Orange Alert

 

On Monday, February 28, New Yorkers will begin to see what Central Park looks like without The Gates, the 7532 bright orange (“saffron” say Christo & Jeanne-Claude, tho tangerine would seem to be more accurate) structures, essentially door-frames sans doors, the top third of whose openings are taken up with industrial strength banners that are neither curtains nor flags. I suspect that for some, especially those who live in close proximity to the park, it will take some doing.

 

Was The Gates great art? I suspect not, tho the actual answer to that question requires an extended contemplation as to what art is or should be & how a work like this does or does not meet the necessary conditions. It was, unquestionably, a great gift to the city of New York, the best thing that has happened to Manhattan in some time. And, if you look at all closely, it stands up remarkably well in many of the areas that one would get to in that extended contemplation.

 

But lets begin by noting what this art was not about, which was itself. The utter redundancy of the material object replicated over & over essentially obliterates what Benjamin once called the aura of the original. That is certainly no accident, any more than it is an accident that one cannot see the whole of the project from any vantage point short of a helicopter – a feature that was true also of Running Fence in California in 1976, the other one ajor Christo project I’ve had the pleasure of seeing up close and personal.

 

In fact, the comparisons & contrasts with Running Fence leap out at one almost instantly. Both require considerable movement on the part of a spectator. Both serve functionally as framing devices for the landscapes in which they were set. Yet Running Fence was an act of late modernism in its aesthetics, a long single pale line that ran through the fields of Sonoma County. The Gates is gaudy to look at, goes off in all directions, leads you to areas where you expect to find more & don’t – Strawberry Fields, for example – then come upon two or even three rows of them running side by side along other paths. The difference reminded me of the aesthetics of Frank Stella as they evolved over a similar three decade span. Running Fence is the early Stella of the continuous gray line. The Gates is late Stella, with wild colors & expressiveness running off in all directions. One could make the same analogy with the music of Steve Reich, I suspect.

 

The Gates is a framing device before it is anything else. What Christo & Jeanne-Claude want you to see is the park. In the cold monochromatic tones of winter, these bursts of orange pop up everywhere – you see them up close as you walk through them, you see them up high on bluffs here & there, you see them curling into the distance & down in the lower reaches of the park. If ever there was a project to make people acknowledge how unflat Central Park is, this was it. It was, in that sense, an homage to Fredrick Law Olmstead & Calvert Vaux, the park’s creators. I was reminded, walking through the park on an afternoon that started off gloomy & then turned sunny, with splotches of the previous day’s snow softening the backgrounds behind all this tangerine, that Olmstead claimed that one of his goals as a designer of environments was to prepare the citizenry for socialism. One way to do that is to orient the individual to his or her position in the natural world – and a framing device is a perfect mechanism for underscoring that point.

 

Invisibility was a major component of The Gates, even though they were not all the same size. For example, the most important structural element of each gate was not the three orange beams, nor the curtain, nor the ten rivets that held all these together, but the plain black feet under each vertical beam that provided the necessary stability for these large & frankly dangerous objects to withstand the elements. The black feet disappear into the park, the background, immediately. I challenge you to find a single photo on Google that highlights this key critical element. Yet on some of the paths, the verticals angled into these base structures in order to keep the gate steady on an uneven plane – they are not incidental, not unart in the way that a wire that enable a canvas to hang might be.

 

Walking through the park, I noted that the banners were remarkably sturdy looking, the sort of synthetic material you might find in a modern sail or parachute, densely stitched with orange thread to provide a tiny grid texture. They seemed remarkable with the sun behind them or when they billowed in the wind. I never once saw an instance of graffiti on any of the structural supports – and I was looking for tagging, expecting it actually. I don’t know if the supports were specially treated to make it impossible, if graffiti was wiped away as quickly as it was put on or if people were too stunned by the work itself to imagine such interventions. I wondered – I still do – if there was any order to the plan itself, or if, as seems most likely, it was carefully done in reaction to existing peaks & valleys & paths of the park, so that the plan is the park itself.

 

And I like the way in which this project does not take itself seriously. There were a number of parodies of The Gates up on the web almost instantly – cheese crackers, little flags leading to somebody’s bathroom, etc. – and every one of these ribald knock-offs seemed to me to confirm the essential rightness of Christo’s & Jeanne-Claude’s original impulse. Look, these alternatives seemed to say. This is exactly the point.