New York City. (My guess? Somewhere in the 2 million range, and that includes double-counting of people who go more than once. New York's population is 8 million.)

Still, there is no doubt that this is public art on an enormous scale, and which has proved incredibly popular. Jason Kottke says that "it will probably be the most photographed event ever;" I don't know if that's true, but there were certainly thousands of photographic devices in Central Park today, including one fellow drawing a crowd with his enormous 11x14 large-format bellows camera. No Chicago-style small-mindedness here: these Gates are for everybody, and most people who go to see them are likely to want their own memento of having been there in person. This is art to live in the memory for decades to come. As Michael Kimmelman concluded his review this morning, "Once upon a time there were The Gates. The time is now."

So, are the Gates good art? Are they even, maybe, great? That's a hard question, and I'm reserving judgment; I'll go back again, for sure, and make up my mind slowly. Here's another photo from Jake, which gives an idea of some of their formal qualities: looked at from the middle distance, as they march and flutter in unison, they seem monumental in a slightly dated, 1970s sense, a work of art which wouldn't be out of place at Storm King.

On the other hand, 1970s monumentalism rarely came up with anything as subtle and beautiful as this. And, more to the point, it never made hundreds of thousands of people incredibly happy. Maybe art is too limiting a box to put this kind of public event into: it's already been compared, in terms of its audience, to things like the St Patrick's Day parade. There's no doubt that the Gates are great for New York, and great for New Yorkers. Whether they're great Art, too, is almost beside the point.

Posted by Felix at 20:20 EST

Comments

thanks Felix - I experience this installation through your words and the links to the photographers listed.

Posted by: bafc23 at 11:31 EST, February 14, 2005

I've been struck by the lameness of most photos taken so far, none of which seem to capture whatever it is that makes the gates such a spectacle. I'm sure they're magnificent, and will go look for myself, but somehow they don't seem amenable to being squished into a 6x4 frame.

Posted by: Matthew at 21:51 EST, February 14, 2005

Feed-bac: Nice photos in Thomas Locke Hobbs's blog. He captures very well both winter sun and the light through the fabric.

Posted by: David at 15:12 EST, February 16, 2005

" I'm just mad about saffron, saffron's mad about me...they call me mellow Yellow, they call me mellow Yellow, quite rightly..."
(we all know the song, right ?)
Orange is not saffron...orange is not saffron...that is all I wanted to say...(if The Gates were saffron I might have been inclined to fly in to see them- the mistake in the colour (Can.sp.) desciption put me off...(yes, I checked the dictionary under saffron- who actually thinks saffron is Not yellow?-or at least, in its original form- red?)

Posted by: Sari Grove at 19:59 EST, February 27, 2005

I've put some of my photos of the gates up at www.thegates.reellies.net Hope you enjoy.

Posted by: Doug Magee at 15:52 EST, March 01, 2005