View of “The Gates” in Central Park, NYC, February 13, 2005. Photo: Barbara Purcell
On a recent visit to The Shed in New York City, I managed to relive a brief but bold era from twenty years earlier when Central Park morphed into a saffron-colored sculpture for sixteen straight days. The Gates gave some much-needed oomph to a deciduous winter landscape with thousands of bright orange post-and-lintel frames lining the park’s pathways — not unlike the Torii gates at the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Japan. Matching nylon fabric magically billowed from each structure in the frigid February air, made all the more shrine-like when a snowstorm suddenly cloaked the whole thing in white.
Conceived of by artist power couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude — Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon — The Gates was twenty-six years in the making, up for two weeks, and down in one day as soon as it closed. The grand-scale intervention — not exactly a thing of beauty but not boring either — gave tourists and park goers something to ponder. Twenty years later, people are still pondering.
Using “The Gates” AR in Central Park. Courtesy Joe Pugliese Dirt Empire
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City is both a walk down memory lane and a walk into augmented reality; a downloadable app allows you to experience segments of the original installation if you’re strolling through Central Park. The commemorative exhibition, which opened on February 12, features objects and artifacts from the installation, a cache of preliminary sketches, fun facts (5,290 U.S. tons of steel for use, 584 uniformed workers to install, four million visitors in total), not to mention video footage of its weeklong assembly, all while park joggers, stroller pushers, and bench sitters went about their daily routines. Video from the opening ceremony captured a collective of onlookers, including the two artists, counting down from ten before then Mayor Michael Bloomberg unfurled the first saffron panel. It took two hours to release the other 7,502.
Installation view of “The Gates” exhibit at The Shed, NYC, February 13, 2025. Photo: Barbara Purcell
It turns out that the most compelling part of The Gates exhibition is not The Gates at all, but Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s numerous “unrealized” projects in and around New York City — also on display as three-dimensional scale models in a separate gallery. Projects that were dreamed up by the pair in the 1960s, around the time they relocated to New York from Paris, but fell through due to pushback or politics or both. Plans, for instance, to enshroud the original Whitney Museum of American Art in fabric, as well as 20 Exchange Place, in Lower Manhattan — not to mention an idea for a barrier of oil barrels at 53rd Street, next to the Museum of Modern Art. This particular whim fed a far bigger idea, one that caught the attention of the de Menils in Houston: a twenty-story Texas mastaba, made up of a million oil drums, installed along the Gulf Freeway between Houston and Galveston.
Christo, “One Million Stacked Oil Drums” (Project for Houston-Galveston Area Texas), 1970, graphite, charcoal, wax crayon, photostat from a photograph by Shunk-Kender, map, and adhesive tape on cardboard, 28 x 22 inches. Property of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. Photo: Shunk-Kender. © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
A mastaba, otherwise known as a trapezoidal tomb in ancient Egypt (or a Mesopotamian house bench, depending on who you ask), is the ideal flat-headed shape for a million stacked barrels. And Texas is the ideal location where everything’s bigger. The Texas mastaba was a match made in heaven — or the Egyptian afterlife.
Origins for this gargantuan oil drum temple could be traced back even further to 1958, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude first incorporated barrels into their artwork as a cheap, sculptural material for still lifes that were larger than life. Their first outdoor environmental installation Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Packages (1961) — exactly as it sounds — incorporated said motif along the Rhine River in Cologne, Germany. Those barrels became the building blocks (literal, figural) for everything that came after in their oeuvre, realized and unrealized. Though a good portion of their large-scale visions came to fruition, many did not. However, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s unrealized projects fed into their greater body of work; nothing was spared. Works on paper for proposed projects helped fund their actual physical projects in a type of circular breathing that produced a continuous flow of output. In this sense, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s ideas were as valuable as their installations.
Plans to wrap the Eiffel Tower in fabric, for instance, fell through and so the artists took to Paris’ Pont Neuf and Arc de Triomphe instead. An ill-fated saffron pathway stretching across two small islands in Tokyo Harbor didn’t happen, though they pulled off a smaller-scale effort of the same hue years earlier in Jacob Loose Memorial Park in St. Louis (and later, in New York City’s Central Park). Though the Texas mastaba never saw the light of day along the Gulf Freeway, a project half its size is underway in the Persian Gulf. The Mastaba (1977-), set in the Liwa Desert south of Abu Dhabi, will become the artists’ only permanent large-scale public work when it opens (posthumously, Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 and Christo in 2020). Even a floating mastaba in London’s Hyde Park mesmerized onlookers for three months in 2018. Still, the art duo dreamed biggest for Texas.
Installation view of “The Gates” exhibit. Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies
Sometimes dreams do really come true. And The Gates is a reminder that good things come to those who wait. By playing the long game — a quarter of a century to be precise — Christo and Jeanne-Claude created a lasting mystique around their saffron salute to Central Park. I can still recall trudging along its pathways on a bitter cold day, surprised by the installation’s traffic-cone color, only to be reminded of that most disagreeable orange while visiting The Shed exhibition, twenty years later to the day.
Falling squarely into the category of public art, these large-scale environmental works can also be classified as performance art. Given the years (decades!) it might take for each project to manifest, the sheer manpower behind each enterprise, and the physical scale of each installation — only to be quickly dismantled and recycled — creates a lot of drama. The artists, who were often photographed at their far-flung scouting locations looking like très chic explorers, always maintained that the purpose of their work was to bring a fresh perspective to a familiar landscape. But by staging such grandiose interventions, even those that didn’t come to pass, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s main message seems to be one of inspiration: go big or go home.
The augmented reality feature that currently lets viewers hold up their phone in Central Park and walk through the orange arcade of yesteryear is all well and good. But no app is necessary when the idea needs simply to exist in one’s mind. The next time you’re driving on I-45, closer to Houston than Galveston, be sure to look up and take in the view.
1 comment
We were lucky enough to be there when the Gates were unfolded and for a few days before. One of the best side effects was that it turned the City into a small town – people were talking about it with everyone everywhere, on the streets, in stores, at street lights, and of course in the park – it gave a wonderful neighborliness to that very busy City.