The Gates, The Gates, Wie Gehts?

Okay, this is it. What is going on with these people? I am fed up!

I was sitting at work looking at the photos I had uploaded from my phone, and I showed them to a fellow teacher. "Look!" I cried. "There they are!" Now, the "they" in question were photos of the large orange frames of the as yet unfurled Gates that I had taken on my morning dog walk. There they stood, glistening in the sunrise.

She snorted. "I don't get it. What's the point? Why are they doing that?"

"Because it's beautiful! Look at them!"

"But they're only up for what -- like two weeks? What's the point of that?"

"Umm, it's an installation," I replied. "installations are temporary, you know?" At times like these I feel like I'm working in a don't-get-it zone. I mean, she's a teacher, right? Right? Whatever.

Later I recounted this to my friend, the brilliant poet John Keene. He laughed. "Life is ephemeral. You'd think a science teacher would get that."

Then the reports come pouring in from my friend in Chicago ("I saw a critic on the news saying they weren't really art but a mechanical feat") and from Australia ("Everybody seems to hate them" -- this in a most charming accent --"The Times had a scathing review") Then at breakfast this morning with my brilliant visual artist friend and her lover, they were both commenting on the very smart and negative critique of the Gates in the aforementioned Times. Wha?

So, since Kwas said I should, here is my take on the Gates:

Everyday, twice a day for the past year and half, I have walked my dog through Central Park, in all kinds of weather, rain or shine, warm or blistering cold. A few months ago, as I blearily dragged myself up to the Great Hill, I noticed these little metal stands placed at regular intervals along the path. At the end of each of these metal stands was a nightmare orange plastic triangle, put there so that you wouldn't inadvertantly trip over these things. They were after all, almost the same color as the path, and at night you could stub your toe on one and take out your whole ankle, they are that hard and heavy (I tried, in true participatory new yorker fashion to move one, unsuccessfully). I asked a fellow dog walker what the hell they were and he told me they were for some "art exhibit." Now, having spent the best part of the last six weeks in hospital-funeral-landia, I was understandably out of the loop. My neighbor, S., told me excitedly, "Yeah! Christo is doing this thing called the Gates! It's going to be awesome! And right in our park!" "It doesn't seem that exciting to me," I responded. "At the moment, "It seems damn ugly." "That's not _it_," she snorted. "It's a whole something else."

Well, it is a whole something else. There is something to be said for living with the Gates. Maybe something that doesn't happen if you don't live with the park, see its seasons and know its contours. I watched as those hideous little plastic orange things were taken away and replaced by the massive frames, that was awesome enough. Then I stood out with everyone else that cold Saturday morning and watched them being unfurled in the sun, one by one, as people cheered, and took photos and the dogs played on unaware. And I walked beneath them that night, in the quiet, as they murmured in the wind. And the next morning I went to the top of the rocks at the Great HIll, and then down around the pond to the waterfall, and watched them winding through the stone dark trunks of trees to the other side of the park. I caressed the fabric to report on their texture to J. in San Francisco, something like muslin or taffeta, not a tarp; and if like a shower curtain, then a very very expensive one. I took photos and sent them to N. in South Africa so she could see shadows of the branches on them when the sun is in the east and they are illuminated against the steps of The Strangers Gate. And although I don't normally like orange at all, I disagreed with the woman walking the massive poodle that they should be green. And as I walked the dog at night beneath them, and the rain poured over them, flattening and buffeting them in a way the sunny wind did not, I felt a kind of awe, and peace, and in the presence of something good.

And frankly after day after day of ugly and cynical, it makes me happy to be witness and part of something that someone made, as a gift to me, just because it was beautiful.