Open Air Art #4: Hoisting the gates
On Wednesday the air was smooth and cool in Central Park, not quite holding back the rain which fell in a light sprinkle. I did my warm-ups by a gnarly tree by the reservoir, pushing against the trunk to stretch my Achilles, propping my foot on the bumpy knothole for my hamstring.
The workers in gray vests were midway through the chore of hoisting the gates for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation. They seemed to outnumber the regular park users, the dog walkers and strollers, cell phoning wanderers, and people in running clothes like me.
In the distance, groups of unfurled gates snaked through the hills, partially obscured by bare branches. Christo had originally requested a fall schedule for the installation, but in the leafless winter season much more can be taken in with a single glance.
Three workers guided a hand-trolley carrying 10 or so vinyl gates. An electric cart, with a couple of supervisors doing the rounds, cruised by the opposite direction. I started my run along the roads and trails from the reservoir to below Sheep Meadow, witnessing different stages of the installation along the way.
In one area, I saw two workers tilt the steel bases with a heavy steel bar and remove the flat plastic safety triangles. The bases were brought into the park by loaders last month, and the triangles were put at both ends, 30,000 triangles in all. It’s difficult not to think about this event alongside its big record-breaking numbers: the millions of pounds of steel, the million yards of fabric, the tens of millions of dollars of costs and so forth. One Central Park Conservatory board member compared The Gates to Haley’s comet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an artwork compared to a celestial object before.
Recently, I read an online interview with the sculptor Richard Serra where he spoke about his experience with open air artwork. “If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused,” Serra said, “but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.”
In an area where none of the workers had yet been, I glimpsed at one base covered with colored chalk as I ran by. It looked like the artwork of a small child who was granted permission by an adult caretaker. It was surprising, after having passed hundreds of gray steel bases, to come across this brightly colored one. A sculpture in a museum doesn’t get used as a child’s chalkboard like that.
If I understand Serra, the public’s evaluation of this artwork will come in the way people walk through and around it or see it from the roof of the Metropolitan or a mid-town hotel window. The child with the colored chalk was a preliminary acknowledger of sorts, had made an initial, visible comment with no reference to the bigness of this artwork, no reference to the stupendous feat it represents for the artist and the city. Others will be confronting it in their own ways after it is unfurled tomorrow. Running through the park this week, I felt like a hidden dimension of the artwork was beginning to take shape. The Gates was going up in Central Park. It was coming out in the open air.
The workers in gray vests were midway through the chore of hoisting the gates for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation. They seemed to outnumber the regular park users, the dog walkers and strollers, cell phoning wanderers, and people in running clothes like me.
In the distance, groups of unfurled gates snaked through the hills, partially obscured by bare branches. Christo had originally requested a fall schedule for the installation, but in the leafless winter season much more can be taken in with a single glance.
Three workers guided a hand-trolley carrying 10 or so vinyl gates. An electric cart, with a couple of supervisors doing the rounds, cruised by the opposite direction. I started my run along the roads and trails from the reservoir to below Sheep Meadow, witnessing different stages of the installation along the way.
In one area, I saw two workers tilt the steel bases with a heavy steel bar and remove the flat plastic safety triangles. The bases were brought into the park by loaders last month, and the triangles were put at both ends, 30,000 triangles in all. It’s difficult not to think about this event alongside its big record-breaking numbers: the millions of pounds of steel, the million yards of fabric, the tens of millions of dollars of costs and so forth. One Central Park Conservatory board member compared The Gates to Haley’s comet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an artwork compared to a celestial object before.
Recently, I read an online interview with the sculptor Richard Serra where he spoke about his experience with open air artwork. “If you get it out into the urban field it's going to be used or misused,” Serra said, “but it'll also probably provide a way of people acknowledging what the aesthetic is about because people have to confront it every day.”
In an area where none of the workers had yet been, I glimpsed at one base covered with colored chalk as I ran by. It looked like the artwork of a small child who was granted permission by an adult caretaker. It was surprising, after having passed hundreds of gray steel bases, to come across this brightly colored one. A sculpture in a museum doesn’t get used as a child’s chalkboard like that.
If I understand Serra, the public’s evaluation of this artwork will come in the way people walk through and around it or see it from the roof of the Metropolitan or a mid-town hotel window. The child with the colored chalk was a preliminary acknowledger of sorts, had made an initial, visible comment with no reference to the bigness of this artwork, no reference to the stupendous feat it represents for the artist and the city. Others will be confronting it in their own ways after it is unfurled tomorrow. Running through the park this week, I felt like a hidden dimension of the artwork was beginning to take shape. The Gates was going up in Central Park. It was coming out in the open air.
posted by Paul Cogley at 10:58 PM
2 Comments:
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