Gates and Art
Several people I know have traveled to Central Park in New York to see the Christo installation of 7500 bannered Gates winding along 23 miles of park trails and pathways looking like a rippling orange river, or brilliant dominoes ready to be toppled.
Christo is famous for wrapping enormous buildings, and bridges with fabric and ropes and even surrounding islands with fabric. These works are meant to be viewed and admired from a distance. The Gates consist of 16 foot high orange steel frames on heavy bases with pleated panels of translucent orange fabric hanging down like medieval banners. Instead of viewing them from afar, the viewers are right in the middle of the exhibit.
I have been entranced by the photographs of the exhibit with the panels blowing and luminous in the late winter sunlight. The photos show happy people wandering under and through the gates. My friends have told me that the sun shining through the saffron-orange fabric is brilliant and glorious, the flutter in the breezes a joyous dance that is contagious. In the Sunday New York Times there was even a photo essay about visitors to the park who were so filled with delight that they wanted to be part of the art, and adorned themselves with orange vests and coats and other accoutrements.
Christo’s Gates turned the wintry park into an enchanted Happening.
One artist friend told me that the brilliant orange banners set off the first subtle colors just starting to appear as winter draws to a close, the yellow of the willows and gold of the forsythia, and the pale blooms of opening crocus.
The Gates will last only 16 days, as ephemeral as a sunny day. After they are dismantled and recycled, there will remain only a golden memory, documented in commercial books and posters, or placed in family photo albums.
Inspired by Christo’s Gates I’ve thought about what gates are. A gate can open and close. It can separate, but it can also tantalize and lead you through and forward. It can be a delight in itself; it can frame a view.
Christo’s Gates don’t open and close, but they are a delight leading on and on, through the park. The term is metaphorical and it has made me think about two natural ‘gates’ in my own landscape. The path to the Frog Pond winds from our dirt road through a little grove of young poplars. When I stand just inside this grove, the overarching branches frame a view of a sunny meadow. This is one gate. Then, after walking across a section of the meadow I walk into the deep shade under the boughs of a old pine. Here the path curves and the view of the pond through this gate, is again framed. This is my own set of gates. They are never more pleasant than when I am walking through them behind the grandchildren on the way to the delights of the pond.
Nature provided those two ‘gates’ but a garden does provide an opportunity for the gardener to create an artistic garden gate. I was particularly reminded of this when friends recently visited London and brought back dozens of photos of beautiful decorative ironwork fences, railings – and gates.
We can’t all arrange for elaborate ironwork gates, but I once visited a garden that had several curving arches made of rebar that supported graceful climbing roses. In a way these arches formed a series of gates that finally led to the vegetable garden. The rebar was not expensive. It did take an imaginative leap to see the possibilities of fluid curves in those stiff rods.
I have a real and utilitarian gate in my garden. Set into a wire fence that separates the lawn from the Sunken Garden, it is not a lovely thing. The fence and the gate were necessary to keep deer out of that part of the garden. The gate is attached to an arch made of metal pipe and when it is covered in summer with autumn clematis and sky blue morning glories it is a lovely thing.
We are always planning to do something with that gate, replace it with something sturdy and attractive. Somehow we never have the time to examine the possibilities that are available in garden shops, or to sit and invent something of our own. I have noticed that thinking is the hardest part of almost any project. Part of that thinking is knowing what it is that you really want.
For Christo and his wife Jeanne Claude, the thinking about The Gates was done a quarter century ago. Way back then he imagined them winding through Central Park, but he had to wait for the ripeness of time to make them a reality. Only a little more thought had to go into the plan insuring that The Gates would not leave any mark on the park when they were gone. Then enchantment appeared.
I will continue to think of my garden gate as an opportunity for enchantment – and wait for time to ripen.
March 2005