news.artnet.com: In 1979, artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed a monumental project meant for New York City’s Central Park, known as The Gates. Comprised of several thousand steel structures (or “gates”) bearing swathes of fabric and installed along the park’s numerous winding paths, the project was not only large from a conceptual standpoint but pragmatic as well.
4 comments:
Christo and Jeanne-Clause’s piece The Gates looks striking and absolutely gorgeous. Undertaking to create it was an ambitious task, but it must have been worth it in the end. I wonder how the artists felt seeing their dream come to fruition after being blocked by the city for so many years. I think it’s also interesting how the project brought tourists and income to the city and yet the long wait for the project to happen was largely due to a lack of support. The support came after the piece was created. The story of this piece is one of persistence and determination, and these artists are to be commended for it. It’s not an easy thing to be told you can not create an art piece and then to keep trying and keep fighting for it anyhow. The pictures show it to be gorgeous and monumental and I wish I could have seen the original installation.
I started doing research on Christo and Jean Claude back in November-ish December and The Gates was one of the big projects that I looked at when I was learning about their art style. I find they aren't very inspirational. I think it's really cool how they use inspiration from places like Japan or just across the world to help create new works of art. I think what really stood out to me in this article was that they pulled the exact color and Hue of orange that they were looking at in Japan to make this art installation in New York City and the the scale of these installations was just massive I mean it wasn't what you would think a typical art installation would be or look like they were just these huge large scale Orange pieces of art that stretched through Central Park in New York City it's just really magnificent to see.
I’m always a sucker for a good public art installation, this is absolutely not an exception. The sheer quantity of gates for the installation alone is insane. What really stuck out to me with the artpiece was the location of it being in Central Park. I would imagine that in order to be able to put an art installation in a heavily used public location it would take immense amounts of time and money getting the approval for it all, let alone the cost of materials and the cost of the actual installation of the art. Another thing that really caught my eye was the fabric. I have always enjoyed using fabric in art for its materiality and I think it was a really interesting choice to incorporate it here. I imagine the use of fabric made these gates much more dynamic and created a lot of movement that the frames of the gate alone would’ve lacked. I really wish I could’ve seen the actual installation when it was up.
I really love this piece, I think it’s so cool in so many ways. (It was one of my favorite works from my high school art history class.) The idea of doing an augmented reality version of it is interesting? I wonder if the artists (who have sadly both passed now) would have approved of it. The fact that the original installation was only up for two weeks was a major part of the concept behind it—it was meant to be fleeting. A lot of people interpret the piece as having an environmentalist message, citing the fact that the gates organically followed the existing structure of Central Park, responded to the natural force of the wind, and had sustainable materials. In some way I feel like resurrecting the work through AR technology is a small betrayal of the original work’s temporality. But on the other hand, maybe photography of The Gates would also be problematic by that token.
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