Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005 / February 12-27, 2005
How could I not be interested in The Gates? That pair of canny, visionary (oh, let’s call them) artists– born on the same day in 1935, one in Bulgaria, one in France, New York City denizens for over four decades–installed it in my backyard. And, what’s more, made sure it would appeal to a dance person. For it’s an artifact that, though you can scan it with pleasure (or antipathy) from outside or above, requires you to walk through it, walk in it, your pacing feet measuring time and space, if you’re to experience it truly.
Backstory:
http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/
http://www.nyc.gov/html/thegates/home.html
“The Gates” in online archives of the New York Times
As the press has been telling us unremittingly, The Gates consists of 7,500 orange portals, each with a swath of orange fabric hanging from its lintel, that have been placed along a marathon 23 miles of Central Park’s pedestrian walkways–from 59th Street to 110th Street and from Central Park West to Fifth Avenue.
I started walking The Gates almost daily during the week in which the portals were being installed. They are arranged in batches of irregular numbers. I encountered groups containing as few as two, as many as 21. People assiduously tracing the full 23-mile extent of the installation and focusing on the numbers will find, published stats tell us, as many as 36. The occasional singletons I came upon felt like accidents, because the project as a whole makes a major part of its impact through repetition. This repetition, as you tread The Gates’ paths, deftly turns footfall into drum- or heartbeat. Martha Graham used the same steady-pulse phenomenon in the formally paced entrances and exits that frame the sections of her Primitive Mysteries. Laura Dean, choreographing to the music of Steve Reich, made it the keystone of her contribution to postmodern dance.
I found that one portal was usually about five paces distant from the next, according to my stride (yours may well be different). In many–perhaps all–of the groups, the portals are, indeed, equidistant, except where they’ve been nudged a little by foliage that has scrupulously been awarded the right of way. In some groups, though, the spacing is about ten or 15 of my paces. Between the groups lie stretches of negative space–about 12 feet long, according to the stats. These “gaps” are energized by the groups of gates that precede or follow them on the same path.
The portals are all the same height–16 feet. They vary in width–five and a half feet to 18 feet–according to the width of the path they bestride. Because of the other aspects of uniformity the portals share, you don’t notice (at least I didn’t notice) that significant variation in width for an astonishingly long time. On a particularly narrow walkway, I could stand in a portal and, stretching my arms sideways, touch its sides. My seven-year-old granddaughter, who has accompanied me on several of my treks, longs to do this, and keeps trying, but can’t manage it yet. Just think, children must feel this way all the time.
According to the terrain, the groups of gates promenade in straight lines or swerve into gentle curves. When two paths converge, the two lines of gates veer off from each other at odd, disconcerting angles. Similarly, scoping the park from any vantage point in the course of your promenade, you see series of portals from different angles. Walking past–not through–a group at a certain distance, you can see the angles of the portals shift as your place in space shifts in relation to them. Herein lie lessons in perspective, both objective and metaphoric.
Dance observers will recognize The Gates’ tactic of combining repetition and surprise. Balanchine used it all the time.
The gates proceed, orderly and calm, up and down gentle inclines. Any series of them can be said to ascend or descend. Their up or down inclinations depend on the direction the walker or viewer dictates.
One line of gates marches up to a decrepit path-striding wooden trellis covered with gnarled wisteria vines. Another leads away from it. The tall, shiny, new, boldly orange structures seem to stop and leave some empty space in deference to the rough-hewn, dull brown bit of carpentry, as if they knew that the trellis becomes an enchanted gazebo of leaf green punctuated by lavender when the vine blossoms in the spring, and that its life, though modest in impact, has been long and will be longer. In myriad ways like this one, The Gates, though it invades the nature-sanctuary aspect of the park, gives the park back to its users. Through its blithe intrusiveness, it reawakens the observer to the more recessive and far more profound attributes of tree, earth, water, and stone.
I’m convinced that this project has wit. Consider this: Most of the gate groups are open-ended; the one dead-end installation I’ve encountered thus far stops at a playground. Moral: If you can’t forge ahead, stop to play. Elsewhere, a group of four gates marches up to another playground via a tiny flight of steps.
At every break in the low stone wall that encloses the park–these openings were called “gates” by the park’s original designers, hence the name of the current project–the orange portals line the entry paths like carnival shills, luring passersby to take in the larger show.
The portals’ hue (a mellow orange, sliding toward peach) matches–has anyone else noticed?–the webbed feet of the park’s duck population. The fabric, by contrast, is exclamatory (or caution) orange, as in Orange Alert (a familiar state in this town). Everyone is calling both colors “saffron,” which is inaccurate though elegant and evocative. Some are comparing the color to the brazen copper-shot crimson of Jeanne-Claude’s hair. This is simply wrong. The two-tone orange of the fabric-festooned portals offsets the somber browns, greens, and grays of the winter landscape, which is all “That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs that shake against the cold, / Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” Sun sets the gates aflame.
One misty afternoon, the seven-year-old decides to practice tightrope walking on the wooden fences that line the car path. It’s only a three-foot fall and there are no cars in sight. Suddenly an imposing limo comes cruising toward us, but slows to a cautious crawl as it passes the child, and in it we glimpse (unmistakable with that hair and now well-publicized, handsomely ravaged face) Jeanne-Claude. “Hello,” I yell, waving. “Thanks!” The child continues her tenuous balancing act, undistracted by issues of fame and the serendipitous coincidences that characterize life in New York.
Each gate is a door frame, welcoming you as you “enter.” Each sends you out into another world. Unless you decide to stay, undecided–and you’re welcome to–the in/out process is accomplished in a matter of seconds.
The dates in the project’s full title indicate the years elapsed from conception to (hard-won) realization. The actual life of the installation is shorter; after 16 days, it will vanish. The ephemeral nature of the thing is an essential part of it. In this, too, it is related to dancing.
As I said, this thing has been planted in my back yard. I live on the Upper West Side, half a block from the Gate of All Saints at the park’s 96th Street transverse. The morning of the project’s official opening, when the fabric is unfurled from its overhead cocoons, I’m out there in the freezing damp among some 100 neighbors armed with friends and lovers, offspring, cardboard coffee cups, and cameras–witnessing. All the previous week, alone or with a child, I had watched the construction, the most thrilling element of which was the swinging of a gate from a horizontal position on the asphalt (passive, recumbent) to a vertical stance, a small, cheeky salute to the sky. I believe this was my younger granddaughter’s favorite aspect of the project. Just turned five, she is still relatively immune to the postmodern aesthetic but has long harbored career plans that favor the manual-labor trades.
When the bright rectangle of ripstop nylon first emerges from its coiled confinement–the fabric giving a faint whoosh, the heavy cardboard tube around which it was rolled hitting the asphalt with a hearty thwack–it’s tightly pleated, like the skirt of a parochial-school girl. As the days go by, the sharp creases will soften, allowing billows and similar freedoms of expansion into space. The progress is like that of a newborn infant slowly relaxing from fetal position in the course of its first few weeks.
The hem of the fabric–seven feet off the ground–seems to graze a tall grown-up’s head; half-grown kids stretch up an arm, expecting to touch it. Toddlers and kindergartners, hoisted on parental shoulders for their tour of the site, swipe plump hands at it with glee. Lanky middle-school boys with basketball dreams leap up at it, one arm raised, as if to slam-dunk a dark orange ball through a hoop in the air.
The next day is fair, balmy for the season. Natives and tourists turn out in great numbers to trace The Gates’ paths. New York has always rewarded walking, and the project has only enlarged that opportunity, transforming the place into Pedestrian City. Central Park has become the town square, with people promenading at a leisurely pace, chatting as they take in the scene around them.
The people walking through The Gates become part of it, in two ways: through their visible presence and through their individual perceptions of it.
Entering at Central Park West and 106 Street, you clamber up eight tiers of steps bordered by boulders, gates brightly poised on either side of each landing. At the top, you’re greeted by a goodly number of gates deployed on the periphery of a huge circle, the fabric waving in the breeze like a civic arrangement of celebratory flags. Just past this point you reach the spot’s highest prominence–called the Great Hill, but in truth a modest elevation–from which you gaze down through thickets of branches glinting silver in the afternoon light to see smaller parades of flags, tracing other byways. Downtown, the Great Lawn offers an even grander curved formation, but the larger expanse of the ground encompassed diffuses the enthusiastic nature of the effect slightly. Or perhaps the power of the impression depends on which location you happen to see first.
The circular configurations manifest a mood of triumph, elation; they’re an image of victory earned, joy deserved. You don’t necessarily need to trace their path with your feet to receive their message; most of it is delivered if you’re just standing still at a single vantage point, gazing at them. But these formations are the least typical aspect of the project. When, as happens most of the time, the flags line a path that’s fairly straight, despite some deviant undulation, the strategy gives the walker a sense of proceeding, of going somewhere, of setting one’s foot on the path of one’s destiny (or, at least, destination).
At every turn, The Gates claims a partnership with nature. Time of day and the angle of the sun affect your perception of the project. Looking across the Lake, from the east side to the west, as the sun begins to set, you see on the already darkening shore the flags gleaming faintly like distant torches. As the sun sinks further and hits other panels dead on from behind, they become rectangles of sheer glow, hearths to which one can return after a journey out in the wet, the cold, and the dark. Weather is significant, too, especially wind, which energizes the fabric panels. High wind makes them wild, heralds of violence. A breeze, rippling sideways through them, creates an undulating pattern of shadows. When the air is calm, the panels act like scrims, displaying the silhouettes of the neighboring trees, complex networks of branch and twig.
At 72nd Street, there’s a long, long stretch of parallel gated walkways. Nearing Central Park West, where the double formation slews off to continue its run downtown, it is joined by yet a third gated path. The effect is–deliberately, no doubt–disorienting. It is salutary, at times, not to know where you are or where you’re going. The experience takes you to places you would otherwise have missed.
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
© 2005 Tobi Tobias