Gates Update: Raising the Gates

The gung-ho team of volunteers is busy raising the gates in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s big project in Central Park. The Times has a big piece on the process today:

At 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.

An image of the workers taken today:

The Times describes the volunteers:

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.

See also: Preparations for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates Project: Raising the Gates (Big Map page); “Barbarians (Well, Mostly Art Lovers) at the Gates” (NY Times, February 9, 2005)

Gates Update

Workers have begun putting up the orange support beams for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park.

Jeanne-Claude explains the project to a group of children:

“Know why we’re doing this?” Jeanne-Claude asked children yesterday after unexpectedly getting out of a car on East Drive near 90th St.

“They are a work of art, and a work of art is for nothing,” she said. “Only a work of art, for joy and beauty.”

Unfortunately, the Daily News omitted the children’s responses.

Meanwhile, the Post, doing the Postian thing, quotes an 81-year-old retiree doing the 81-year-old retiree thing:

Park-goers seemed excited yesterday as they watched the much-hyped project take form.

“I think it’s good that they are challenging people to re-envision their conception of a place they know so well,” said Chris Martin, 27, a Brooklyn poet.

Others weren’t sold.

“The park is for everyone, not for one person to gum up with their whimsical, individualist fancies,” said Louis Thorn, 81, a Manhattan retiree.

Bah humbug!

Jeff Koons’ Birthday Party

We might have new shorthand for “kooky excess,” now defined as Jeff Koons’ 50th Birthday, as reported by Talk of the Town:

And then the garage doors opened, and in trooped the marching band of Burlington City High School, in Burlington, New Jersey, wearing navy-blue uniforms and feathered shakos and producing on their instruments a deafening version of “Happy Birthday.” They were followed, a few minutes later, by a pair of white ponies pulling a cart with a three-tiered white cake, out of which popped a girl in a skimpy red bathing suit. [Deitch Projects gallery owner Jeffrey] Deitch had tried to get Jeff’s friend Pamela Anderson for the cake duty, but she had to be at the Sundance Film Festival.

The Gates

Preparations on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park began yesterday:

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.

“Nature Must Not Win the Game”

The Times, doing a fancy-pants version of that Jay Leno “Jay Walking” thing, asks subway riders what the cryptic quotes in the subway station under Bryant Park mean. Hilarity ensues:

In the subway there is a riddle disguised as a declaration. It is engraved in gray stone on a wall of the station at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas, atop a staircase to the platform where the B, the D, the F and the V rumble by.

“Nature must not win the game,” the inscription reads, “but she cannot lose.” Each day the words float briefly before thousands of eyes. A few riders pause to ponder them as they go on their way, perhaps seeking a clue in the backdrop, a mosaic of what look like berry-bearing vines creeping through and eating away at the gray stone.

The simple-sounding sentence, the inscription says, was written by Carl G. Jung, the psychologist and mythographer. What does it signify? And what is it doing in the subway?

Who knows? Not Joe Noto.

“Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what it means,” Mr. Noto, an electrician on his way home to Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, said the other day. Many other riders refused even to entertain the question.

Of course, this is New York, so no Jay Walking here:

But two recent afternoons spent conducting a semi-random survey turned up a fair share of subterranean philosophers intrigued by the cryptic pronouncement, which has been on the wall since 2002. Was it meant as a reassurance or a warning? Is it a good thing if nature wins, or a bad thing?

A police officer patrolling the station, Officer Russell King of Transit District 1, which includes the 42nd Street station, has worked enough slow shifts to have had time to chew over Jung’s words. “It seems like he’s an urbanite,” Officer King said. “It seems like we as a people in this city have to overcome everything to live.” But, he added, there’s a twist: we are part of nature, so if we defeat nature, we defeat ourselves. “It’s like a double negative, a Catch-22,” he said. “If we win, we lose.” Officer King’s partner on patrol, Wayne Steele, picked up the riff. “No matter what,” said Officer Steele, a beefy man with a prominent mustache, “nature’s going to win.”

Some people tried to break the sentence into its parts.

“‘Nature must not win,'” repeated an unassuming man in a blue-and-red windbreaker, who said he was a designer of women’s accessories and volunteered only his first name, Emilio, and his home country, Ecuador. “So man – man could win?” Emilio asked. “I think nature is bigger than man. At first glance, it makes me think two things. One is the grabs for a global empire – the power of the big corporations trying to run the world.”

A southbound F train pulled in and Emilio got on. “But beyond the greed itself,” he continued, “unless the people can make decisions in the world, it’s much easier to do just a few people’s interests.”

The train stopped at 34th Street. Emilio got out. “Nature,” he said. “Who controls nature? Nature is God. It’s the fight between the power of man’s greed and the power of God. And when it comes to reality, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t control the world.” He disappeared through the turnstiles.

But just so you know, some riders — not unsmart ones, we! — told the Times that the installation just makes them feel stupid:

“I don’t like it,” said Martin Bernier, a transplanted Parisian who owns a wholesale bakery in Queens. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for people to see in the subway. Why do they put this here? Who is Carl Gustav Jung? I know who he is now because I made a small investigation. But it makes me feel ignorant.”

Mr. Bernier pointed out that the Jung installation was part of a much larger piece that proceeds down the long corridor to the Fifth Avenue exit and includes quotations from Ovid, the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill,” and an obscure passage from “Finnegan’s Wake,” each being invaded from above by mosaics of golden tree roots and from below by mosaics of bedrock.

Sipping quickly from his coffee cup, Mr. Bernier, 52, led a reporter down the corridor. “Look at this,” he said. “James Joyce. He’s Irish, right?” The decay hinted at in the mosaics, Mr. Bernier said, assaulted the eye.

“I’m glad to talk about this,” Mr. Bernier confided, “because I was very disturbed by this corridor. I have an average education, and I feel frustrated. It made me feel like an idiot.”

Finally, for the record, an expert’s opinion:

Meredith Sabini, a Jungian psychologist who recently compiled a book of Jung’s writings on nature, “The Earth Has a Soul,” said the quotation referred to a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious, or “natural,” mind.

“Jung is saying we’re not supposed to follow instinct blindly,” Ms. Sabini said in a telephone interview from her office in California. “We’re supposed to have consciousness. But that doesn’t mean you’re supposed to kill nature. Because the unconscious is wisdom that has grown over the millions of years we have been Homo sapiens.”

The full quotation, from Jung’s “Alchemical Studies,” says: “Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations – as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness – nature pops up with her inescapable demands.”

Bonus Point: MTA’s Arts for Transit Pages (curiously, no “Under Bryant Park”).