Christo's Gates: Passing Through

An experiment, then, suppressing the urge to write the 'I' and, despite lit fag and red wine to hand, write this instead. Christo's Gates were unfurled though not unveiled in Central Park today. Which was, of course, a mob scene: ars brevis, vita longa, as it were. Thousands of them, all scrabbling to the high points to try and get a sense of the installation. Which, of course, removes them from the paths along which the gates are installed. At first I was fundamentally disappointed in the fabric - rip-stop, very plastic, seemingly inert. But the wind picked up, and once in motion, the gates very much overcome the rigidity of their 3-beam construction. The colour somewhat remiscent of the Golden Gate bridge. The placement is both playful and predictable, but ambitious as only Christo seems to have ever carried off.

But to go through them is to be in them, to be in them is to be amongst them, and to be amongst them is to be missing something. To walk with the knowledge of the incompleteness of the view. My friend remarked, knowing that the piece is meant to be taken in as a pedestrian, that she nonetheless very much wanted an aerial view, to capture the entirety of The Gates. Which rather precisely captures the enormity of the sense of the incomplete induced by the gates - their staggering spread, numbers, almost numbing repetitive-ness is very much in contrast to the emphatically local experience of them. Even the vistas offered by the hills and swells of the park never provide more than the isolated subset of gates that momentarily make up the totality of the experience. To take in the vastness of the project is precisely to imagine what's out of sight, what's out of site, what's unimaginable about where they 'all' are. For they are, of course, finite in number, as the Park is finite in space and the piece finite in time. Although undoubtedly some intrepid and yet rather tedious fuckwit will walk 'all' of the gates, clicking a counter as s/he goes.

The gates themselves aren't inhumanly large, the fabric stopping perhaps 7 1/2 feet above the ground - easily touchable (and, should any NBA-sorts go walking through the park (?!), bloody annoying). The simplicity of their construction is decidedly accessible, a child balancing a brick on top of two others. Something about the tension between the isolation inspired by the gates, the incompleteness of the piece without the participant, the incompleteness of the participant's ability to accept the incompleteness of his/her perception, and the thronging art tourists today, was compelling. (Graffitti, seen scrawled on a wall in Barcelona c. 1999: 'Turismo = terrorismo'. Elsewhere, same hand: 'Trabaho=muerte'.) En masse, the tens of thousands visiting today are rendered more ephemeral than the gates themselves: an almost cruel twist. The very inertness of the posts against the motion of the hanging fabric, the motion of walking through the Park, a reprimand, somehow. To pass through one, to pass through many, is in fact devoid of, detached from, progress, accomplishment. The possibility of the infinite variation in how one experiences the gate an insult, but not a challenge. So many of us confronting a reduction to the abject subject...

Did I mention they're fucking beautiful? That Central Park is beautiful? Nevermind the nutcase woman handing out leaflets, as we first entered, shouting about the 'desecration of Central Park'. A wholly different type of sacred space, promising passage to whilst delivering only process. But a process, a journey, saffron-tinged, towards the ultimate indistinctness of mortality.