February 25, 2005
In one and out the other
I like The Gates. I like that they are as subtle as a traffic cones. I like that everyone takes pictures of them and then puts them up on their websites and tags them for flickr. I like that there are people in official “The Gates” aprons whose job it is to yank tangled curtains down with tennis-ball-tipped sticks. I like that the gate-keepers hand out little orange swatches like they would at a fabric store. I like that since it’s public, it actually resists celebrity; famous people are as unwelcome there as the bridge and tunnel families are unwelcome at downtown art openings. I like that Cristo and Jean Claude eat breakfast with the volunteers each morning to discuss the aesthetic ramifications of the weather report. I like the waste. I like the fact that they blew twenty million dollars to make something beautiful when there are people starving and our soldiers go without body armor and the pope is sick.
Angie and I went the Monday after the snow-fall. It was an overcast day, the skyline was cropped out with clouds, and the park felt like a pocket of color in emptiness.
The great thing about The Gates is that all you have to do is walk through them. There’s no learning curve; you’re just walking, and they are just there. That’s it. As you walk through them you might notice that they segment the space nicely. When you look at the path ahead as it loops around you’ll see people walking through gates that look the same as the gates you are walking through, but aren’t, because of the space-time/Cristo-Jean Claude continuum. When you see those people you picture yourself walking through the same gate later on, or taking another path, or you wonder if you’ve been through that gate before. You might get disoriented and realize that it’s possible you have walked in from one gate and emerged from another. In any case, when you see all those people framed by the gates you get a read on the dimensions of the city, and how those dimensions are traveled.
