I think you glance at what has to be a serious issue, Doug. I walked
through large sections of The Gates on several occasions, both casually (I
really needed to get from one side of the park to the other) and for the
experience. I also saw it from above--a friend had an opening party in an
apartment on a high floor on Central Park West. It doesn't work from above
at all, but I don't think it was intended to, and abstract patterning
requires intention. In this case, the city largely determined which paths
could be used and which not. Walking through it, on the other hand, was
compelling, at times thrilling, but I think one would have had to be from
Mars not to be aware of the price, so that, and the Christos' very public
image, which they manage with enormous determination (don't hold your
breath waiting for the documentary that they agree to appear in that's
anything less than hagiographic), and their history, all the way back to
those bales of hay (were the aparatchiks thinking of Monet?), were
omnipresent, and the volunteers, who reminded me of the week the Moonies
invaded New York some 30 years ago, made sure of that. And one's history
with the park was also always there.

Every art critic I've read mentioned two very striking phenomena that I
also noted: the impact the gates had on one's experience of the park, and
the mood of the crowd. To the first: Olmstead and Vaux worked very hard to
create maximum space for walking, at the same time creating "natural"
features and plantings that shiled the different paths from each other. on
occasion also having paths dive beneath or climb over each other by means
of elegant cast-iron bridges or grotto-like tunnels, so that  there are
intersecting or branching paths that one is largely unaware of from
whichever path one has chosen. One of the exhilarating things about The
Gates--for me the most exhilarating--was that it made these paths apparent
from wherever one was walking. This would have been impossible in summer,
but the bareness of winter acted as facilitator. For me, at least, The
Gates said to me, "Wow, I've known this park forever and always loved it,
but now, standing back from it, I can formuilate what incredible geniuses
its creators were."

So, a profound rush of love for a beloved landscape, in the company of
crowds many of whom (those with long and constant histories of the place)
one could convince oneself to assume were having a similar experience, as
one does in the theater, for instance--a temporary community. But this too
is problematic: parks are the ultimate interactive artworks, and in
Olmstead's work that interaction is strategized precisely to eliminate the
sense of a maker--its interactivity all the way, even in environments like
the Bethesda Fountain (or, for instance, in Boston's Public Garden, a far
more "artificial" space). So one has to ask oneself, how does this sudden
distancing function, beyond the moement? My guess is that as far as the
experience of the park is concerned it won't. But it's not surprising that
no one seems to wish The Gates had been made permanent or even allowed to
stay around longer.

The crowds: about the same in mood and numbers as any warm day in the
temperate months. Central Park is one of the places where New York becomes
a real community (as a city it tends to become so with an unusual degree of
ease in any case), and a walk through the chaotic interplay of uses to
which its put is always a pretty amazing experience. The difference here is
that usually most of the park is empty in winter--it's a bit cold for lying
on the Great Lawn. It's one of my pleasures to walk across the park in
winter--the solitude is wonderful--but apparently not for a lot of other
people--one encounters the occasional jogger or dog-walker. So what The
Gtes accomplished was an infusion of the perfectly common carnavalesque of
summer into the middle of winter. All to the good.

This is in part accomplished, however, by the unusual constraints placed on
the crowds. In most of the park the open spaces were off-limits--one could
see the gates across the meadows, but one couldn't walk to them except on
the encircling paths. A good idea--the crowds would have plowed everything
up, and anyway it's pretty muddy (or slushy) this time of year. So the
crowds appeared larger, and foklkjs were forced into greater proximity.

I'm suggesting that the history of one's intimate relationship with the
park was one of the factors that conditioned one's response.

That response was not allowed to be anything like intimate, in any event.
The Gates was not art for art's sake in any usual sense--it was political
and and it was advertizing. First, the political. There are two reasons why
it took so long to get the city's permission for the installation. One had
to do with the destructiveness of the original plan. The other had to do
with the ambitions of the people in office. Mike Bloomberg, the people's
billionaire, is just beginning the runup to his re-election campaign, and
the high-profile event both masks the city's problems and obliterates the
various other contenders from the news. It also filled the hotels and
restaurants with out-of-town dollars. Bread and circuses for the middle
class,and also money in the bank. For earlier mayors (Bloomberg is neither
the best nor the worst we've had) such an event could easily have been a
disaster. Through much of the period when permission was denied the park
was a major and constant crime scene--a few tourist deaths or robberies
would have served no one's interests. And for Giuliani, thre czar of
repression and outer-borough rectitude (if you didn't look to closely), the
sunniness of the piece would have warred with the image that worked for him.

Advertizing: the Christos have been at it a long time. Each installation
validates the next with whoever's in charge of allowing it (not only
because it's guaranteed to bring prestige and bucks). So the brand name
Christo acts as a force in itself. And it serves the Christos well. I don't
doubt their sincerity as artists, but I do question their purity. The
Gates, for instance, famously has been funded by the sale of art associated
with it. But the price tag of that art has been determined by the hype
associated with it. There are Christo lithographs published at prices as
high as $15,000, in editions of 200, which is an enormous edition these
days. What does that mean? Most Picasso graphics are cheaper, and Picasso
is hands down the greatest of modern lithographers and etchers. Most Chuck
Close's are cheaper. etc. And none of these guys have been slouches at
self-promotion. The Christos are something else--the only thing close is
Dali, who managed for much of his life to be a very good artist indeed, but
who made his living by being Dali.

At the park exit at 79th and Central Park West there was a large booth, a
good twenty feet long, staffed by those same moonie-eyed volunteers,
selling official souveniers and books. I assume that, as in Paris (the Pont
Neuf packaging), reproduction rights remain with the artists. There,
Jeanne-Claude famously demanded of Jacques Chirac that tourists be
forbidden to take photographs. Chirac reminded her that France owned the
bridge. But those tourist photos couldn't be published without the
Christos' permission. So every postcard of the event is a few sous into the
family pocket. Safe to assume that the Christos will be supporting their
comfortable life style (which I don't begrudge them) on the profits and
publicity of The Gates for a long time to come.

There's another message to this. The Christos always do the same
thing--they invented a medium, and they never deviate from it--it's their
brand. The scale, however, has changed over time--they now practice
megalominimalism, with the emphasis on the megalo. How much of the impact
of The Gates is a result of our awaremness that there were 7000 separate
gates, consisting of so many pounds of metal and so many acres of fabric,
that it cost $21,000,000, and that it's 23 miles long? Almost nobody
bothered to walk all 23 miles. Suppose that there were only a thousand
gates, at $3,000,000 dollars, stretching three miles? That three miles,
given the topography of the park, would have seemed visually just as long
from the ground. But the awareness of scale, even if it was not visually
apparent, was a part of the experience. One was part of something
amazingly, overwhelmingly large.

I have a lot of difficulty with this. It seems to me that there's a
power-play involved--we're all under the canopy of an enormous ego, wherein
we can only be parts. I have the same feeling in the lobby of the Kennedy
Center in Washington, where the ceiling is so high that humans are reduced
to ants. And in a great many public headquarters buildings. Or at
Versailles. This is fascist architecture, it seems to mem, which tells us
that there can only be one being, and it sure aint us.

Which segues neatly into damage. The other reason that The Gates took so
many years to be approved is that originally and for many years the
Christos wanted the arches supported by bolts drilled into the paths,
requiring massive repair work. This wasn't on their radar. Nor was the
deadly force of wind-driven umbrellas in that installation--one art lover
was impaled. No public mourning from the Christos. Nor the destruction of a
year's worth of bird life on the very active rookery--the estimate at the
time was something like a million fewer birds--in those draped cliffs near
Sydney. Nor the destruction of marine life in Biscayne Bay outside of Miami
when light was cut off to all those creatures that live in the shallow
waters. Nor apparently are they concerned that their next proposed project,
an enormously long canopy above the Arkansas River, reducing the water and
ground below to twilight during two weeks of the very short Rocky Mountain
summer. Yet another very fragile ecosystem.

I'm suggesting that the overweening egotism that allows this sort of
thoughtlessness, that spawns this sort of thoughtlessness in the rest of us
lords of creation, is a very real part of the experience of The Gates and
other of the Christos' projects. And I couldn't get this out of my head--it
was a part of my experience, as it is when the goals of pride are merely
the generation of industrial profit with no aesthetic committment.

So I guess what I'm saying is I did enjoy The Gates, tho diminishingly (up
for 6 months and everyone would have thought them a nuisance), but I enjoy
a lot of things that I don't think are good for me.

One last point. Several people--on another list I think it was Nick
Piombino--have pointed out that it was some sort of miracle that there was
no grafitti, as if people were too much in awe or maybe the materials
weren't suitable for spray paint. Nope--it was because the gates were very
well patrolled by police, park rangers, and volunteers, not to mention the
huge crowds that allowed for little solitary vandalism. Myself, I don't
think that this was a good thing--I would have liked more evidence of
interaction, and I would have liked to watch the gates evolve interactively
with the city. As it was, the only change was that the cloth began to look
a bit shopworn.

Mark

At 10:02 AM 3/1/2005, you wrote:
>And whatever I might think of it were I there, i would have liked to be
>able to be there, to then think, respond, & even criticize should I
>have been so moved. CBC news (which is not quite like Fox) did a 10
>minute piece on the work, with interviews with the artists & with some
>of the first viewers. My response was that it looked neat, would be fun
>to walk through, &, given that they paid for the whole thing
>themselves, couldn't be blamed on 'wasting public money on silly
>art...'
>
>Doug
>
>
>On 28-Feb-05, at 12:30 PM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
>
>>For an historic note, when Christo was a teenager in Bulgaria - in the
>>late
>>Forties -  one of his summer jobs was to live and work on a collective
>>farm
>>located beside the Orient Express. He and other workers took
>>responsibility
>>for ordering mowed hay into bales that they neatly stacked and covered
>>with
>>colored tarps.
>>The image of these well ordered and colorful stacks was to present a
>>persuasive, well organized and aesthetically attractive image of the
>>socialist Bulgarian Government to travelers on the Orient Express -
>>many of
>>whom were from Europe and America, including countries that were in
>>high
>>debate about whether or not to become entirely or partially Socialist.
>>The
>>covered hay stacks were considered a highly effective form of socialist
>>advertising.
>>
>>Every time I see a Christo project I marvel at how his career has
>>taken off
>>from that first Bulgarian experience in making public art occur in
>>such a
>>diversity of contexts with a diversity potential intentions, or what
>>more
>>often happens,  in a space of "non-intention" over which the artist
>>waxes no
>>control. The materials are always only one half of the event; the
>>other half
>>is what both individual and the public bring into the environment.
>>It's in
>>this alchemy of the combination of materials and person(s) that
>>something
>>transcends into another space - at least for a moment or a sustained
>>moment.
>>In Hannad Arendt's terms, the site becomes a place of public
>>disclosure - in
>>which the environment (including it's historical associations),
>>objects and
>>persons become actors on a stage, one in which we partake both as our
>>own
>>experience, and the witness to the enactments of those of others.  One
>>might, for examplem juxtapose this kind of public experience with Fox
>>Network (as a site) - where space is entirely enclosed,
>>claustrophobically
>>so, and "we" as individuals or a group are permitted no disclosure at
>>all.
>>Ideally its one in which authority - in all senses - returns to the
>>members
>>of the Polis.
>>
>>The Christos in that sense are only responsible for creating a stage
>>that
>>permits the event.
>>
>>Stephen V
>>Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
>>
>
>
>Douglas Barbour
>Department of English
>University of Alberta
>Edmonton  Alberta  T6G 2E5 Canada
>(780) 436 3320
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
>care to be more
>precise about whatever
>it is you are
>saying, I said
>
>        Bill Manhire