What a beautiful, extravagant excuse to take a walk in the park! It doesn't matter where you start on this 23-mile yellow-brick road (well, it's orange, and we'll get to that), and it doesn't matter where you end up.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005, designed to be many things to many people, to me is fundamentally an invitation to slow down, relax, stop, look, and listen.

The pair's work has been assigned to various schools, but this piece functions as a readymade: what they're done is to put a metal and fabric frame around one of New York's finest features, Central Park. By lining the footpaths of the park in orange fabric, they have created a space where everyone's a tourist again. I saw an well-dressed middle-aged couple scrambling over a rock outcrop near the Hecksher ballfields to get a better vantage point on what is perhaps the best (certainly it shows one of the bigger masses of color) view of the installation. On the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which is coming to be the place to view ephemera—cf. Andy Goldsworthy's wooden hives from 2004), everyone has a camera. Even though there were short queues for the elevators on a weekday afternoon, the roof was mercifully not overcrowded. Perhaps because the view is less than dramatic from up top.

But, oh the storage cards and hard drives that this project will have engendered! Everywhere there are people taking pictures of the portals and of themselves.

An aspect of the work that photobloggers can't capture is the range of sounds that it can produce, depending on air conditions. The golden curtains function as sails, and they sigh, whistle, and rumble with progressively higher wind speeds. And in at least one case, the metal vinyl frame where it bolts to the mounting plates emits a soft, plastic-like squeak as the fabric whips in the wind.

The concept of microclimate is made manifest by the sight of a line of the gates spanning no more than 100 yards. At one end of the line the fabric might billow almost horizontally in a stiff breeze, while the fabric at the other end might hang slack.

To return to the idea of the artwork as a framing device: I discovered a number of wonderful things in the park that I had never bothered to notice before, largely because I had given the park short shrift on previous visits to the city.

• A hieroglyphic obelisk near the Metropolitan.
• A rustic Asian-styled structure perched atop an outcrop of the famous Manhattan schist that makes the skyscrapers of the city possible.
• A memorial to Mayor John Mitchel at the east side of the reservoir.
• A full-frontal parkside view of the Guggenheim through through the leafless trees. (You just can't take in the whole building from the street.) Two well-meaning buildings across the street from the Cooper-Hewitt have hung bunting of the same color as the gates from their windows. The effect is, alas, droopy and ineffective. Artful simplicity takes planning.
• A man blowing haiku-like phrases through an alto sax in one of the park's many pedestrian underpasses.
• A donated plaque on one of the park benches in memory of a 9/11 victim. And another, from the Katz family, with the simple instruction to "Have a great day."
• At the Bethesda fountain, a couple of transplanted locals grousing about busted love affairs. "Woman number two, as far as I know, is still crazy."
• A pretty young girl with a twin-lens reflex camera. The camera may be older than she is.
• Near Strawberry Fields, snowdrops blooming.

Now about the color. "Safety orange" comes nearer to describing the hue than the variations of saffron that have been tossed about. It's not the ruddy orange of most traffic cones, more like something you'd expect to see on a deer hunter. The orange clashes with the hint of yellow-green washing over a tree just coming into bud. With the watery winter sun shining through it, the color somehow takes on more depth, and it can resemble the center of a daisy, while in reflection, the color softens to something close to the promised shade of saffron.

Actually, the gates look a lot like the orange paint galumphing across Hans Hoffmann's Deep within the Ravine (1965), on view at the Metropolitan, which is undergoing its own temporary transformation. I did not experience any change to the light transmitted through the fabric.

The project staffers, clad in subtle gray vests, are equipped with telescoping poles that are improvisationally capped with tennis balls for unsnarling the frequently-occurring drape that wraps itself around the lintel of its gate.

An unplanned effect, I warrant, is the melancholy of the lone gate separated from the rest of its train by pesky overhanging tree branches (a project requirement was that all trees were to be left intact).

As I exited the park on Friday into the bustle of Central Park South and the Avenue of the Americas, I observed another yellow-orange file of objects marking off the pathways of New York. But these were not so orange, and they could move: a line of yellow taxicabs. New York does not need The Gates to highlight its remarkableness. Of course it needs The Gates.

Epilogue: I'm typing up my notes aboard a southbound Acela Express that left New York 65 minutes late due to a broken air hose. Ordinarily I'm exceptionally unforgiving of schedule problems with the trains, especially on the top-dollar Acela. But not this evening: I am typing, I am out of the cold, and life is good.

See also:Tobi Tobias's thoughtful, lengthy posting:

posted: 10:07:17 PM  

Paul Topping knows how to pronounce it.

(Thanks to Bookslut.)

posted: 2:31:18 PM