Thinking about a visit to my old home, New York City, from nearly ten years ago this winter to view The Gates, the monumental sculptural, site-specific work by Jeanne-Claude and Christo. It is an artistic reflection of beauty, endurance, community, and free form thinking and imagination...much like the city it was produced within. It is comprised namely of Central Park in NYC, in the winter of 2005, and the 7,503 structures that aligned pathways throughout this park. Connecting the space of the city park, and its inhabitants, with vibrant florid orange fabric drapes which were animated by the wind and yet seemed indifferent to any other elemental residue, as I was able to witness in the time I spent experiencing this monumental work all variety of weather; sun, overcast, daylight, night time, fog, rain, snow, and sleet. These ‘drapes,’ were singularly held aloft by steel and vinyl tubing structures in the shape of rectangular arches suited for pedestrian passage underneath. Lining the byways in the park like giant dominoes, yet incapable of falling one after the other, the drapery of the fabric billowed gently overhead and flowered the space enormously. Viewed up close they obscured the outstanding topographic scenery the park is known for, and from a distance exemplified the space with its gentle dotting of lines, illustrating the free flowing design each flaneur may stride as if on a 19th century derivee. But it isn’t the 19th century, and life in a modern and bustling 21st century city such as New York doesn’t provide the kind of time or psychic space one may have had when living in the times of one Charles Baudelaire. However, this public work, granted significantly with the aid of the city’s mayor Bloomberg, helped to recreate this mode of pedestrian ponder one was forced to reconcile while in the space, even if the work was disliked, as many voiced disdain for such a project.
Figure I The Gates, Central Park (Michael Gardner, 2005)
The magical difference of the past in memory and said habit resulting from this past, versus the inescapable force of the now via The Gates, is a major shift and result of ones experience with this public work. Living in a major and crowded city, our senses work toward a focus of attention and protection together, as we make our way through life in this environment of choice. “We work out when and where to look, which sounds to tune into, what we can ignore. This ability to filter one’s perceptions, however, is stretched by the sensory excess of urban environments,” indicates Fran Tonkiss in the article, Spatial Stories. This understanding is reframed and underlined by Georg Simmel in his article, The Metropolis and Mental Life. “Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e. his mind is stimulated by the difference between impressions and those which have preceded.” Now take this, “Man,” place him in an urban context of the park, a place he may route routinely in his day or week, and has for years and years. Redesign the surroundings of this park, which through history of repetition through this space is augmented by the sculptural work The Gates, and this psychically challenges him to reconfigure in his mind the event of the space, forever changed now, and re-establish within his bodily memory map, a new experience. “...mapping is a form of abstraction explicitly linked to spatial geometry - ‘a conceptual grid that enables every phenomenon to be compared, differentiated, and measured by the same yardstick,” illuminates Phil Hubbard in his article The Represented City. This route in this city park will never again be the same. The habit in his mind of the space he travels through has evolved. His recognition of the park space once protected by the city essentially from the city itself, is redrawn in a manner which challenges himself in the space, and as Simmel continues, “...pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli.” The very rhythm of this man’s life, in a city that changes and doesn’t change simultaneously to one who lives in the midst of such a bustle for years, is altered. If even for the two official weeks The Gates was up, and then forever after. This is truly the power of re-presenting the city to itself through public art, and a piercing reflection of such a city through the enormity of its design and implementation. More specifically, calculating in the pain and upheaval from the circumstance of 9-11 just a few short years prior, one could view a prism like refraction of renewed possibility and beauty within the once darkened and shadowed change the terror of that day challenged the city, and how community was re-established through this as it crossed all boundaries of difference, such as race and economy, to refresh the integrity of such a place and the possibility in inclusion urban life in a city provides for all.
Figure II The Gates, Central Park (Michael Gardner, 2005)
And just like that fateful day, the event of The Gates in totality and singularly of each individual, “gate,” marked through the artistry of sculpture, a passage of time. Walked under and through, each gate notates much like a clock; a tick, then tock, as each step touched upon the pavement, a moment in time. Recording the surroundings and experiences through the experiential demarkation The Gates imply and integrate into ones being, an aside if you will, to the permanent surroundings. Or evolutionary as nature in such a park would contain, but perhaps not to the eye as this kind of change happens so slowly one notices only in terms of memory to years past. Here is life for all of us right now, The Gates gently intone. Much as in the article, Writing the City, authored by Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley, when they wrote, “The city’s air, too, may be blent, composed of the hopes, aspirations, disappointments and pain of those who live it; like Larkin’s church, it is a kind of vessel, filled with human experience.” I believe Jeanne-Claude and Christo understood this deeply. In their efforts to create a capillary system of pathways through a world famous park, they established a bloodline the en masse-human vessel contained, through The Gates. Enveloping the rich and poor alike under their guardianship. As Preston and Simpson-Housley indicated in continuation in this article, “...the city is an active organism, which may prove to be a site of culture and inspiration, like Pushkin’s Odessa, but is more likely to be seen as oppressing its inhabitants and creating or exacerbating divisions within individuals.” The Gates understood this, and created a pathway through these oppressions. Uniting its inhabitants in play.
Figure III The Gates, Central Park (Michael Gardner, 2005)
The journal article, Thinking Art Sociologically, by David Inglis, discussed many of the social and political encompasses art, in connection with a city, contain. Noting that there are, “...a great many issues connected with artistic matters...that we should not take the word ‘art’ at face value and accept it uncritically...the sociological view tends to see ‘art’ as always thoroughly bound up with politics [sic], the latter term is meant in its widest sense, where it refers to conflicts and struggles between different social groups.” Despite these assertions, The Gates succeeded in eliminating real or imaginary boundaries, and established a collective of interested parties from all social strata. Many of whom were not invested toward any considerations of ‘art,’ but in terms of allied constituents from the city to which they all belong. Participating in something unique and transient. Volunteers rising at dawn together helped deploy structures hard hatted engineers and constructions crews set out along paths. Uniting inhabitants side by side, city neighbor’s new and old together assembled each gate. Upon completion and ready for releasing the drapery making up the most visible and elemental feature of each gate, the New York Times article ‘The Gates’ Unfurling to High Hopes, by Randy Kennedy, February 12, 2005, quoted Mayor Bloomberg as announcing, “I can’t promise...particularly since this is New York, that every single person will love ‘The Gates,’ but I guarantee that they will all talk about it.” And photograph it, and explore it, and garner the attention of all the world’s cities. Quite an accomplishment a city notorious for so many reasons was accoladed, and an accomplishment for public works in every city worldwide. It may be site-specific and temporary, but ultimately temporal and historical for all time to follow. Temporaneous features prominently in a city, as people move in searching for dreams accomplishment, or desiring to anew a life dissolved of hope in a previous locale. The Gates is much like any new and also important traveller, who may or may not establish permanence in residence within any city’s estate. Like the ever changing face of architecture New York endows itself with, The Gates impermanence attests to this idea. Building’s may stay, or may be re-built, and much like the nature of New York specifically which re-new’s itself routinely as it’s space is small and unchanging (the borough of Manhattan, where all of this article features representation is obviously an island, and as such can only rebuild through new design; buildings, roadways, infrastructure. Tearing down and re-building back up again. It cannot spread out like pancake batter spilled onto the untouched outer limits as other cities can do), except through re-feature of aesthetic focus in architecture and the like. Phil Hubbard’s article The Represented City, again helps to understand these ideas. In citing Baudelaire whose prose understood this evolutionary attitude a city can possess when as he reflected on Paris:
Old Paris is no more (a town, alas
Changes more quickly than man’s heart may change);
Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
The debris, and the square-set heaps of tiles.
...Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.
New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,
And suburbs old, are symbols all to me
Whose memories are as heavy as stone...
The “perceptual innuendo,’ as coined by Lyn Lofland is ultimately the basis and spine line for the monumental accomplishment The Gates gave us. The unexpectedness of such a visual intrusion upon such a famed space, as noted in movies, plays, music, and historical accounts of Central Park, is the focal point from which Lyn’s assertions would begin. This public work illustrates the whimsy of a magical and facile imagination, incorporating the history of the initial design for prominent gates, as was included in the first blueprints for the park, and from which initial inspirations for the project arose in the minds of Jeanne-Claude and Christo. The crowding and spectacle of the park’s natural and man made formations, flourished with the sculpture, and the spectacle of the people who inhabit the city as they make their way through the park; seeing and being seen. Part and parcel of the juxtaposition Lyn informs us of. As journaled in The 3Cities Project: New York Essays, by Richard Ings, “In Lofland’s analysis, the pleasures of the public realm are aesthetic as much as interactional. As well as the theatre of people watching and being watched, there is ‘the experience of enjoyment occasioned by certain (mostly visual) qualities of the built environment.” The Gates would prove to be a third party in this cultural, sociological, and artistic exercise, and as such I imagine will endure in the memory of the inhabitants who experienced it, the psychic essence of the park itself, and in stories and photographs shared.
Figure IIII The Gates, Central Park (Michael Gardner, 2005)
Works Cited
Hubbard, Phil (2006). The Represented City. London; Routledge.
Simmel, Georg. The Metropolis and Mental Life.
Tonkiss, Fran. Spatial Stories. Subjectivity in the City.
Preston and Simpson-Hously. Introduction. Writing the City.
Inglis, Donald. Thinking Art Sociologically.
Kennedy, Randy (2005) 'The Gates' Unfurling to High Hopes. The New York Times. Feb. 12, 2005.
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