Christo 'Gates' strangely disappointing

[KurtNYC]

I've had mixed feelings about the Christo Gates project in Central Park. When I first heard about it, it seemed like a reasonable idea -- force people to look at Central Park in a new way, free public art and create some excitement during what is usually a short cold month.

Then I heard they were doing the whole park (2.5 miles by 1/2 mile) and that seemed a bit much. Then I heard that the installation, exhibition and removal would span a 3-month period, which again seemed like a long time to disrupt the atmosphere of Central Park.

Personally, I think Frederick Law Olmsted was an artist. At the time Central Park was designated, they held a contest and most of the submissions were along the lines of English parks meaning straight sidewalks, formal planters, right angles and flat spaces. Olmsted went completely the other way -- NO right angles ("nature abhors a straight line"), no flat rectangular spaces, no raised formal planter. After rigorous debate, Olmsted won out and after years of labor Central Park as we know it was created. It was a revolution in landscaping and design. Olmsted had the vision to create Central Park out of swampland and boulders. On average the elevation of every square foot of CPk was changed by 6 feet! (meaning swamps were filled in, mounds were created extensively) The park brings nature to the middle of the country's biggest city. By design, when you walk down the steps from 59th Street into the park, you are visually separated from the city. The park takes you in and wraps you quickly. People fell in love with the concept of the design and Olmsted went on to design other great parks including Prospect Park, Fink Park (Seattle) and Parc du Mont Royal (in Montreal). Demand for Olmsted's work lead to more than 3,500 parks in the US and Canada being created by Frederick and his progeny.

My point is that Olmsted worked his butt off to bring the country and nature into New York City in such a way that it celebrated nature and yet in the sense that the landscaping and the location of every tree was designed, it was totally artificial. The Dairy and the Sheep Meadow testify to how much city dwellers yearned for the country or at least viewed it as relaxed and wholesome. In 150 years it has only gotten more important to us. We just finished a 10 year, multi-million dollar re-seeding program. And I love the park just as it is.

Enter Christo. I wanted to like this project. Saffron. Flowing moving patterns. Warm fabric, glowing in the sun. All that. I went by the park last Thursday before they opened the cocoons and let the fabric out. Walking in from West 81st, you went through a series of square frames. It was like a video game. The straight frames at regular intervals emphasized your motion as you walked through them.



I went back on Saturday. They had most open and were still opening some at about 11:30. The harsh video game thing was softened by the fabric in almost constant motion. Walking under the same frames, now there is thick orange fabric, which has the sheen of plastic (since it is) and looks high tech. Your view of the park is frustrated by the each panel as you walk through. On longer stretched you want to look to the side. It is disorienting. A woman near me remarked that it was making her dizzy. It struck me that this was in a way like his wrapping projects -- Christo frustrates your ability to see something familiar and of cultural significance (eg. the Reichstag). This leads the viewer to want to unwrap the object. We recognize the form of the wrapped Reichstag but can't see the Reichstag and perhaps this makes us want to see it more. The Gates have a similar effect. While not totally obscuring the details, the Gates break your view of the park into confusing chunks and your expectation, IMHO, going in is that you will see the orange Gates as art and not the park.

People seem to like the high views better. There was a line to get up to Belvedere Castle on Sunday and there were relentless helicopters on Saturday morning. Christo told us all that the way he wanted us to experience the work is by walking through it, all of it. And walk through it again when the light changes or when it snows. To me, the best views are sideways, when you can see lines of orange curtains running at different levels.

Someone on local TV this morning said it had all the artistic merit of "toilet papering someone's house." And I think my reaction is similar. I have resisted calling the color saffron because to my eye the color is just plain orange; orange like you see on traffic cones. In the drawings there is more of a red tint to the color which takes it closer to the color of flames. Next, the fabric of the curtains is a horrible plastic. It would have been far better IMHO, if the fabric was organic (like a heavy cotton canvas) and was unevenly dyed in saffron, a warm red-orange saffron. Then there are the frames. They are 16 feet tall and about 5 inches square and they are covered with orange PVC plastic. I can only think that the lack of organic materials and colors is intentional. The Gates do not improve Central Park and I don't think that was the intent. Christo put right angles and shiny plastic into a park that abhors such things. He diminishes and frustrates our experience of the park with 7,500 plastic frames. It is like he is torturing the park to show us how much we love the park and have taken it for granted. The park will seem to look better than ever perhaps when the garish orange plastic is removed. When right angles are banished again from Olmsted's park.

More on the birth of Central Park: http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/20030721/200/464

[Squeech]

1. Hmmm...

One of the purposes of the artistic experience is to re-evaluate the world, see something in a new way. Arguably the gates do that.

Of the pictures I've seen, I like the ones where they haven't untied the fabric yet. Are you familiar with those Japanese stylized arches called "torii"? They're built in conjunction with Shinto shrines. Some of them are single, standalone things (there's a particularly monumental one just off the coast at Hiroshima), but in some shrines, the path to the shrine is framed by a whole row of them, and the process of walking through those torii tends to focus your mind, take you out of the everyday and into the otherworldly, like the wardrobe that gets you to Narnia. I thought the newly erected gates looked kinda like that.

I'll be down this coming weekend to see for myself.