Christo: The Gates, Central Park

NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/nyregion/19PARK.html

December 19, 2002
Artist's Plan to Drape Central Park in Fabric Is Approved
By ROBIN POGREBIN


A scaled-down version of a plan by the artist Christo to festoon 26 miles of Central Park's walkways with swatches of translucent saffron-colored fabric has been given a crucial vote of support by the Central Park Conservancy, which helps manage the park.

The project, which would be installed in February and remain in place for two weeks, still awaits approval by the city's parks department, but the vote on Monday by the Conservancy's board is significant. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, too, has said he supports the project, making approval by the parks department likelier.

The project was rejected in 1981 in the wake of vehement opposition to what was seen by critics as a gross intrusion into the city's most beloved and important green space.

This time, a "policy statement" approved by a majority of the park conservancy's board concluded that the project "could move forward without damage to the park and without impeding the recreational use of the park by the public," provided that issues including financing and security were resolved.

Evelyn H. Lauder, who serves on the conservancy committee that studied the project, said: "My position has always been caution in terms of ecological impact. All those problems have been answered by them. So I'm very happy because I think it is a very exciting and dynamic possibility."

In a much-chronicled career, the Bulgarian-born artist and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, have wrapped the German Reichstag and the Pont Neuf in Paris in cloth. They surrounded part of the coast of Australia in sand-colored fabric, hung an orange curtain across a gap in the Grand Hogback Mountain Range in Colorado and dispersed several thousand umbrellas across southern California.

The Central Park project would include a trail of thousands of rectangular steel gates, each 15 feet tall, supporting individual panels of billowing cloth that would outline the park's winding promenades. The gates would begin at the park's pedestrian entrances and continue at nine-foot intervals.

Among the Central Park Conservancy board members to vote in favor this time was Gordon J. Davis, who as parks commissioner 21 years ago rejected the project in a 107-page document that concluded the project was "in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong scale."

Among those to vote against the project on Monday was Richard Gilder, an investment manager who pledged a $17 million challenge grant to refurbish the Great Lawn and is a conservancy founding trustee.

The conservancy's approval came with the condition that the work, known as "the Gates project," undergo significant modification: construction and installation with no excavation; fewer than 7,500 gates rather than the 15,000 originally proposed; no interference with trees or sensitive park areas like the reservoir and Ramble; and minimal use of large trucks and forklifts. The board also stipulated that the February installation date replace the original October proposal.

The conservancy still wants more information on such issues as the project's financing, the impact on wildlife, and what will be done to keep parkgoers off grassy areas where bulbs are growing.

The project has been given new life in part because of support from the mayor, who has generally championed the importance of public art, particularly since the events of Sept. 11. Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris said it was premature to comment on the development.

Christo collaborates on his creations with his wife, and they finance their projects themselves from sales of Christo's work. Reached yesterday by phone at home in Manhattan, Jeanne-Claude said she was unaware of the conservancy's support. "We don't even know that," she said.

To the artists, the process of seeking approval is part of the art itself. "The negotiation is part of the artistic focus," Mrs. Lauder of the conservancy said. "To eliminate obstacles is part of what they perceive as their process."

... *Christo's a lot of fun. *I can't wait to see this.

I had no idea Christo was still alive, kicking and doing this stuff........ haven't heard of him since the Riechstag.

Should be interesting!;)

December 24, 2002
The Fabric of Life in the Park Christo Plan Advances
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN


The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude came up with a plan 23 years ago to erect gates draped in saffron-colored fabric in Central Park. Thousands of them would meander along pathways for two weeks during the winter when the trees are bare so the gates could be seen. Then they would be removed. A simple, slightly mad idea, and beautiful.

Since then this husband-and-wife team has wrapped buildings, surrounded islands with pink floating fabric, installed giant blue and yellow umbrellas, and strung miles of curtains at locales from Florida to California to Japan to Europe, turning doubters into converts, while New York City, art's supposed capital, has dragged its heels.

Until now. Maybe.

Last week the Central Park Conservancy passed a resolution giving its support, basically. Christo and Jeanne-Claude said yesterday that they still had not heard from the conservancy, a private organization, which donates millions to maintain the park.

Meanwhile it turns out that the artists have been negotiating a contract with the Parks Department. They are reluctant to talk about it. They don't want anything to spoil progress, having got so close to approval after so many years. Yesterday they told me that an announcement by the city may come very soon. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has already said he likes the idea.

Charlatans? Shamans? With their hard-sell tactics, their followers trailing them like Deadheads from one gig to the next, their feel-good populism and phenomenally expensive, grandiose ambitions, it's no wonder Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made skeptics of people who haven't seen their work, don't understand it or don't want to, and who won't take them seriously.

I remember going to the "Wrapped Reichstag" in 1995, expecting the worst. Then, like so many people, I was won over by the whole giddy event: the revelers who turned the fields around the Reichstag into Woodstock East, the art students sketching the building, the street vendors, the grumpy politicians, the store windows full of wrapped objects — above all by the beauty of the project.

Briefly the hulking building became a kind of shimmery gift to the city, swathed in a million square feet of silvery polypropylene fabric held in place by 10 miles of bright blue rope. When the last roll of fabric was unfurled by a crew of climbers resembling Lilliputians atop Gulliver, someone cranked up a hurdy-gurdy. The crowd applauded.

Then the building was unwrapped a few weeks later, leaving nothing behind except the economic benefits of tourist dollars: Christo and Jeanne-Claude always pay for their own projects by selling his art. The Reichstag wrapping cost $13 million.

Berlin, a German newspaper said, made about $700 million in increased tourism. The artists also bequeathed to the city the worldwide afterimage of a gentler Reichstag. The symbolism was a new Germany emerging from the chrysalis of the wrapped building.

They came up with the Reichstag idea in 1971. Resistance and negotiation are part of their work: everything that happens from concept to completion belongs to the project, they say; this is a basic tenet of Conceptual Art. They have been pondering something big in New York since the mid-60's, shortly after immigrating from Paris. First Christo proposed wrapping two downtown buildings, then wrapping the Museum of Modern Art, One Times Square and the Whitney Museum.

By the 70's they imagined the gates to celebrate the rambling, organic system of pathways through Central Park, in contrast to the grid of streets. This interaction between order and disorder encapsulated art at that moment. The rectangular shape of the gates combined with the windblown fabric made a classic Post-Minimalist statement about man-made systems and nature.

The project was turned down in 1981, when the Parks Department feared it would damage the grounds and set a dangerous precedent. Gordon J. Davis, then the parks commissioner, produced a report arguing against it.

Mr. Davis is now a conservancy board member, and he voted for it this time. In 1995 Disney showed "Pocahontas" in the park on four 80-foot-high screens to tens of thousands of people crammed onto 120,000 square feet of artificial turf under 56,000 watts of light, listening to a 400,000-watt sound system before a gigantic inflatable Mickey.

So much for dangerous precedent. If the legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park's legendary designers, could survive that, what's the problem with the gates?

Anodyne, critics say about Christo. But public art does not consist only of artists leaving black boxes with "Fear" on them in subway stations. There's a fruitful territory between yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater and erecting a statue of a forgotten hero holding a sword. Christo's work derives from 60's happenings and Earth Art, from the general move out of galleries and museums into the real world, and from the utopianism of Socialist Realism (he was born in Bulgaria in 1935), with its belief in art for everyman, agitprop and the gigantism of Soviet monuments. He has transformed all this into a transient brand of visual entertainment.

A little of that wouldn't hurt New York City now. After 9/11 the project can show the world the city's creative vitality, emotional health and sense of humor, and be a complement to the proposals for downtown.

It would require at least another year, and probably a few years, for the project to be realized even if a contract were signed today and no legal hitches occurred. (They better act while this mayor is still in office.) Besides the money to be raised (Jeanne-Claude mentioned to me $20 million as a possible amount), there are 74 tons of steel to be designed, around a million square feet of fabric to be woven, cut and sewn, and workers to be hired and trained. And more planning. Last June, with Douglas Blonsky, the Central Park administrator, Christo and Jeanne-Claude surveyed the park, recording the precise width of walkways and heights of the lowest branches.

The present plan is for about 7,400 gates, each 16 feet high (a foot higher than they originally proposed), with an average of 12 feet between gates. (There will be some gaps to avoid branches and other obstacles.) The widths of the gates will vary from 6 feet to 18 feet, to match the widths of walkways. Instead of slender steel poles, as first proposed, the gates are now to be 5 inch by 5 inch fabricated recyclable vinyl poles extruded in the saffron color of the fabric, which is no longer attached like a shower curtain but built right into the frame, like sails into masts.

Each gate will have a slender one-ton steel base. The gates will rest only on walkways, so no holes with be dug or grass disturbed. Teams hired by the artists will take about six weeks, using small forklifts, to install the bases, another week to raise the gates. The park will be open as usual. Then the fabric will be unfurled in a day, ceremoniously.

The teams will maintain and guard the gates, hand out fabric samples as gifts, act as docents to the curious, then take the gates down after two weeks. Six weeks later everything should be gone.

At Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's studio I watched a short video of models of the gates, tested in Washington State, where the artists' chief engineer, Vince Davenport, lives. A van drove through the gates to make sure emergency vehicles wouldn't be obstructed. The fabric (it doesn't hang lower than seven feet) billowed nicely in a breeze. Christo pulled out some drawings and a book about the project. The gates are shown to fill the park, drawing orange paths up and down hills and stairs, around the lake, zoo and Met Museum — a vast, whimsical abstraction in the land.

To the city, as "Wrapped Reichstag" was to Berlin, "The Gates" could be more than a popular attraction and profitable. Art, even a temporary installation, maybe especially a temporary installation, when it is good has a way of leaving an indelible mark on a place and the people who see it. Its value is civic and psychological. As a successor to the image of the collapsing Twin Towers, the picture of a winter park filled with people streaming through gates of fabric could be priceless. At the least, it would show New York City was willing to take a gamble on art.

Here's hoping a contract is signed. Then it will be up to private donors to decide whether the project is worth the cost. Museums pay millions for some exhibitions. Knicks players are paid millions and lose. Who's to say what's too much? Considering how much money street vendors make hawking postcards and geegaws of the World Trade Center these days, it shouldn't be too hard for Christo to sell images of his project to raise cash.

Meanwhile temporary public sculptures, as part of the last Whitney Biennial, have proved that Central Park can accommodate art and survive. The park is gorgeous without gates. It might be gorgeous with them, too.

There's only one way to find out.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/arts/...e-christo.html

January 22, 2003
Artist Christo Gets Nod to Do Up NYC Central Park
By REUTERS


Filed at 4:31 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Artistic duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude have finally won permission to snake a fluttering orange sculpture through 23 miles of New York's Central Park, ending a decades-old debate, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Wednesday.

The exhibit -- ``The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005'' -- will be erected in February 2005 and stand for two weeks.

Christo is famous for his giant temporary works of art, such as wrapping the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in a tarpaulin and wrapping Berlin's Reichstag in 1 million square feet of polypropylene fabric.

The Central Park work by the husband-and-wife team will consist of 7,500 16-foot-high gates draped with saffron-colored fabric parading along about 23 miles of public paths in the park.

``I predict, whether they love this temporary work of art or not, New Yorkers will certainly make 'The Gates' a very popular topic of conversation,'' Bloomberg said at a news conference.

The mayor predicted the project will attract half a million out-of-town visitors and generate $72 million to $136 million in economic activity.

First conceived in the late 1970s, the project ran into environmental objections. Among them were the thousands of post holes to be dug in the park to secure the tall upright structures.

In this version of the installation, recyclable vinyl poles will be secured by narrow steel base weights on the paved surfaces of the park's walkways, with no holes in the ground.

Pedestrians will be able to pass under and through the work, drawn as sort of a whimsical tunnel without sides, with cloth draped from cross beams shivering in the wind.

The artists say they will pay for the project themselves and pay $3 million to use the city park.

Christo said New York inspired him as ``probably the most walking place in the world,'' and that the only places where people walk for pleasure are the parks.

The gates and panels will be made in local workshops and factories and transported in pieces to the park for installation.

Good going! It will cost us NOTHING, spur tourism and they will give money to the Parks Dept.

Win, Win, Win.

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/...ts/24note2.jpg

A large detail of a drawing of Christo's project to hang saffron-color drapes in Central Park.

Photo accompanying the Times article (Wolfgang Volz/Christo 2002)

How many miscreants,in furtive search of future profits,will come to the park,running with scissors and ready to clip a pirce of Christo?
In 5 years,they'll advertise their clippings on eBay for the same price as a Yankee's ticket.
To prevent this tattered assault on Central Park's experiment with European High Art,a large number of the *diminishing police force will have to patrol the hell out of CP.
Art affecionados will be coming out of the dark,bearing machetes,lusting after instant fortune by claiming THEIR piece of Christo.
And New York will pay for the protection of this masterpiece,just wait.
Otherwise,Christo appears,and "pouf",there is no Christo.

June 6, 2003

A Windfall From Christo

By CAROL VOGEL

While February 2005 may seem like eons away, it is not, at least for Christo and Jeanne-Claude. That is when the artists will finally realize their 24-year-old dream of decorating 23 miles of Central Park's walkways with 7,460 gates, 16 feet tall and topped with translucent saffron-color fabric.

Whether wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin with more than a million square feet of aluminium-colored fabric or swathing the Pont Neuf in Paris with 454,178 square feet of a champagne-colored textile that shimmered like silk, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always financed their mammoth undertakings themselves. They raise money by selling Christo's drawings and collages, as well as early artworks of wrapped objects from the 1950's and 1960's.

"Each project is like a child — it costs whatever it has to cost," said Jeanne-Claude, who estimates the gates may cost up to $20 million.

While the potential for marketing products related to this project is almost limitless, the artists have never allowed any licensing or taken any such initiatives themselves. Until now.

For the first time, they have agreed to let the Carriage House Center, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan that oversees a consortium of foundations, have the exclusive worldwide rights to set up licensing agreements for products based on the Central Park project. None of the proceeds will go to the artists or toward producing the project: everything goes to protecting and restoring New York City's natural environment and supporting arts causes. Deutsche Bank Americas is joining the initiative, giving $250,000 in seed money to become a corporate founding partner with the Carriage House Center.

The center's president, Theodore W. Kheel, the former labor negotiator, has worked with the artists since they filed their first, unsuccessful application with the city to do "The Gates Project for Central Park" in 1979. They have remained friends.

"They offered to give the city marketing rights, but the city was not in a position to accept them," Mr. Kheel said in a telephone interview this week. "Knowing about the Carriage House and my interest in environmental matters, we agreed to work together." Mr. Kheel is passionate about helping raise New Yorkers' awareness about dangers to the city's environment, which he says is an issue "as serious as terrorism but not as immediate."

Mr. Kheel and Deutsche Bank executives say they do not know how much money they will be able to raise through licensing, nor have they determined what kind of licensing efforts to embark upon. Paul Wilmot, managing partner of Paul Wilmot Communications, has been asked to help develop licensing programs and seek additional corporate sponsorship.

Gary Hattum, president of Deutsche Bank Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the bank, said he saw its involvement as a way to support the city, the environment and the arts. "We view this as seed money that is an investment," he said. "It will have a long-term legacy for the city."


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Urban Art by Christo and Jeanne-Claude The Gates Project for Central Park, 1979-2005 Previews at Metropolitan Museum in April 2004
Exhibition Dates: April 6—July 25, 2004
Exhibition Location: The American Wing, first floor, The Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery


The evolution of the widely anticipated outdoor work of art for New York City initiated in 1979 by the husband-and-wife collaborators Christo and Jeanne-Claude will be the subject of the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates, Central Park, New York, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 6 through July 25, 2004. Some 45 preparatory drawings and collages by Christo, 40 photographs, and 10 maps and technical diagrams will document the soon-to-be-realized work of art, which when completed will consist of 7,500 saffron-colored gates placed at 10- to 15-foot intervals throughout 23 miles of pedestrian walkways lacing Central Park from 59th Street to 110th Street and from Central Park West to Fifth Avenue.

April 9, 2004

ART REVIEW | 'THE GATES, CENTRAL PARK'

Christo's Feat: 25 Years' Work for 16 Days

By GRACE GLUECK

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/...rts/09glue.jpg
A collage depicting part of Christo's plan to bring saffron to Central Park next February, the culmination of a quarter century of effort.

You might think that after more than 40 years of grand-scale achievements, like hanging a curtain between two peaks in a Colorado valley; running miles of fence through two California counties; outfitting several islands off Florida with tutus; wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris; and swaddling the Reichstag in Berlin, the indefatigable team of Christo and his wife-collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, would at last run out of ambition.

But no. With their eyes ever on the Big Apple, the two had long plotted a Christofest in Central Park. And after two and a half decades of refining the work and banging on official doors for a hearing, they are about — thanks to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's approval — to achieve their goal, with a project called "The Gates." It is logistically one of the team's most complicated to date, and certainly, at 25 years, the longest in gestation.

Weather permitting, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005, will see the formal opening in Central Park of the team's 16-day installation of 7,500 saffron-colored fabric panels, each suspended within a free-standing framework 16 feet high and swinging at the whim of the wind. Placed at 12-foot intervals and well over a stroller's head, the panels will occupy 23 miles of park walkways. The installation is meant not only to salute the park's half-planned, half-natural topography, but to evoke the grid structure of the surrounding city blocks. The saffron color recalls the park in fall foliage, a particularly expressive device when set against a mélange of February-bare trees. A preview of what's to come has been mounted by the Metropolitan Museum: "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates, Central Park, New York," a show of 51 preparatory drawings and collages by Christo, 64 photographs, 11 maps and tech-y diagrams, along with actual samples of the steel posts, fittings, footings and such that will support the banners along the walkways without making holes in them. (The title, "The Gates," is taken from the name used by the park's architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, for the openings in the stone wall surrounding it.)

Christo's feat is hailed as "a tribute to the grandeur of Central Park and New York City" by Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met (which will itself be in direct line of the enfilade). But the installation is also a testimony to the team's inexhaustible skill and patience in the manipulation of officialdom, the imposition of an artist's will on a very public domain. Does Central Park really need Christo's embellishment?

With Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the conceptual process — the technical problems, the political arm-twisting, the fund-raising, the public relations-maneuvering and the documentation relating to their projects and, of course, the power play involved in achieving them — is as much a part of their art as the visible, sometimes beautiful but always temporary, end product.

Like everything else the team does, the chronological documentation of the forthcoming event on view at the Met is as yawningly thoroughgoing as, say, a space exploration log, sparing the viewer no detail. Christo's drawings and collages show the installation from every vantage point, close-up to panoramic. Some are small and humdrum, others elaborate and impressive, like an eight-foot-long collage dated 2003, depicting the banners close up and receding on their long march, with buildings in the background. This work is topped by an aerial photograph of Central Park and a sketch of some technical details with an actual snippet of fabric.

The photographs, mostly by Wolfgang Volz, exclusive photographer for Christo's projects since 1972, range from the first meeting between Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their lawyer, Theodore W. Kheel, with Gordon J. Davis, then the New York City parks commissioner, in April 1980 (a poignant note here is the visible advance in age of the participants as the years roll by), to a meeting of Community Board 8 in March 2003, at which the artist's contract with the city is explained by Jack T. Linn, an assistant commissioner of parks and recreation.

Slightly less repetitive are color shots of the various manufacturing processes: the making of steel plates (5,290 tons of them) for the base weights at the ISG steel mill in Coatesville, Pa.; the weaving of more than 119,556 miles of saffron-colored nylon thread into 1,006,620 square feet of recyclable nylon fabric at the J. Schilgen Company in Emsdetten, Germany; the manufacture of the vinyl poles that hold the panels at the North American Profiles Group plant in Holmes, N.Y. (No one can say the Christo team doesn't do its bit toward fuller employment.)

And then there are samples of the tangible results of all this busyness: solid steel bases each weighing between 614 and 815 pounds; steel leveling plates to ensure the verticality of the poles; the vinyl poles themselves; the fabric panels (each rolled around a cardboard tube three inches in diameter in preparation for unfurling); bolts and self-locking nuts that will total 165,704.

Whew! These dumbfounding statistics make it clear why the cost of this enterprise is estimated to approach $20 million (including a $3 million donation by Christo to the Central Park Conservancy). The artist has always said he supports his enterprises through the sale of drawings and models, with no government funds involved. And as for the materials themselves, Christo says they are all subject to recycling.

But what about the end product of all this? In all fairness, that can't be weighed until the actual installation is in place. Supposedly that installation will result in no damage to the park.

Yet there's no denying that Christo's work has in the past achieved some beautiful effects. I will always remember the magical sight in 1972 of the orange Valley Curtain suspended between two hills against a background of grayish peaks in Rifle, Colo., lasting for nearly a day before the wind destroyed it.

Nor will I forget the stunning view, from a helicopter, of the bright pink skirts inflecting the tiny green bits of land they billowed out from in the "Surrounded Islands" project of 1983 in Miami's Biscayne Bay. Neither of these, nor any of Christo's other projects, as far as I know, was destined to be permanent. The successful struggle to realize them, and then to document their existence, seemed to satisfy the artist.

Paradoxically, it's the ephemerality of his ambitious projects that give them their true strength. Operating on a grand scale, boldly moving in on nature or man-made architectural schemes, he has the chutzpah to work his way with them, then walk away, leaving echoes in living minds and documents for the archives. It's not a bad way of imposing art on us; after all, look at the ugly public statues that now pepper the park. Unlike Christo's work, they aren't temporary.

"Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates, Central Park, New York" is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, (212) 535-7710, through July 25.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

November 23, 2004

Christo 'Gates' Arriving in Central Park Next Week

By CAROL VOGEL

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...render.450.jpg
A collage depicting part of Christo's plan to bring saffron to Central Park next February, the culmination of a quarter century of effort.

The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation of 7,500 gates in Central Park will begin next week, it was announced yesterday.

"The Gates," as they are called, will be festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels and will line 23 miles of pedestrian paths from Feb. 12 to 27. They are being made in Queens and are nearly finished. The artists say they have been working on the project for 20 years.

Details of the installation were announced at a news conference by Deputy Mayor Patricia E. Harris; Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe; Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin; Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein; and Cristyne L. Nicholas, the chief executive of NYC & Company, the city's tourism marketing group.

Materials, including the 15,000 steel bases needed to support "The Gates," will begin arriving in the park on Dec. 1.

While they are on view, the Central Park Conservancy will set up what officials there call warming huts throughout Central Park. They will also offer information on the project and sell souvenirs like posters, postcards, T-shirts and maps to support Nurture New York's Nature Inc., a nonprofit organization for the arts and the environment.

For 18 months organizing the installation has been like pulling together "a military operation,'' Mr. Benepe said.

In addition to the logistics of the installation itself, there is the issue of providing proper security while the park has tourists from around the world. Yesterday Mr. Benepe said additional security would be provided by the Parks Department along with private security provided by the artists.

Guided trolley and walking tours will be offered, and the Metropolitan Museum will open its roof to visitors for the first time during the winter.

For schoolchildren, the New York City Department of Education has created an instructional guide that is being distributed through the city school system.

" 'The Gates' are for everyone,'' Deputy Mayor Harris said. "Public art is wonderful, surprising, amusing and sometimes confusing. The Christos do not accept sponsorship. The city will bear no expense.''

The artists have historically paid for all their public art projects, which over the years included wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin with more than a million square feet of aluminum-colored fabric and swathing the Pont Neuf in Paris with champagne-colored textile, through the sale of their artworks. They estimate "The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979-2005'' will cost about $20 million.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Bets on whether the "ripped from the headlines" Law & Order episode featuring a foppish, egomanicial "Artiste" will air this season or next?

http://www.nyc.gov/html/thegates/home.html

January 4, 2005

Work Begins on Colossal Artwork-in-the-Park

By CAROL VOGEL

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One of Christo's drawings for "The Gates," works that are being sold to help finance the giant project.

Under the watchful gaze of the creators, a crew of roughly 100 workers began lowering thousands of steel bases onto the walkways of Central Park yesterday in preparation for the biggest public art project the city has ever seen, at least since the park itself was designed in 1857: "The Gates," by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

The workers, who ranged from musicians to out-of-work actors to forklift operators, gathered at 7 a.m. at the Central Park Boathouse for a briefing by, among others, the artists. A little while later, at the staging area at 102nd Street just beneath the Harlem Meer, where the steel bases were stacked, men and women in yellow vests waved orange caution flags at pedestrians while others, wielding measuring tapes and string, began carefully placing the bases in areas designated with a stenciled maple leaf, about 12 feet apart. Eventually, the bases will support 7,500 gates festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels along 23 miles of the park's pedestrian walkways - from 59th Street to 110th Street, east and west.

The $20 million project, a quarter-century in the making and financed by the artists, will go on full view on Feb. 12 and remain until Feb. 27. It is expected to attract thousands of art lovers from around the world. The artists are trying to create "a visual golden river appearing and disappearing through the bare branches of the trees, highlighting the shapes of the footpaths," according to a brochure explaining the project. The color was chosen to cast a warm glow over the park at a gray time of year.

Though Christo and his collaborator and wife, Jeanne-Claude, were in the park yesterday greeting the crews, most days Christo has been closeted in his SoHo studio making drawings of the gates as fast as he can. As soon as he finishes a work, Jeanne-Claude gets in touch with an interested collector or museum to try to sell it in order to pay for "The Gates."

"He only has 40 more days left to make the preparatory drawings," Jeanne-Claude said in a telephone interview on Sunday. "Once 'The Gates' are up, Christo stops drawing."

In 2004, she said, the couple sold $15.1 million worth of Christo's creations, everything from recent drawings of "The Gates" to a sculpture of a life-size storefront dating from 1964, which the Würth Museum in Kunzelsau, Germany, bought for $3 million. They also sold a significant amount of work in 2003 that will go toward the current project's cost.

In addition to the passionate collectors from around the world who have bought their work, Jeanne-Claude said, museums like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Diego Museum in La Jolla and the Würth Museum have all purchased drawings of "The Gates." The largest of these have been selling for $600,000.

The artists have historically sold their work to pay for all their public art projects. Over the years, these have included wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin with more than a million square feet of aluminum-colored fabric and swathing the Pont Neuf in Paris with a champagne-hued textile.

Two years ago, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg first announced that "The Gates" would come to Central Park, he, along with officials from the New York City Parks Department and the Central Park Conservancy, emphasized that the project would not cost the city a penny. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are responsible for paying for all materials, labor and installation. They have also agreed to pay the city for additional security during the period that "The Gates" is on view.

The city's Economic Development Corporation estimates that the project will generate more than $80 million in revenue for New York during a traditionally dead winter month. NYC & Company, the city's tourism marketing group, said that once visitors made the pilgrimage to see "The Gates," they would also be staying at hotels and going to restaurants, museums, Broadway shows and other attractions, adding up to a significant economic boost for the city. (In 1981, the New York City Parks Department denied the artists a permit to put up "The Gates," which at that point involved drilling holes in the ground to stabilize the steel supports. Over the years, however, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have modified the project considerably.)

For several months the cafe in the Central Park Boathouse has been taking reservations for lunch and dinner during the 16-day exhibition. Officials at the Metropolitan Museum, whose rooftop is being opened especially for visitors to view the project, say both its trustees' dining room and its Petrie Court cafe have been taking reservations for the same period.

Turning "The Gates" from the artists' 26-year dream into a reality has taken years of planning and testing. Vince Davenport, the chief engineer and director of construction, and his wife, Jonita, the project director, have been working alongside Christo and Jeanne-Claude since 1989 - for the last three years exclusively on "The Gates." At their home in Leavenworth, Wash., they created a life-size test where 18 gates were installed for seven months through the rains, snow and high winds of winter.

"I'm under the gun now," Mr. Davenport said. "I sleep till about 4 o'clock, and then my stomach starts churning." He has supervised every detail that has gone into the making of the gates themselves, from finding the right materials - which include more than 5,000 tons of steel, about two-thirds of the amount used to make the Eiffel Tower - to figuring out with park officials how to get the materials from assembly plants in Queens into the park in a way that does not disturb the public, to making sure the installation is as simple as putting together a giant Lego set.

"There are so many details," he said. "You have to be ready for anything." He has bought 150 snow shovels to clean the paths, in case it snows.

From a trailer adjacent to the Central Park Boathouse, the Davenports run a command center. Mrs. Davenport handles the day-to-day details. She also hired the crew of 1,100 workers, who have come from 45 different states.

The couple moved to New York two years ago to work on "The Gates." It is by far their biggest logistical undertaking, bigger than wrapping the Reichstag or planting a forest of giant umbrellas in rice paddies near Tokyo.

"You cannot overplan something like this," Mrs. Davenport said. "Our children are grown up, so we can devote 110 percent to the project."

Describing the workers, she said, "We have retired Air Force people, doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, teachers." Many people who work on Christo and Jeanne-Claude's projects, she explained, have had experience in the film industry or in organizing events like rock concerts. There are several different kinds of workers; the most inexperienced are paid the minimum wage, $6 an hour, plus one free hot meal a day; professional workers, like the forklift operators, are paid a salary for the entire project.

All the hiring was done by e-mail messages. Once word spread that they were gearing up for "The Gates," Mrs. Davenport said, she received inquiries from more than 2,000 applicants, out of which she chose 1,100.

"Christo and Jeanne-Claude give first preference to local workers," Mrs. Davenport said. "And to those who have worked on previous projects. They recognize loyalty."

Each worker gets a special "Gates" uniform (to keep) designed by Christo. Jeanne-Claude declined to describe it, saying she was afraid that if she did, there would be a rash of knockoffs for sale.

Traditionally, Mrs. Davenport said, the workers are a jovial group. "Lots of long-lasting friendships are made," she said. "There's always a baby born after every project. But this one is in winter, so we'll have to see."

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Thousands of steel bases will hold "The Gates," an artwork by Christo and Jeanne-Claude now being installed in Central Park.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Central Park pictures from 9 January 2005.

Christo's Gates and Harlem Meer.

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Christo's Gates - near Conservatory Garden.

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Christo's Gates - near North Meadow.

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Christo's Gates, near the Pool.

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A young visitor to the park and Christo's Gates, Central Park.

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11-Jan-2005

New York Art Project Made in Germany

Ever since they shrouded Berlin's Reichstag, most Germans know artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Germany plays a role in their latest work in New York too, this time weaving and stitching their trademark fabric.

A decade ago, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created a sensation when they swaddled the German Reichstag or parliament building in shimmering silver fabric for two weeks in a statement of Berlin's Cold War east-west political divide.

As the artist duo prepare for their latest art installation in New York -- setting up 7,500 gates hung with panels of saffron-colored fabric in Central Park -- Germany is once again involved. Few know that much of the handiwork for "The Gates," as the New York art installation is called, was done across the Atlantic in small workshops in sleepy German towns.

And, as if in a continuing vein of the artists' Reichstag project, Germany's once divided halves are in it together: a manufacturing company in Taucha near Leipzig in eastern Germany and a weaving mill in the town of Emsdette, near Münster in western Germany, have labored separately to ensure that "The Gates" opens as scheduled on Feb. 12.

Both companies have worked for the Bulgarian-born Christo and his French wife and co-artist Jeanne-Claude before. There's little doubt that the high-profile New York project is a further feather in their cap.

Klaus Schirmer, head of production at the Schilden company, which wove the sturdy sheets of polyamide imprinted with an intricate honeycomb design in saffron yellow for "The Gates," said it wasn't a routine commission.

"It is definitely special. It's probably not everyday that one can associate art with a technical weaving mill. Thus this whole Christo thing is really special and of course very, very important to us," Schirmer told Deutsche Welle during the manufacturing stage last year.

Christo reportedly paid the weaving mill around €400,000 ($524,000) for 100,000 square meters of polyamide textile, the normal price according to the company.

For the tiny sewing workshop in Taucha, which belonged to the Communist East German government and has now been bought over by the Swiss Bieri Group, the Christo commission brought welcome relief to its workers.

"It's a nice change," Susann Reihe, who has been stitching together the fabric panels for Christo and Jeanne-Claude's New York artwork for the past year in Taucha, told German broadcaster WDR. "We normally do protective weather-proof covers for cars, party-tents and the like, that demands a whole lot of painstaking work," Reihe said. "This is really lovely in contrast."

Christo's project manager Wolfgang Volz said that the Taucha-based Bieri Zeltaplan company had already proven its skills and quality during the Reichstag wrapping project.

"At the time we had a really good experience with them," Volz told WDR. "That's why we approached them again."

Roland Eilenberger, head of Bieri Zeltaplan is clear that the commission has also brought the company much prestige in their line of work.

"Naturally, you can't market such a project in the same way that you would perhaps bring out a luxurious product on the market," Eilenberger said. "But, overall, in the textile industry it's pretty unique to able to work and complete such a mammoth project."

The company shipped off the last of the fabric panels to New York last November.

"The Gates" is just the latest in a string of gigantic public art pieces that the conceptual artists are known for, most of which have involved wrapping swathes of fabric around massive objects.

Among their more memorable projects, was a hanging of a curtain between two peaks in a Colorado valley, wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris, embellishing several islands off Florida with tutus, the wrapping of the Reichstag and opening 3,100 umbrellas in Japan and California.

"The Gates," which like most of the artist duo's works is monumental but temporary, will consist of five-meter-high gates placed at intervals of about 3.5 meters along 37 kilometers of footpaths throughout New York's Central Park. The saffron-colored fabric panels will be suspended from each gate, falling to two meters above the ground.

The installation is designed to pay tribute to the park's half-planned topography as well as to evoke the structure of the surrounding city blocks.

As with most of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's projects, the fabric is central to the installation. This time the saffron color is meant to symbolize a park in full bloom.

Author DW staff (sp)

http://www.dw-world.de © Deutsche Welle

January 12, 2005

PUBLIC LIVES

Handling the Nuts and Bolts of Colossal Art

By ROBIN FINN

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"The challenge to me is, how do you build it so that they aesthetically like it?" said Vince Davenport.

VINCE DAVENPORT, the obsessively innovative engineer of "The Gates," the $20 million outdoor art extravaganza designed for Central Park by the conceptual artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, is a bundle of nerves inside his puffy black goose-down vest. Shy? Not at all. Anxious to get back to work? Absolutely. His adrenaline is pumping full throttle as he fidgets in a chair in the deserted banquet room of the Boathouse restaurant.

Feb. 12-27 is show time, and that makes January crunchtime. His wife, Jonita, an efficiency expert who juggles the project's myriad administrative details from an inelegant white trailer parked beside the restaurant, won't let him forget it. She also, he adds drolly, complains that whenever he gets going full-tilt on a Christo project, their love life takes a back seat to his work. "My mind just goes out in left field and stays there." He fantasizes about nuts, bolts and PVC tubing, dreams of 5,000 tons of steel leveling plates. In the early stages of the design process, he exhibits the traits of a mad scientist, routinely leaping out of bed in the middle of the night to rush out to his workshop and jot down a theory.

Fortunately for the Davenports' marriage, Christo's installations are temporary propositions. And fortunately for Mr. Davenport, Christo is enough of "a frustrated engineer himself" that he doesn't conjure up the impossible: he settles for the grandiose and unprecedented.

"For me, the biggest challenge of working with Christo and Jeanne-Claude is that you're designing something that's never been done before and will never be done again. Every project is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But it takes a person like myself who thrives on solving problems."

Turning the vision of a pair of visionaries into a 23-mile marathon trail incorporating a million square feet of golden fabric that billows from 7,500 custom-made gates held together by 165,000 bolts is, he says, "a logistical nightmare."

"I'm not an artist, and I never envision what Christo and Jeanne-Claude see as far as the beauty of the thing goes," says Mr. Davenport, a compact man with a freckled, weather-beaten forehead. "I'm too concerned with making it come to life. The challenge to me is, how do you build it so that they aesthetically like it? Where do I get the parts? How do I manufacture it?"

But it is art, after all, with every detail meticulously documented by his history-conscious employer, who conceived the idea of adorning the park with gates in 1979 and was rejected by the city in 1981. The responsibility to do this right is all-consuming.

But that's what makes it irresistible. The perfect project, actually, for a fellow so hyperactive that, back in kindergarten in Kansas City, Mo., his teacher used to tie him to his chair with a towel, a tactic that prompted, he says wryly, laughter rather than censure from his parents. The oldest of eight children, Mr. Davenport, 68, inherited his technical wizardry from his father, a farmer and roofer with an eighth-grade education but a sophisticated grasp of mechanics and engineering. He could fix or build anything.

So can Mr. Davenport. He holds no engineering degrees but has been fixated on building since he received his first Erector set. His workshop at home in Leavenworth, Wash., where he passes his downtime building the occasional condominium or pizza parlor, is three times the size of his house.

CHRISTO came calling in 1989, in search of a contractor to puzzle out the best way to install 1,760 yellow umbrellas in the mountains just off Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles. Mr. Davenport, by then semiretired from a lucrative career as a general contractor in Southern California, took the job for the wackiness of the challenge - not as an art lover. The challenge proved addictive, and he has been with Christo and his spouse, Jeanne-Claude, ever since, first as a consultant for "Wrapped Reichstag" in Berlin (10 miles of blue rope was used to wrap the building in silver fabric), next as the design engineer in 1996 for the as-yet-unrealized "Over the River" installation on 40 miles of the Arkansas River in Colorado.

But "The Gates" sets the bar for difficulty, and Mr. Davenport originally backed away from it because the first plans called for drilling 15,000 holes in the park to anchor the gates.

"I said: 'Christo, this park is the eighth wonder of the world. No way in hell can we drill 15,000 holes in it. They'll laugh us out of town.' " So Christo reapplied to the parks department and the Central Park Conservancy in 2002 with a no-holes plan. It was accepted. Mr. Davenport had three months to invent a working prototype.

The blue eyes behind his bifocals are bloodshot. He has lost 15 pounds the wrong way - via stress - and he swears his hair, of which there admittedly isn't much, was a darker hue of gray when he started this project three years ago. Does it strike him as a tad insane to devote three years to a colossal installation with a two-week lifespan? He shrugs. That's the Christo mystique. Perishable art.

"I'll look at it when we're done and say, 'Yes, I guess it is beautiful,' " he says, "but the truth is, the day this is up and running, in Christo's mind, he's already onto the next project." He shakes his head and heads outside to count his gates. Again.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com

Open shutter on 'Gates'

Monday, January 17th, 2005

It took 26 years for landscape artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, to get permission to erect their "Gates" project in Central Park.

Legendary documentary film maker Albert Maysles caught the process on tape.

About 100 hours of it, anyway.

And although Christo's 7,500 tubular gates with saffron-colored fabric panels will decorate 23 miles of pathways in the park for a mere 15 days, Feb. 12-27, Maysles, 71, and directing partner Antonio Ferrera, 28, promise a film for the ages.

They also pledge to make a distinctly New York film, starring Central Park and what Maysles calls "the collage" of people around it.

"Central Park is sort of this egalitarian place, this Arcadia, where all of New York comes together to play and do their thing," Ferrera said. "'The Gates'" sort of underlines that."

Maysles and his late brother, David, used hand-held cameras and sound equipment to revolutionize documentaries with films like "The Beatles: First U.S. Visit" and "Gimme Shelter," their 1974 film about the Rolling Stones tour that culminates in the disastrous California concert at Altamont.

The brothers caught on film a Hells Angels member, hired to provide security, killing a fan who tried to rush the stage. Maysles has one of the cameras used at Altamont in his home at the Dakota on Central Park West.

Maysles and the Christos have a long history together - "The Gates" will be the sixth documentary Maysles has done with them since he and his brother met the pair in Paris in 1962.

The collaboration has worked because their methods are the same, a sort of Zen acceptance that whatever happens, happens and becomes a part of the artistic process.

"In a good documentary, you never know what will happen next. Half or more of the Christos' projects is the unknown reaction to it," Maysles said. "They don't know what the weather is going to be. That's okay. Maybe it will snow. Maybe a rainbow crosses the park at that time. So much the better."

The city's reluctance to approve the "Gates" project added a bit of cinéma vérité to the film. Because they have film spanning each of the Christos' requests and city rejections since the artists' first attempt in 1979, the audience gets to watch various officials, and the Christos, age on film.

"So the viewer gets to watch these evolutions of the project and the people involved," Ferrara said. "People go from being young people in the '70s to who they are today. One guy who was against it has hair in the '70s. Now he's bald."

"So many people think of interviews in documentaries, but what is important is that person you are filming experiencing something," Maysles said. "You are experiencing things those people experience."

The Christos modified their proposal over the years to win city approval. For instance, they abandoned the idea of drilling holes to anchor each gate in the pathway and instead constructed portable stands for each.

And the couple's success over the years with their massive works - they covered the Reichstag in Germany in silver fabric and strung yellow umbrellas across the California countryside, for example - made the Central Park project more palatable to local officials.

Maysles said he is also proud that this is a film without a point.

"At our best, we are making a film that has no particular purpose," he said. "You talk to the Christos, they say there is no purpose to their art, just a thing of beauty to be enjoyed. So is this film. When you think about it, Shakespeare, what is the purpose?"

The documentary crew spends hours a day filming all aspects of "The Gates" assembly and construction. The filmmakers expect to winnow the estimated 100 hours of videotape to a 90-minute film.

Then there is the money.

Unlike the Christos, who pay for all of their projects by selling the equivalent of storyboard sketches of each - Maysles has two of them - the filmmaker is still raising the estimated $80,000 he will need to complete the documentary.

Press Release Source: New York Magazine

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, creators of The Gates in Central Park, to Sign Copies of New York Magazine on Tuesday, February 15th
Thursday January 20, 10:30 am ET
Artists to Autograph Limited-Edition Artwork in the Issue on Stands Now

NEW YORK, Jan. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Christo and Jeanne-Claude will be signing copies of New York Magazine, which includes a drawing of The Gates, on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 from 4 to 6:30 PM at the Central Park Boathouse. In the issue on stands now through January 30, 2005, New York Magazine has commemorated the incredible spectacle of 7,500 colorful 'gates' along 23 miles of pedestrian walkway with an drawing created by Christo especially for the magazine. The Gates in Central Park, 26 years in the making, will be installed in Central Park February 12 - 27. Buy your copy of New York Magazine (cover title, "You'll Never Have Stress in this Town Again") now to commemorate this once-in-a-lifetime event.

The Passion of the Christos

February 5, 2005

Art Project Pilgrims Prepare to Install 'The Gates'

By CAROL VOGEL

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/o.gifne by one, they emerged from the Bliss Street subway station in Sunnyside, Queens, on Thursday afternoon, nervously eyeing the idling yellow school buses that were waiting to ferry them to an assembly plant. Mutual strangers, they were a blend of New Yorkers - a retired math teacher, a medical litigator, a street artist, a fitness instructor - and out-of-towners, like an architect from Denver and a college student from Virginia.

These 100 worshipful pilgrims are among 600 or so paid volunteers who will put their lives on hold for six straight days to help install "The Gates," a giant $20 million project by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude that opens in Central Park next Saturday. The workers' task, starting Monday, is to assemble 7,500 gates festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels along 23 miles of the park's pedestrian walkways, from 59th Street to 110th Street, east to west.

Once the workers had assembled inside the cavernous factory, on a side street near Fresh Pond Road in Maspeth, Jeanne-Claude and Christo, in jeans and sneakers, appeared briefly to greet them and to remind them to be on their best behavior in Central Park. "You are our ambassadors," said Jeanne-Claude, whose signature flame-orange hair could almost be viewed as a live advertisement for the project.

"One question you will be asked: 'What is it for?' " she said. "It's for nothing. It's only a work of art. Nothing more." Then she and Christo were off in a twinkle, dashing to Manhattan to get back to work.

Some of the enlisted workers signed up for the project years ago by e-mail. Preference was given to New York-area residents and to people who had worked on previous projects by Christo, like wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin with a million square feet of fabric or placing 1,760 yellow umbrellas in the foothills about 60 miles north of Los Angeles.

The pay is minimum wage, but no one seemed to mind. "If you've ever done it before, you'll want to do it again," said William McMullen, the architect from Denver, who worked on the umbrellas project in 1991. "It was a blast."

As an architect, he said, he is especially intrigued by the construction of the gates. Like a giant erector set, each is composed of a pair of orange 16-foot-tall vertical vinyl poles topped by a horizontal pole rigged with a pleated orange fabric panel. (During the installation next week, the gates' fabric will remain within a tubelike cocoon.) Each pole is attached to a steel base - weighing anywhere from 615 to 837 pounds, depending on the width of the gate - that rests on the surface of the walkways. The upper corners where the poles meet are fitted with recyclable cast aluminum reinforcements.

The gates were designed so that with careful instruction and a bit of muscle, unskilled workers could put them together.

The volunteers were divided into three groups for the training session. One team watched slides of previous Christo projects while waiting to receive special ID cards.

A second group learned how to attach a leveling plate - a steel plate on which the vertical poles will be placed - securely to a steel base. At first, it seemed a little tricky: the worker starts by removing two orange safety cones fitted into either side of each base. Then the leveling plate must be attached to the base itself on a perfectly horizontal plane - not at an incline - so the vertical poles stay properly in place.

Assisting Vince Davenport, the project's chief engineer and construction director, and his wife, Jonita, the project coordinator, were 10 skilled workers who will be a part of a larger team supervising in the park. Most are experienced stagehands or producers who have worked on movie crews or have been studio managers for artists; others are professional organizers who have previously set up events like rock concerts in Central Park.

The third team was taken to a courtyard behind the plant where three sets of gates were lying on the ground, ready to be assembled. Dividing that team into groups of six, the skilled workers assigned two people to hold the bottom of each pole; two people to insert the horizontal poles into the vertical ones; and two people to align the aluminum corners that will ensure that the vertical poles stay in place when the gates are hoisted into place.

This was the first of three training days (two sessions per day) led by the skilled workers. "I'm in Central Park every day with clients," said Megan Banwart, a fitness instructor who attended the Thursday afternoon session. "So how could I not get involved in a project like this?"

None of the volunteers know exactly where they will be asked to work on Monday. On one wall of the plant is a giant map of Central Park that Mr. Davenport has divided into seven areas. Each area is divided into 21 zones, and each zone into 73 sections. "It's a logistic way of providing supervision for the entire project," Mr. Davenport explained. "There are seven area leaders, these are the most experienced people, then a zone supervisor, crew captains and team leaders."

Safety is a crucial issue for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who have occasionally met with setbacks. Two deaths resulted from "The Umbrellas, Japan-U.S.A.," in which a forest of umbrellas were planted near Tokyo and along the hillsides of Southern California in 1991. During the dismantling of the umbrellas in Japan, a man died when the arms of the crane he was operating touched a power line. In California, high winds blew an umbrella across a road and crushed a woman against a boulder.

The Davenports have drafted a schedule to ensure that no workers will be rushing through their tasks. Mr. Davenport estimates that the 600 workers will be able to install about 22 gates a day, just enough to keep them busy and complete the job at an even pace.

The workday runs from 7:30 to 4:30, weather permitting. (The recent snowstorm cost the project $250,000, Mr. Davenport noted: he had to buy snow blowers and other equipment, and it took six days and 150 people to clear snow from the steel bases.) Toward the end of the training session, all 100 trainees were asked to gather around a sample gate for the final - and most dramatic - demonstration: the unfurling of the fabric, which will take place in the park from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. next Saturday. Raising a long pole with a hook, one of the trained workers detached a small loop at one end of the tubelike cocoon. As the tube dropped to the ground, the orange pleated fabric fell gracefully between the vinyl poles.

There was a dead silence and a few teary faces, then an enthusiastic round of applause.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Nearly 30 years ago I had the privilege of working on Running Fence in Sonoma County. I participated in putting the fence up, taking it down and driving to Colorado with the construction crew to return vehicles. It was an amazing event in which to participate.

For the crew on this project, I'm sad I can't be there to do it again - have a fantastic time.
:)

The first gates are installed near the Merchant's Gate at Columbus Circle. 7 February 2005.

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Feb 7, 2005

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The installation of Christo Gates continues. Central Park near East 72nd Street. 8 February 2005.

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February 8, 2005

A Filmmaker's 50 Years of Reassuring Intimacy

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

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Albert Maysles, in his 50th year as a filmmaker, in Central Park.

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Some of Christo's gates, the subject of Albert Maysles's documentary.

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/t.gifhe scene left a lot to the imagination. On a sun-drenched day last week in Central Park, the only evidence of "The Gates," New York City's biggest public art project ever, was several thousand dark steel bases poking through a layer of snow.

But for the 78-year-old filmmaker Albert Maysles, whose mission it has been to record a quarter-century of work on the project by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the site had potential. The saffron-colored panels that will billow across 23 miles of park footpaths will not be unfurled until Saturday, but 11 days in advance, Mr. Maysles knew that people would already be talking about it.

"I'd like to find a group already involved in a discussion about the work," he said, alighting from a golf cart at the Great Lawn.

A barely perceptible frown clouded the white-haired filmmaker's face, framed by black spectacles. Except for a few pedestrians wandering by, nothing much was happening.

Finally, camera in hand, he approached a tattooed woman who was sitting on a bench in a spaghetti-strapped camisole and trousers, her two white dogs the only apparent source of warmth.

"Let me feel you," he said after a few minutes of casual conversation, placing his hand on her bare shoulder. "My God, it's warm." He turned to Antonio Ferrera, his co-filmmaker, and motioned him over. "Feel her shoulder," he said. "Do you believe it?" Mr. Ferrera reached out and touched her.

It was the Maysles technique - intimate to the point of being unnerving yet somehow, reassuringly safe. Touched by strange men in the middle of Central Park, the woman did not flinch.

And so began the first of Mr. Maysles's explorations that afternoon as he and Mr. Ferrera sidled up to bench-sitters, waved at passers-by, basked in recognition and filmed - or not, depending on their subjects' willingness - reactions to The Gates, a project that just about everyone seemed to have an opinion about, once Mr. Maysles had coaxed them into revealing it.

A chat with a transplanted Russian couple veered from Mr. Maysles's visit to Russia in 1955, when as a psychology teacher from Boston University he cajoled his way into psychiatric hospitals and recorded what was to become his first film, to the eccentricities of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, the subject of another of his documentaries, to the Russian man's own work as an artist in Central Park upon his arrival in this country in 1979.

"Christo and I are alike," said the man, Eric Freyman. "We both relied on the park to survive."

A woman who described herself as "a product of Germany after World War II" and refused to be filmed, was less enthusiastic about the project. "Nature does not need adornment," she said, her brow crinkling.

Mr. Maysles sat down, turned off his camera and began to talk. Soon, the conversation moved to Prague, where, the woman said, her Jewish mother had been forced to work in a church during the war.

"My family name is well known there, but spelled differently," he said: "Maisels." "Ah, yes, you are Albert Maysles," she replied, her face brightening. "Gimme Shelter." "Salesman." "Grey Gardens." She knew his documentaries well.

They talked a bit longer - about her former career as a language teacher, about his continuing one.

"Well, I still can't say that I approve of this," she said, finally, gesturing to the base that she was using as a footrest. "But you've convinced me to keep an open mind."

Mr. Maysles picked up his camera and walked on.

"You know, one experience leads to another," he said, inching closer to his listener until their noses were almost touching. "In the end, 'The Gates' become connectors between lives."

Mr. Maysles is well practiced in finding the connections between the environmental art visualized by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the people who experience it.

"The Gates," his sixth project with the couple, is to be shown on HBO in the fall. Tomorrow, the Museum of Modern Art will begin screenings of "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Projects Recorded, 1969-1998," which includes Mr. Maysles's films of the previous five collaborations.

Mr. Maysles met Christo and Jeanne-Claude through a friend in Paris in 1960, and they became like family, Jeanne-Claude said, when the Christos moved to New York in 1964. With his brother and co-filmmaker, David, Mr. Maysles followed the couple as they strung a rippled sheet of orange fabric between mountains in "Christo's Valley Curtain" (1974), stretched an 18-foot wall of white across Northern California in "Running Fence" (1978), skirted Biscayne Bay islands in flamingo pink in "Islands" (1986) and wrapped the Pont Neuf in gold in "Christo in Paris" (1990). He completed "Umbrellas" (1995), about the simultaneous opening of 3,100 umbrellas in California and Japan, without David, who died in 1987.

For now, all that exists of "The Gates" documentary is a five-minute trailer and a mass of film taken across more than two decades - and left to editors in Mr. Maysles's studio on West 54th Street to make sense of.

"It's a talent I don't have," he said of the editing, noting that a late-in-life diagnosis of attention deficit disorder had helped him better understand what he had always viewed as his weaknesses. "I haven't the eye."

But that disability has helped to nurture some strengths.

"I am a very, very good listener," he said. "My innate difficulty with concentration forced me to be."

A pioneer in direct cinema, the American version of French cinéma vérité, Mr. Maysles is an old-school documentarian, preferring to remain out of frame and let life speak for itself.

"When you ask a question," he said, "you already know what the answer will be."

And so he has sought out what he doesn't already know.

It was Mr. Maysles's team who filmed a man being stabbed to death during a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in the 1970 film "Gimme Shelter," Mr. Maysles who ferreted out the aspirations and disappointments of a reclusive mother and daughter in their decaying house in East Hampton, on Long Island, in "Grey Gardens" (1976). And it is Mr. Maysles whom the Christos have allowed to accompany them from intimacy to intimacy for more than three decades, from Christo's freak-out session as he watched their Colorado curtain become snagged during its unfurling in 1972 to Jeanne-Claude's singing "Oh, What a Beautiful Day," a bit off-key, in the back of a taxi cab in 2003.

"We used to tease David and Al when we were younger because once I remember they said, they want to be with us all the time, everywhere," Jeanne-Claude said in a telephone interview from her downtown loft last week. "But they have not yet caught us brushing our teeth."

"It's not only about the films of Christo," she continued. "You will see that in all of their film, David and Albert, always, they just can't help it - no matter what is happening, they cannot help but throw in a little a bit of tenderness."

David was mostly the sound, she recalled, and Albert the cameraman. David's role on "The Gates" has fallen to Mr. Ferrera, a 35-year-old writer and filmmaker with a fondness for quoting Thomas Hardy whose romantic vision seems to mesh with Mr. Maysles's own.

For "The Gates," the men have been camped out "like nomads," Mr. Ferrera said, coming and going until late into the night from their trailer next to the Central Park Boathouse, just across the park from Mr. Maysles's apartment in the Dakota.

Inside, young assistants tap away on laptops and answer phones, maintaining filming and interview schedules, keeping Mr. Maysles sated with miniature chocolate bars and, given that it is in 50th year in filmmaking, monitoring the recent run on lifetime achievement awards.

Mr. Ferrera, who met Mr. Maysles by timidly approaching him at a Film Forum screening, has worked with him since 1999.

"The greatest thing I've learned from Al is the way that compassion and openness are the only true things that will allow you to find the fullness in that which is before you," he said.

"Al does that with his camera. He's like a heat-seeking missile. It's not about shots or any of that stuff. It's about discovering what happens in life through the lens."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Newsday: February 8, 2005

'The Gates' shall be unfurled
Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude see their fleeting installation finally come to fruition

BY ARIELLA BUDICK
STAFF WRITER

Why would any artist devote decades of planning and millions of dollars to create a new project with the intention of destroying it a few weeks later?

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who long ago became famous for draping fabric across buildings, canyons and entire counties, first proposed festooning Central Park in 1979. Three mayors and countless hearings later, the couple has spent $21 million on "The Gates," a 23-mile procession of billowing, saffron-colored curtains that will be unfurled Saturday and dismantled on Feb. 28.

Why it's transitory

"One of our workers on the night shift asked me why is it temporary," Jeanne-Claude says. "I told him to think of the rainbow. And he grabbed my arm and says, 'I think I got it: If the gates were there all the time, after a while nobody would be looking at them and the magic would be gone.' And I said, 'You've got it better than most art historians.'"

Precisely because it is such a colossal undertaking, the transience of "The Gates" is central to the project's meaning. Ours is an era of great migrations, in which whole populations live with the feeling that shelter is fragile and landscape can be suddenly reshaped. The artists themselves are transplants to New York - he from Bulgaria, she from France - and their work reflects the sense of impermanence.

"Nomads one day arrive and they unfold their fabric tent and they build an entire town, and weeks later they fold up their tents and they are gone, and this nomadic quality is reflected in the fabric," says Jeanne-Claude. Then, as if to offer assurance that "The Gates" will be no didactic enterprise but a thing of visceral beauty, she segues into a different metaphor. "Fabric is also sensual, like a second skin," she says. "It moves in the wind. It is alive."

The installation has an economic life, too. It has generated more than 1,000 temporary jobs. It will probably lure hundreds of thousands of tourists who will buy meals and Broadway tickets. Sales of related posters and merchandise will benefit the nonprofit organizations Nurture New York's Nature and the Central Park Conservancy.

But nobody gets rich: The artists sell preparatory sketches, as well as works they have been hoarding for decades, and that revenue covers the expenses of this extravaganza or gets plowed into the next, a project over the Arkansas River in Colorado. If the weather or some other glitch drives up the cost by $1 million or $2 million of the artists' own money, then so be it.

"Each work is like a child of ours," Jeanne-Claude shrugs. "A father and a mother do not have a budget for a child."

Speaking as one

In the months leading up to opening day, the gangly Christo has been cloistered in the studio above the couple's SoHo loft, churning out the drawings and collages that will be the only permanent trace of "The Gates" once the vinyl poles and the nylon material have been recycled. He sleeps just a few hours a night, eats hurried meals of raw garlic with yogurt, and gives no interviews.

His partner waves all such requests away, explaining that they have fused into a single entity: Christo and Jeanne-Claude. "I live with him for 47 years, and I know exactly what he would have said. We do everything together - except we don't fly together, I do not draw and Christo never works with our accountant."

Like most of the pair's other projects - wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris, spanning a valley in Colorado, stretching a cloth fence across Sonoma and Marin counties in northern California, dotting whole landscapes with thousands of bright umbrellas - "The Gates" had to overcome a mountain range of logistical barriers. The city equivocated and objected until their fan Michael Bloomberg became mayor. Then it was just a matter of turning 5,290 tons of steel into 15,000 supports capable of withstanding February bluster, without damaging the Central Park turf or pathways.

The obstacles and the expense, while central to the process, have tended to arouse hostility, which usually takes the form of accusations that the artists are wasteful publicity-seekers. Christo and Jeanne-Claude both deny and embrace those criticisms.

"If the project was a movie set for Hollywood ... there would be no opposition," Christo told the art historian Jonathan Fineberg, discussing a work that involved encircling 11 Miami islets in floating fabric. "The great power of the project is that it's absolutely irrational, and that disturbs, angers the sound human perception of a capitalist society. That is also a part of the project ... to put in doubt all the values of everything."

Will it work in New York?

According to John Elderfield, chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, such large, theatrical and subversive work belongs in a tradition of the politically charged avant-garde of the Russian Revolution. It's hard to know how well that social critique will translate to New York City. "Public art thrives best in periods where there are widely understood communal beliefs," Elderfield says. "How can this work in a city where nobody agrees about anything? Therefore, there's something wonderfully ingenuous about the wish to do it."

Fomenting doubt about social conventions is not the same as spreading confusion, however. Perhaps because they have mystified so many people over the course of their joint career, Christo and Jeanne-Claude insist on fact-checking every article about themselves (including this one). Their Web site (www.christojeanneclaude .net) features a list of common journalistic errors, such as the recommendation: "See the artwork best by flying." The written retort resonates with Jeanne-Claude's Gallic scorn: "No! None of their work is designed for the birds, all have a scale to be enjoyed by human beings who are on the ground."

Nothing annoys them more than to be described as "wrap artists," since they also put fabric to many other uses. "When people think that we wrap everything, it means that they don't have eyes," Jeanne-Claude sputters. "It's close to cretinism."

As for the charge that they are merely chasing fame, Jeanne-Claude's answer is that their desire for recognition is profoundly human and inseparable from their desire to be good at their job. "If someone is the best garbage collector in town, he is proud of being known as the best garbage collector," she says. "Or butcher or baker."

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.

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Video: The making of 'Gates' (NYNewsday.com) Feb 1, 2005

February 9, 2005

Barbarians (Well, Mostly Art Lovers) at 'The Gates'

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

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Iris Sandkuhler, an artist and volunteer, helping to raise "The Gates."

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Caryl and Harold Unger in their Miami Beach yard with their Christo and Jeanne-Claude collectibles, including a raft used to wrap islands.

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/i.gifn 1991 David Yust clocked 22 hours staring at a forest of yellow umbrellas in a valley north of Los Angeles. He spent 13 days in Berlin in 1995 marveling at the aluminum-surfaced fabric that draped the Reichstag, once rising at 2 a.m. for a reverential photo session of the sun rising over the enfolded neo-Renaissance landmark. And next week he plans to photograph a saffron-cloaked Central Park at dawn.

Mr. Yust, 65, is part of a far-flung group of followers of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose latest public art project, "The Gates," is scheduled to open along 23 miles of the park's pedestrian walkways on Saturday. These loyal fans plot distant vacations, organize group trips and sometimes abandon jobs to bear witness to the artists' installations.

They are like the fans that long traipsed after the Grateful Dead, but with far fewer tour dates. They share the passion of people who collect milk glass, Manolo Blahniks or rare teapots, although their holdings are limited to books, pieces of fabric or, in the case of Caryl Unger, a shovel that was used to install "Surrounded Islands" in Biscayne Bay, off Miami.

Groupies? Gate-heads? They resist monikers. But their ardor for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude happenings is passionate.

Mr. Yust, an art professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, said he was first bitten by the Christo bug in 1983, when he signed on to work on "Surrounded Islands," in which 11 Florida islands were encircled by pink floating fabric, after hearing the artists speak at the university. Since then he has tried to see as many of the installations as he can.

"I thought about that project every day for the next two years," said Mr. Yust, who, like many of those who travel the country or world to see the team's work, is an artist himself. "I thought he was a big nut at that time. And I still think he is a big nut. But I am totally supportive of what he and Jeanne-Claude do. I feel they are among the last of the true idealists on the planet."

From art collectors to museum groups, tourists to paid Christo volunteers, the city expects 200,000 to flock to the city for the installation, which will remain through Feb. 27. Such figures, of course, are mere guesses for now. But there does seem to be universal agreement that in a traditionally slow tourism period, New York will draw record numbers of visitors, thanks to "The Gates."

Hotels that are usually half full or worse this time of year are reporting strong bookings, especially at establishments that line the park's perimeter. For the coming weekend, the Carlyle Hotel is 75 percent booked, a 30 percent increase over last year, said James McBride, the hotel's managing director. The hotel is offering a "Gates" package, which includes a park-view suite with catering for two hours for 25 people, at $6,000. "We booked one of them already," Mr. McBride said.

The Mark is sold out this weekend; last February, only half of the 176 rooms were booked, managers there said.

The artists estimate that thousands of people around the globe make a point of traveling to see their work, often signing on to help install the pieces. Smaller Christo communities hammer beams, tread water, twist fabric, answer phones or perform myriad other tasks to help bring a work together. There is even a blog on which visitors can record their reactions: nycgates.blogspot.com.

Those fans, as well as thousands of other visitors who are landing in New York over the next several days to behold the ornamented park, are expected to lift the city's tourism economy, usually lackluster this time of year.

"You don't go running up to New York in the middle of February from Miami," said Mrs. Unger, who is flying in on Thursday from Miami to see the installation. "But when I heard it was going to be in New York, I said to my husband, 'Please, let's go.' "

New York merchants, of course, hope the experience will be as remunerative as it is enriching. The Mandarin Oriental will offer a package including binoculars in each of its Central Park View rooms, as well as breakfast at Asiate and a Metropolitan Museum of Art book on the project, starting at $1,050 a night. La Prima Donna Restaurant will serve sautéed Prince Edward Island mussels, in a saffron cream sauce. You get the idea.

For the record, the artists do not earn income from the detritus left behind once a project is over. "The Gates" will be industrially recycled, and proceeds from the sale of "Gates" sweatshirts and other souvenirs will be donated to Nurture New York's Nature and the Central Park Conservancy. The project, which will cost more than $20 million to install, will be paid for by the artists.

Organized groups are coming from Japan, Germany and many American cities to see the work, a great many of them made up of artists or art collectors.

Ruth Halperin, chairwoman of Contemporary Collectors Circle of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, will fly in with 25 museum members on her fourth Christo trip.

"We went to Fresno to see the umbrellas," said Ms. Halperin, who is 77. "We went to Paris, and we saw "Running Fence," she said, referring to the draping of the Pont-Neuf in Champagne-colored cloth in 1985 and a 24-mile nylon curtain that stretched through Sonoma and Marin Counties in California in 1976. " 'Running Fence' - to me that was the most beautiful one," she said. "The hills were beautiful and soft, and the light as the wind blew was magic. I will never forget that for the rest of my life."

About 100 hard-core fans live out their commitment by helping to assemble the projects. Iris Sandkuhler, an artist from San Francisco, has worked on seven Christo installations to date. "I did my first one as a teenager, and now I am in my 40's," Ms. Sandkuhler said. "In 1978, an art instructor in North Carolina piled us into a van and said you have to do this," she said, describing her initiation, a modest Christo project involving the wrapping of some streets in Kansas City.

The commitment is not without its physical challenges. "Working in water in the Biscayne Bay," she said, "we had to lace the panels together, and there was nothing to stand on, so we were in the water floundering around."

"But the hardest one for me," Ms. Sandkuhler mused, "was when I worked for them in Paris, and I was sleeping on a couch in the office right next to the bathroom."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The installation of Christo Gates continues. Sheep Meadow. 8 February 2005.

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The installation of Christo Gates continues. Central Park near Eagles and Prey sculpture. 8 February 2005.

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February 10, 2005

Central Park Makeover: Reality Show, in a Way

By CAROL VOGEL

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The volunteers installing Christo's "Gates" in Central Park share a resolve to be a part of the city's biggest public-art happening ever.

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Paid volunteers raising part of the "Gates" installation in Central Park.

Slide Show: It's a Wrap

Video: Work Begins on "The Gates"

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/a.gift 6:45 a.m. on Tuesday, as the sun was beginning to rise over Central Park, the Loeb Boathouse was buzzing. The artist Christo stood outside, admiring the way the soft morning light bathed the orange gates that teams of workers had put into place on Monday.

It was Day Two of installing his vast $20 million public art project, created with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, and there was a sense that there was no time to lose. So far, 261 16-foot-tall gates had sprouted around the park. By tomorrow evening, 7,500 will have to be in place along the park's pedestrian walkways from 59th Street to 110th Street, in time for the saffron-colored fabric that adorns the gates to be unfurled around 8:30 on Saturday morning. (The project will remain through Feb. 27.)

Inside the boathouse, the 600-odd paid volunteers enlisted for the five-day job were chatting over coffee and rolls, waiting to head off to their assigned areas. Things had gotten off to a slow start on Monday. It had taken time for the workers to assemble, find their work areas and figure out the most efficient way to work.

Still, every team seemed competitively conscious of its accomplishments. "We installed 27 gates yesterday," boasted Ann W. Richards, the former governor from Texas.

"There's something magical about people coming together for a common purpose without something for them to gain," she added. "I'm having a ball."

"There's real energy," agreed Antoine Douaihy, who oversees 150 people in 14 teams as the leader of Area One - extending from 59th Street to 65th Street and from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West - and in real life works in film production. "One team refused to stop until they had put up 25 gates."

Also savoring the scene was Anne L. Strauss, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who organized an exhibition of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Gates"-related drawings, collages, photographs and maps last year. "There are a lot of art people here," she said.

While each team seemed diverse in age and profession, from college students to retired teachers and doctors, all had a common bond: a resolve to be a part of the city's biggest public-art happening ever.

By 7:30 a.m., after a pep talk from Vince Davenport, the project's chief engineer and construction director, and from Capt. Andrew Capul, commanding officer of the Central Park Precinct, everyone headed off to their assigned areas.

Although Mr. Douaihy called the 261 gates installed on Monday a "respectable" figure, he said that 400 to 500 more would have to go up Tuesday if the effort was to be completed by Friday.

Cruising around the park in a golf cart, he consulted with Guy Efrat, one of the area's so-called "zone supervisors." (Each area is divided into zones, and each zone into teams.) Mr. Efrat, who also works in movie production, was overseeing three teams in Mr. Douaihy's area.

Like mutual strangers in a reality television show, each team felt somewhat randomly thrown together. But often, the common strand was art: Area One, Section 10, for instance, was made up of a performance artist, an advertising art director, a retired doctor/Yale University professor, a sculptor/gilder, an architect, an architectural draftsman, a freelance stagehand and a recent college graduate who is on his way to become an intern at the Chinati Foundation, a contemporary-art organization in Marfa, Tex.

"I've never seen so many artsy people in my life," said Huascar Pimentel, the stagehand, who is one of the professional workers that was assigned to the team. "These guys are great - they don't mind getting their hands dirty."

Nor did the men mind taking directions from a woman, although some of them joked about it. ("You don't see this much cooperation in the workplace," said Robert Steigelman, the advertising art director.) Catherine Courter, the sculptor and gilder, had been named the team's captain by the organizers. Michael Bianco, the recent graduate, and Arvin Garay-Cruz, the architect, had been asked to be the "levelers," the team members who made sure that the steel plates anchoring the poles in heavy bases were installed correctly.

Each worker had attended a four-hour training session last week where the professionals took notes on those who demonstrated leadership ability (potential team captains) or mechanical ability (levelers).

It took only about three minutes for the workers to actually hoist a gate into place. The hard part was using the right size horizontal poles (which depended on the width of walkways) and wielding nuts, bolts and wrenches to attach parts like the orange boxlike sleeves that conceal the metal plates. And some spots were more difficult than others. On heavily trafficked paths, installers often had to stop working to let pedestrians pass. Hilly or narrow paths were harder to work on.

And then there was the saccharine music emanating nonstop from the ice rink. And the remarks of passersby. "I can't work it out - it horrifies me that this is costing $20 million, I don't care who's paying for it," a man carrying a briefcase said as he hurried past the workers of Area One, Section 10, on West 59th Street behind the Wollman Skating Rink.

Still, most people who stopped to chat had positive reactions. "I'm not sure about the color, but I'm a fan," Douglas F. Eaton, a United States District Court judge, said after his daily round of skating.

On Monday the team members installed only 18 gates. But by 10:15 on Tuesday morning they were already putting up the 11th of the day. The key was establishing a rhythm: one person repeatedly readied the equipment for the levelers, and the levelers would begin their task as others trundled the gates over to their assigned positions.

"This is my cheap and cheerful vacation," Robert Condon, the architectural draftsman, said, holding a pole in position. By noon the team headed back to the boathouse for lunch, leaving Mr. Pimentel behind to watch the equipment. (That job rotates among teammates each day.)

"Can you believe it, this was conceived the year I was born?" Mr. Cruz, 26, said as the group ambled toward the boathouse. (Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been working on "The Gates" since 1979.)

"If you look at one gate, it's ugly, it looks like a guillotine," he mused. "It's the multiplicity of them that makes it a total artwork."

"The more go up, the cooler it looks," Ms. Courter agreed over lunch in the packed boathouse. Team members sat together, chatting happily while keeping a wary ear open to find out how many gates the other teams had installed.

Then it was back to their assigned area near the rink. By 4 p.m., Area One, Section 10, had managed to install a total of 35 gates. Exhausted, the team members returned their supplies to a nearby staging area and began planning for Wednesday.

After ticking off the completed gates on a map, Ms. Courter started counting those that would have to be installed on Wednesday.

"Thirty-five again tomorrow," she said. "No problem."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Christo's Gates around the Central Park's Pond, with Plaza Hotel. 9 February 2005.

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February 11, 2005

Art in the Park Calls for More Than Velvet Ropes

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/i.gift is one thing to guard a Fabergé egg or the Mona Lisa. Any experienced security expert can list the basic tactics: velvet ropes, glass display cases and infrared beams.

But how to protect art made up of 7,500 gates sprawled over 23 miles of trail in an 843-acre park whose entrances are never fully closed, even at night?

The problem with protecting public art is, well, it's public.

The usual safeguards are of little use when the artists envision visitors walking through their creation, a luminous river of saffron fabric in Central Park.

"To cordon this off would be detrimental to the aesthetic of the display," said Chris Grniet, a vice president at Kroll, the security company.

So "The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979-2005," by the husband and wife team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, has prompted one of the largest efforts by the New York Police Department to protect a single installation of art - proportional to the attention-grabbing nature of the exhibit, which is expected to draw at least 200,000 tourists to New York when it opens tomorrow for a 16-day run.

The department is dispatching helicopters that broadcast live aerial feeds, building a 24-hour command center in the Loeb Boathouse at the park and adding several hundred police officers to the park's 125-person police force. There will be 20 officers on horseback and 43 on scooter patrol. In addition, the artists have hired a 36-person private security team to maintain round-the-clock surveillance.

Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, said the artists would reimburse the city for any costs it incurs, including the increased security.

The department has also set up an 87-officer detail to translate in five foreign languages: French, Italian, German, Japanese and Chinese. And it has published a guide to the exhibit.

Officials say the exhibit was designed to be durable. "The nature of the installation makes it very hard to vandalize," said Adrian Benepe, the New York City parks commissioner.

But public art has always been a target for vandalism, especially the popular animal statues that many cities have commissioned over the last several years.

In July, a 250-pound panda statue, along with its 650-pound concrete base, was stolen from a busy street corner in Washington, baffling the police.

The body turned up five months later - dumped in a creek 20 miles away.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

February 11, 2005

Above the Park, When 'The Gates' Open

By JAMES BARRON

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Ben and Donna Rosen have floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of Central Park and plans for a party on Saturday.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/s.gifuddenly, New Yorkers with friends in high places are wondering: Are their friends in the right high places, that is, overlooking Central Park? And when is their party?

"The Gates," a $20 million art project by the artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, opens tomorrow in Central Park, and it promises to be a social event, not just an artistic one.

"Everybody I know who lives around the park is doing parties for 'The Gates,' said Annaliese Soros, who is planning two parties in her apartment on Central Park West. "The Christo events are happenings, and they attract a lot of enthusiasm. They attract a lot of people. They do something very special and very different. Berlin had five million tourists when he draped the Reichstag. We won't have that many here."

She meant in the city, not in her apartment. But some party-givers say the crowd they are expecting is bigger than they had originally planned. The guest list grew as friends called, and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends.

The 7,500 gates in the project have been installed throughout this week. Tomorrow morning, fabric will be unfurled from atop them. The project will be on view for 16 days.

Donna Rosen, who lives on the 43rd floor of a building a couple of blocks south of Mrs. Soros's, recalled her conversations with her caterer, Gretchen Aquanita, as they planned an open house in Mrs. Rosen's apartment. "I said, 'I think 75,' " Mrs. Rosen said. "Then I called again, 'I think we might be over 100.' Then I called, '200.' She said, 'Ahhgggh.' "

As the gates were being set in place beneath Mrs. Rosen's floor-to-ceiling windows on Wednesday, the count was up to 240, and she was talking about Ms. Aquanita's plans for a menu to match the orange color of the fabric-covered gates on the park's pedestrian paths.

"She said, 'Shall we use saffron?' " Mrs. Rosen recalled. "I said, 'Of course.' " Ms. Aquanita began planning shrimp and saffron salad.

Gail May Engelberg, who has invited friends to her apartment on Fifth Avenue, remembered chatting with Christo a couple of years ago at an event for the Guggenheim Museum. "I said, 'How's the project coming?' " she recalled. "I wanted to host my friends and be able for them to have a look down on 'The Gates' whether there is snow or ice or sunny blue skies."

For some, just looking out the window was not enough to make sure they had a clear view. "I walked over to the park to make sure that I could see the two windows of my apartment," said Rosamond Ivey, a trustee of the Art Gallery of Ontario, who is giving a "Gates" cocktail party in her apartment on East 79th Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue late next week.

Her guests will have drinks at her apartment after inspecting "The Gates" on a walk through the park. Then they will go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for dinner, where David Moos, the curator of contemporary art at the Ontario museum, will be joined by Jonathan Feinberg, an art historian who wrote a monograph on "The Gates."

Mr. Moos, whose museum has a Christo exhibition on display, said he is looking forward to seeing "The Gates" from ground level and from Ms. Ivey's apartment.

"If you think of Central Park as the great democratic American space, Jeffersonian, Whitmanic, in the heart of the metropolis, it is interesting to contemplate who has access to the aerial view," he said. "It puts into relief this political dimension."

And then there are the corporate parties. Budget Living magazine, for example, sent invitations for a breakfast-lunch-or-midday-break party that will begin at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday in a 24th-floor apartment with Oscar de la Renta furniture and 10 Christo images on the walls.

"It's more like a moving cocktail party all day, until it gets dark," said Donald E. Welsh, the magazine's founder.

And no, it will not break Budget Living's budget: the apartment, the furniture and the Christos are all borrowed.

Mrs. Soros, who lives on the ninth floor, will be closer to "The Gates."

"It will be like watching the Thanksgiving Day parade," she said. "I can practically touch the floats, and whoever is on the 36th floor cannot. From up there, you get, obviously, an idea. Down here, it's much more real and touchable. Here, you feel you want to go out and walk through the park and just be there."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

This morning - Christo and Jeanne-Claude with the Gates installation crew. 11 February 2005.

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Nice one, Edward.

The Gates on the shore of the Harlem Meer. 11 February 2005.

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February 12, 2005

'The Gates' Unfurling to High Hopes

By RANDY KENNEDY

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/w.gifith 45 television cameras in front of him and a view of bright orange vinyl gates stretching through Central Park behind him, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that the city expected an infusion of $80 million in tourism and other spending by people flocking to see "The Gates," the vast public art project by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Worldwide interest in the project was clear at the news conference at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where journalists from more than 200 media outlets, including networks in Sweden, Mexico City and Tokyo and others as unusual as Bulgarian national television, crowded into the Temple of Dendur to hear the mayor and the two artists discuss the project, whose saffron-colored fabric panels will be unfurled this morning.

For Mr. Bloomberg - who has reduced the city's arts budget amid general cutbacks but has also emerged as the strongest promoter of public art at City Hall in decades - the event was a chance to bask in the glow of a near-perfect blockbuster project: one that comes at no cost to the city (the artists are paying for everything, including extra police officers) and that will attract thousands of art pilgrims to New York during a month when tourism is traditionally at its lowest.

"With no ticket sales of any kind it's impossible to predict exactly how big an impact 'The Gates' will have during its 16-day stay here," Mr. Bloomberg said, "but based on attendance at similar events and other factors, the city's Economic Development Corporation estimates that the project will generate more than $80 million in economic activity for our city."

The $20 million project was originally conceived by the artists in 1979 and was rejected by three mayoral administrations before Mr. Bloomberg's, in part because of concerns about its cost and about damage to the park.

The mayor, who first became interested in the notion of "The Gates" in 1995 as a trustee of the Central Park Conservancy, made light of the project's long history yesterday, saying that it took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Beethoven five years to write the Ninth Symphony. "Mere blinks of an eye," he said, "compared to the time that it took to build the masterpiece that we are celebrating today."

"I can't promise," he added, "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 that's really what innovative, provocative art is supposed to do," he added, as Jeanne-Claude and Christo sat next to him.

Vince Davenport, the project's engineer, said that teams of workers would be standing by in case any of the 16-foot-high gates broke or were pushed down, and that a gate could be replaced in less than an hour. But both he and Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, said they did not anticipate many problems, from either vandals or the weather. Mr. Davenport said that teams would begin manually unfurling the fabric at 8:30 a.m. and that all of the panels should be released by about 11.

Asked often yesterday to explain the meaning of the project, Christo and Jeanne-Claude emphasized that its meaning would have to be found by those who walked through the 7,500 gates, spread over 23 miles of walkways.

"It has no purpose," Jeanne-Claude said. "It is not a symbol. It is not a message. It is only a work of art."

But Christo explained that it related in some ways to the unrealized plans of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the park's designers, to place iron gates at many of the entrances to the park. He added that the fabric panels, which will blow and curve in the wind, are also meant to remind viewers of the park's serpentine paths and the curves of the empty branches of the trees above them.

After answering several questions, however, Christo became clearly frustrated by trying to explain his work and emphatically urged experience over rational inquiry. "This project is not involved with talk," he said. "It is real physical space. You need to spend time walking in the cold air - sunny day, rainy day, even snow. It is not necessary to talk."


EDITORIAL NOTEBOOK

At Last, the Gates Wave in Central Park

By CAROLYN CURIEL

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/f.gifew artists can make a global splash like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who are spouses and collaborators. Their public art creations are not so much displayed as audaciously imposed: installations that employ landscapes and buildings as mannequins and pincushions. They put pink skirts on islands off Florida, silver draping around the Reichstag in Berlin and colorful umbrellas in fields in Southern California and Japan. As a successor to these phenomena, "The Gates," which unfurls today in Central Park, adds another dimension, a certain humanity within the grandeur.

The artists' earlier inventions were often remote, away from urban areas or other easily accessible settings. The splendor depended on what photographs or aerial video could capture. Not so with "The Gates." For 16 days, "The Gates" will be in place, with 7,500 saffron-colored panels hanging above pedestrians like slices of sunlight.

Streaming along 23 miles of walkways in Central Park - the most-visited park in the nation's largest city - the installation invites interaction and exploration. The artists have said the saffron color of the fabric and frames was chosen simply because they like it, but it seems a prompt for meditation and reflection. Still, visitors shouldn't expect a lot of peace and quiet. New Yorkers and tourists are expected to crowd the park, an unusual circumstance in the month of February.

As with their previous 18 large works, Christo and Jeanne-Claude financed the full cost, some $20 million. They also paid with time and perseverance. It took a quarter-century to realize their vision, which finally won approval after the election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Only in the last few weeks did the scope of the project become clear, with the frames springing up as if ready for a giant round of croquet.

On one recent day, crew members hoisted poles into place and took in early reviews from passers-by. One called it an abomination, but others seemed more enthralled. One woman, who described herself as a landscape painter, called the work in progress "an environmental happening." Another woman, on skates and carrying a Bergdorf Goodman bag, tried unsuccessfully to volunteer to help on the spot. In the dead of winter, when sensations can go as numb as uncovered ears, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their legions of helpers are at the very least succeeding in awakening sentiments.

Critics can argue that Central Park does not need the fuss. But maybe New Yorkers do, in the form of this bright respite.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The Gates are unfurled. 12 February 2005.

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The Gates on the shore of the Harlem Meer. 12 February 2005.

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The Gates on the shore of the Harlem Meer, near the Lenox Avenue entrance. 12 February 2005.

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My dad and I went for a walk through the park today. The Gates are fantastic. I don't think I've seen so many people out in the park in February.

February 13, 2005

Dressing Up in Orange, and Pleats

By JAMES BARRON

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Volunteers unfurled "The Gates" installation throughout New York's Central Park on Sunday.

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The weather was windy and cold as the first fabric dropped from one of the 7,500 16-foot-high gates, creating what the artists billed as "a visual golden river'' along the park's footpaths.

Video: Unveiling 'The Gates' in Central Park

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/s.gifo that is what 1.089 million yards of orange-yellow fabric looks like, floating and fluttering and flapping in Central Park.

The giant $21 million art project "The Gates," which had already filled the park's 23 miles of pathways with thousands of saffron-colored portals, blossomed yesterday at 8:31 a.m., just as the artist Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, had planned.

They watched as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg raised a long metal pole to release fabric from the top of a gate in the Sheep Meadow. Also watching was a crowd that chanted a countdown like the one heard each New Year's Eve in Times Square - "Five! Four! Three! Two! One!"- before the mayor unfurled the fabric on the first gate.

Each and every one of the 7,500 gates had the same cocoon of fabric, and after Mr. Bloomberg had unfurled four more, workers (hired and paid by the artists) fanned out through the park to complete the job.

By midmorning, the park's circulatory system had taken on the bright color of veins twisting and twirling against the gray-and-brown backdrop of midwinter. The pleated nylon fabric pulsed and swayed at the whim of a 12-mile-an-hour wind - not strong enough to make it snap like a spinnaker on an America's Cup challenger. The color was almost as fiery and fierce as the sun that had risen a couple of hours earlier.

"Look at the light," Christo said. "Look, look."

In the crowd, people tried to do exactly that. People who had tried to imagine what the completed project would look like finally had a glimpse.

Some described them as too-short window shades dangling in the breeze. Some mentioned squarish out-of-season butterflies. Some were intrigued by the play of light on the fabric: as the peekaboo sun came and went, the nylon had a touchable texture one minute and a one-dimensional look the next. Some echoed what Christo and Jeanne-Claude had said about a river of bright color against twigs and leafless branches. Some talked about exhilaration and exuberance. Some were more literal.

"A pleated skirt," said Kathleen Catapano of Brooklyn. She looked again, and another idea came to mind: "I think it looks like Jeanne-Claude's hair."

Jeanne-Claude has said that her hair, which is redder than the gates, was not what prompted them to choose the color. But they consider the public spectacle of their installations a part of the works themselves. And the preparation for yesterday's event had been a spectacle of its own.

It began with workers laying the bases for the gates and people talking about how the bases - dark gray, rectangular and squat - looked like something out of a step class. That gave way to the idea of a barn-raising as each gate was fitted together and lifted in place.

"It was like watching an egg hatching slowly," said Olufunmibi Awoshiley, a hospital administrator, "and I didn't know what it was going to look like. Now I see it, and it's beautiful."

The unfurling was a payoff of patience and persistence. In 1981, after the city rejected his original proposal on the ground that it would damage the park's landscape and set a dangerous precedent, Christo made clear that he would not give up. "I am in good health," he declared at the time. "The park is still there, and I will do that project."

Never mind that the Parks Department had issued a 107-page put-down that said Christo's installation would be "in the wrong place and the wrong time and in the wrong scale."

The crowds it would draw, seen by the current generation of city officials as a plus, were considered a negative then. The document also complained that approval would be "inconsistent" with Parks Department permit policies, setting a precedent that could force officials to go along with other large-scale installations.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent the 1980's and 1990's wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris with fabric and rope; planting blue umbrellas over a 12-mile-long valley in Japan and yellow ones over a 24-mile valley in California; and wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin with 1.076 million square feet of silvery fabric and bright blue rope.

What a difference a couple of decades can make. The city gave the go-ahead in 2003 for a project that was both slimmer and taller than originally planned. There are 7,500 gates instead of 11,000 to 15,000, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude had first envisioned.

But each gate is 16 feet high, a foot taller than originally proposed. Instead of steel poles, as first proposed, the frames of the gates are square. The fabric is no longer attached like shower curtains but connected directly to the frames.

And while the first plans called for drilling 15,000 holes in the park to anchor the gates, the final design has the sturdy bases, which rest on the ground. It is all temporary.

Once the gates are dismantled at the end of the month, there will be no sign that they were there - no holes in the ground, no missing limbs from trees that were trimmed to make room for them.

In places where a gate might have brushed against a branch or a limb, the tree won. The gate was moved, but only a bit.

The artists have said that there is no best place from which to view the installation, in their words "a celebration of the processional, ceremonial walkways of the park." They said they had envisioned the fabric as "a golden ceiling creating warm shadows" within the park, and "a golden river appearing and disappearing through the bare branches of the trees" from above.

They also said, on their Web site (christojeanneclaude.net), that "there are no official opening events." But the moment with the mayor, who had been a supporter of the project in private life, came close.

As soon as it was over, Christo and Jeanne-Claude climbed into a $300,000 limousine and went on an inspection tour.

They left behind a crowd as concerned with views and angles as they were. The fans realized, as the gates were going up, that the project would have a decidedly different effect from ground level than from a nearby apartment or a helicopter.

The fans also realized that "The Gates" had a limited life cycle - 16 days from yesterday's unfurling. So, like Karen Castellano of Los Angeles, they had made their travel plans.

"They look like - I don't know, the prettiest curtains I've ever seen," she said as one gate after another opened in the breeze.

Yvonne Woetzel, a painter from Dusseldorf, Germany, said that she would not have missed the project.

"It's impressive," she said. "It touches people. And it makes people happy. And to see the fabric moving - it's so impressive."

George McElroy of Manhattan, who runs a financial services company, marveled at the logistics and the statistics. It took 165,000 bolts and an equal number of self-locking nuts to hold the gates together. Christo's Web site said there were 46 miles of hems in the fabric. And the length?

"It's 23 miles," he said of "The Gates." "That's what a marathon is."

Some fans said "The Gates" had been an endurance run for Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The project's official title, "The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979-2005," acknowledges the time it took from brainstorm to unfurling.

"They waited so long," said Juliana C. Nash, a public relations researcher. "It's almost like Camilla and Charles."

Yesterday, Jeanne-Claude had a one word description for her reaction to the completed installation: "Ecstatic."

But everybody is a critic. Consider the assessment of Vinnie D'Angelo, an artist: "The chunky gate shape, the bright colors - it seems like a 70's aesthetic."

His friend Seth Bomse, a film editor, said he found the initial unfurling lacking. "It was kind of disappointing close up," he said, "but I like it from a distance."

Ann Farmer, Colin Moynihan and Stephanie Rosenbloom contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

February 13, 2005

AN APPRAISAL

In a Saffron Ribbon, a Billowy Gift to the City

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Slide Show

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/i.gift is a long, billowy saffron ribbon meandering through Central Park -- not a neat bow, but something that's very much a gift package to New York City. "The Gates," by Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, was officially unveiled yesterday.

Thousands of swaths of pleated nylon were unfurled to bob and billow in the breeze. In the winter light, the bright fabric seemed to warm the fields, flickering like a flame against the barren trees. Even at first blush, it was clear that "The Gates" is a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century. It remains on view for just 16 days. Consider yourself forewarned. Time is fleeting.

On a partly sunny, chilly morning, with helicopters buzzing overhead and mobs of well-wishers on hand, an army of paid helpers gradually released the panels of colored fabric from atop the 16-foot-tall gates, all 7,500 of them. The shifting light couldn't have been better to show off the effects of the cloth. Sometimes the fabric looked deep orange; at other times it was shiny, like gold leaf, or silvery or almost tan. In the breeze, the skirted gates also appeared to shimmy like dancers in a conga line, the cloth buckling and swaying.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude drove around slowly to watch the progress. Fans mobbed their car. Like all projects by this duo, "The Gates" is as much a public happening as it is a vast environmental sculpture and a feat of engineering. It has required more than 1 million square feet of vinyl and 5,300 tons of steel, arrayed along 23 miles of footpaths throughout the park at a cost (borne exclusively by the artists) of $20 million.

I hadn't been quite sure when I first saw the project going up last week. From outside the park, the gates looked like endless rows of inert orange dominoes overwhelming Frederick Law Olmsted's and Calvert Vaux's masterpiece.

But as the artists have insisted, the gates aren't made to be seen from above or from outside. I stopped in at a friend's office high above Central Park South yesterday and ogled the panorama, which was lovely. But it was beside the point. It's the difference between sitting in a skybox at Giants Stadium and playing the game on the field. The gates need to be - they are conceived to be - experienced on the ground, at eye level, where, as you move through the park, they crisscross and double up, rising over hills, blocking your view of everything except sky, then passing underfoot, through an underpass, or suddenly appearing through a copse of trees, their fabric fluttering in the corner of your eye.

There are no bad locales for seeing them. But there are some spots at which the work looks best: around the Heckscher ball fields, where the gates are dense and lines of them swarm in many directions at once; at the base of Strawberry Fields, where two parallel rows march in tight syncopation; at Harlem Meer, where they cluster up to the shore and then clamber, helter-skelter, up the rocks. Also at Great Hill, near West 106th Street, where they encircle the crescent field, then descend a flight of steep steps.

And at North Meadow, a wide-open vista, where the gates wander off toward the horizon, separating earth and sky with an undulating saffron band.

People preened under the unfurled gates, watching the fabric sway. Now one no longer ambles through the park, but rather saunters below the flapping nylon. Paths have become like processionals, boulevards decked out as if with flags for a holiday. Everyone is suddenly a dignitary on parade.

A century and a half ago, Olmsted talked about the park as a place of dignity for the masses, a great locus of democratic ideals, influencing "the minds of men through their imaginations." It's useful to recall that Christo conceived of "The Gates" 26 years ago, when Central Park was in abominable shape. The project had something of a reclamation mission about it, in keeping with Christo's uplifting agenda. He was born in Bulgaria in 1935 and escaped the Soviet bloc for Paris in 1958. His philosophy has always been rooted in the utopianism of Socialist Realism, with its belief in art for Everyman.

But in place of the gigantic monuments of Mother Russia, forced upon the Soviet public and financed by the state, he has imagined a purely abstract art, open-ended in its meanings, paid for by the artist, and requiring the persuasion of the public through an open political process.

After which the art comes and goes. "Once upon a time" is a phrase Christo likes. Once upon a time, he imagines people will say, there were "The Gates" in Central Park.

Central Park is in fine shape today, but the project still has a social value, in gathering people together for their shared pleasure. Some purists will complain that the art spoils a sanctuary, that the park is perfect as it is, which it is. But the work, I think, pays gracious homage to Olmsted's and Vaux's abiding pastoral vision: like immense Magic Marker lines, the gates highlight the ingenious and whimsical curves, dips and loops that Olmsted and Vaux devised as antidotes to the rigid grid plan of the surrounding city streets and, by extension, to the general hardships of urban life.

The gates, themselves a cure for psychic hardship, remind us how much those paths vary, in width, and height, like the crowds of people who walk along them. More than that, being so sensitive to nature, they make us more sensitive to its effects.

We didn't need the gates to make us sensitive, obviously. Art is never necessary. It is merely indispensable.

At its best, it leads us toward places we might not have thought to visit. Victor Hugo once said, "There is nothing more interesting than a wall behind which something is happening." This also applies to gates, which beckon people to discover what is beyond them.

With their endless self-promotion, and followers trailing them like Deadheads from one global gig to another, it's no wonder that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made a few skeptics of people who often have not seen their art at first hand. New Yorkers are a notoriously tough crowd.

But I was struck by what I overheard a stranger say. She was a doubter won over yesterday. "It will be fascinating when they're gone," she mused.

It took me a second to realize what she meant: that the gates, by ravishing the eye, have already impressed an image of the park on the memories of everyone who has seen them. And like all vivid memories, that image can take a place in the imagination, like a smell or some notes of music or a breeze, waiting to be rekindled.

Once upon a time there were "The Gates." The time is now.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Torii gates are Japanese Shinto gates, centuries old. Christo never gave credit to Shintoism, never mentioned Torii Gates, and proclaimed the idea as his. This is obviously false and dishonest. He should give credit where credit is due.

Modern 'artists' often use repetition of a single theme to try to mask their complete lack of creativity. This is a fine example.

More info on Torii Gates:
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...ii+gates&hl=en

Pictures of Torii Gates:
http://wwwthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/~...japan2/008.jpg
http://phototravels.net/japan/pcd3860/fushimi-torii-89.3.jpg
http://www.accesscom.com/~abe/images/99nov/fukuoka/inaritorii.jpg

http://www.accesscom.com/~abe/images...inaritorii.jpg

More photos of the Gates:


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Wow - beautiful photos :) Too bad the sky looks so gray.

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http://rion.nu/v5/archive/000823.php