The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979-2005 · a temporary installation of 7,503 gates along about 23 miles of the walkways of Central Park, Manhattan, each a frame of two posts and a top bar about 16 feet high, with a free-hanging panel of saffron-coloured nylon falling to about 7 feet above the path · conceived in 1979, shown from 12 to 27 February 2005, sixteen days, and removed from 28 February as planned · paid for by the artists, by the sale of their own preparatory works, with no public money · the unit scored is the installation of 2005 as made and as recorded, with the twenty-six years of its making counted as its process: nothing of it stands in the park, and what stands now is the record, the photographs, the documentary film, the artists’ book of the project and the preparatory drawings and collages
Mode
A temporary installation at the scale of a landscape: one manufactured unit repeated by a rule along every walk of a city park, self-financed, its years of permission counted as part of the work
Mythos
The gate as threshold and the walk under it as procession; the colour of fire and of the turn of the year in a winter park; other gates and robes brought by the viewer’s eye and not built
Phase
Conceived in 1979; refused, then permitted; shown from 12 to 27 February 2005 and removed as planned; now held only in record
Presentation
Frames of two posts and a top bar about 16 feet high, set across the walkways at their width, each with a saffron nylon panel hanging free to about 7 feet above the path, along about 23 miles of walk
Register
Delight and wonder in the cold; festive, genial and bright, a beauty that depends on distance, wind and light
Scale
One unit, 7,503 times, in one park, for sixteen days, after twenty-six years
Governing Proposition
Along every walkway of Central Park, at intervals, a gate stood across the path at the path’s width: two posts and a bar about sixteen feet high, and from the bar a panel of saffron cloth hanging free to about seven feet above the walker’s head. There were 7,503 of them over about twenty-three miles of walk, and the number was not chosen; it was what the rule yielded on the paths Olmsted and Vaux had laid. For sixteen days in February the panels moved in the wind against bare trees, and a city walked its own park in crowds. The wager of the work is that one plain unit, repeated by a rule wherever the paths run, will draw a made landscape so that it can be seen as made, and that a public will walk through the drawing. It took twenty-six years to be permitted and sixteen days to stand, and it now stands only as record.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, both born in 1935, worked as a partnership, and their works are credited to both. The full title of this one carries its whole span: The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979-2005. They conceived it in 1979, for the walkways of the park that Olmsted and Vaux had designed in the middle of Manhattan. They met a refusal, and years later permission. They paid for it themselves, by selling their own preparatory drawings and collages, and took no public money and no sponsor. The artists counted the twenty-six years of proposal, refusal and permission as part of the work.
It opened on 12 February 2005 and closed on 27 February, sixteen days. There were 7,503 gates. Each was a frame of two posts and a horizontal bar about 16 feet high, and from each bar hung a free panel of saffron-coloured nylon, falling to about 7 feet above the path. They followed about 23 miles of walkway, which is about sixteen feet of path for each gate on average. Hundreds of paid workers set them up across the park in a few days, kept them through the run, and from 28 February took them down, as planned.
The work is a rule more than a set of parts. A gate stands across the path, at the path’s width, at intervals, wherever the walks run. The number was not chosen; it was what the rule yielded on those paths, and the widths of the gates changed because the paths did. Take away one gate, or a hundred, and nothing is lost that the eye can find. Take away the rule, a gate on every walk, and the work no longer traces the park; it becomes a decoration in it.
Movement II
The frame carries the cloth and adds little else; seen close, it is a plain manufactured unit. The panel is what the gate does. It hangs from the bar, stops above head height so that it clears the walker, and is free at the bottom, so that the wind moves it. A fixed banner would not move. Along a walk, gate after gate, the panels made a ceiling of colour that rose and fell overhead, and the frame that held them became the least of the work.
The month was February, chosen for leafless branches and low sun. Against bare black trees and a grey park, one colour read from end to end, and the motion of the cloth in the light recurred along every walk and at every hour of the sixteen days. Seen from the air and from the towers around the park, it gave a second register: a line of fire threading through the grey, following every turn of the paths.
This is a real elevation, sustained, and its kind is plain. What the walkers felt was delight and wonder more than transport; the effect was beautiful and genial, not grand or terrible. It depends on distance, movement and light, since at arm’s length the panel is a cloth and the post a post. The choices that made it are exact: one colour tuned to winter light, the hang stopped where it moves and clears the head, a height scaled to the trees and the paths. The making is load-bearing, and much of it is logistics rather than shaping.
Movement III
Central Park is a made landscape that is usually read as nature. Its walks were laid as a system of movement through it, and in winter, from the ground, that system is hard to see as a whole. The gates drew every walkway in one colour. From the towers around the park the drawing could be read at once: Olmsted and Vaux’s plan, made legible by a rule that had only to follow it.
That is the work’s first disclosure, and it can be stated: the park is a design. The second is the public as a body. In the cold of a New York winter a city walked its own park in crowds, and the work showed a commons in use. The third comes from the years before: a city is an order of permits, boards and politics, and the artists made that order part of what they showed. These are meanings, not moods. But the first is a narrow one, the design of one park, and much of what the work gave was festivity and warmth.
One law governs all of it. A narrow gate on a footpath in a wooded corner of the north of the park and the widest gate on a broad promenade in the south obey the same rule: across the walk at the walk’s width, one colour, one hang. The law holds from the ground to the air, and through the work’s time, shown for a fixed span and removed. The process keeps it too: no sponsor, no public money, nothing left behind. Nothing breaks it. But the law governs one repeated unit, and a law that governs a repetition is easily kept.
Movement IV
A gate is a threshold, the passage from one state to another, and a walk under thousands of them is a procession. The work is physically that, and the walker enacts it; the structure is built, not alluded to. Viewers also saw in the frames and the colour the gates and robes of other faiths, but those the eye brought with it. The colour of fire and of spring in a park in winter summons the turn of the year without constructing it. And the threshold, repeated so constantly, flattens into rhythm: no gate leads anywhere the last one did not.
The form is the instrument of what the work knows. A gate set across the path measures the walk it stands on, so the set of them draws the plan of the park; a banner, a wrapping or a canopy would not. The walker cannot see the work without moving through it. The panel makes the wind visible. The impermanence is form as well: sixteen days, so that the park after the gates is seen again as it was before. What the form does not do is develop. The unit is the same at the first gate and the last, and what it knows is known after a few hundred yards; the next twenty miles confirm it.
The partnership had made such works since the late 1960s: Wrapped Coast (1968 to 1969), Valley Curtain, Running Fence, Surrounded Islands, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Wrapped Reichstag, all temporary, self-financed, won through years of hearings and removed. Behind them stood Land Art and the long history of the festive decoration of cities. The Gates moved the method into the most visited urban park in the United States, in thousands of identical units to be walked through rather than looked at. The stake was real and paid. But a gate with a curtain extends Running Fence and Valley Curtain; it is a late, large and costly extension of a proven path, not a turn from it.
Movement V
From 28 February 2005 the gates were taken down, as planned, and nothing of them stands in the park. The work stood for sixteen days of a span of twenty-six years of making, and it has been gone for twenty-one; of the time since its conception it stood for less than a tenth of one per cent. What stands now is the record: the photographs, the documentary film, the artists’ book of the project, and the drawings and collages, sold to pay for it. The record carries the plan and the look, the line of saffron through bare trees. It does not carry the walk, the passage under thousands of moving panels, the duration or the cold. That the loss was intended belongs to the form; it is still loss.
Its reach in attention was very wide. It was a mass public event that put contemporary art before people who seldom meet it, and it is cited in accounts of temporary public art in cities since. The partnership’s own The Floating Piers (2016) is its plainest heir. That it redirected the practice of others is not shown, and the reorganisation of what such a work could be belongs to the works of the 1960s and 1970s. The questions it has kept open are real and few: whether the work is the installation or the years of its making, what a self-financed public work without a message means in a sponsored city, and whether a pleasure that asked little of its public is its seriousness.
Beside it on this desk stand The Weather Project, at 7.7, an installation for a public interior also dismantled and known as record, which rises higher and moved its field further; Cloud Gate, at 7.7, made in a city park in the same years, which still stands; and Spiral Jetty, at 8.5, the benchmark of work made in a landscape. The Gates is strong in its rule and its making and lesser on every axis of consequence, and that holds it below Tier IV. For sixteen days in February a gate stood across every walk in Central Park, at the walk’s width, and a city walked under the cloth.
Act III · The Twelve
The work is a rule more than a set of parts: a gate across the path, at the path’s width, at intervals, wherever the walkways run. The count of 7,503 is not chosen but yielded by the rule on Olmsted and Vaux’s paths, and the scale is compelled, twenty-three miles because the walks are twenty-three miles. The subtractive test bites in the opposite direction from a painting’s. Take away one gate, or a hundred, and nothing is lost that the eye can find; take away the rule and the work stops tracing the park and becomes a decoration in it. The free-hanging panel is required, since its motion is most of what the gate does, and the single colour is required. What gives is the frame, which carries the cloth and adds little else.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Disclosure through space is credited in full, and what it brought into the open can be stated. First, the park as a made thing: one colour along every walk showed a landscape usually read as nature, from the ground and above all from the towers around it, as a designed system of movement, Olmsted and Vaux’s drawing made legible. Second, the public as a body: in a New York winter a city walked its own park in crowds, a commons in use. Third, through twenty-six years of refusal and permission, the city as an order of permits, boards and politics. These are meanings. What holds the axis: the strongest of them is a narrow one, the design of one park, and much of what the work gave was festivity and warmth, a mood.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The elevation is of one kind and sustained: saffron panels moving overhead in wind and low winter light, gate after gate, a ceiling of colour rising and falling along the walk against bare black trees. Frequency is high, since the effect recurs along every walk and at every hour of the sixteen days, and the views from the air and the towers gave a second register, a line of fire threading a grey park. Height is the limit. The response the record shows is delight and wonder more than transport; the effect is beautiful and genial, not grand or terrible; and seen close, the frame is a plain manufactured unit and the panel a cloth, so that the height depends on distance, movement and light. A real elevation, sustained, in a middle register.
Score: 7.4 / 10
One structure is built, not alluded to: the gate and the processional way. A gate is the threshold, the passage from one state to another, and a walk under thousands of them is a procession through a sequence of thresholds; the work is physically that, and the walker enacts it. Much else is evoked. Viewers saw other gates and the robes of other faiths in the frames and the colour, but these the eye brought, and the work did not build them. The colour of fire and of spring in a winter park summons the turn of the year without constructing it. What holds the axis: the threshold, repeated so constantly, flattens into rhythm. No gate is a passage to anything the last one was not, and the particular, a park in February, carries the archetype lightly.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The inheritance by 2005 was the partnership’s own: temporary works at the scale of landscape, self-financed, made through years of permits and public hearings and removed, from Wrapped Coast (1968 to 1969) through Valley Curtain, Running Fence, Surrounded Islands, The Pont Neuf Wrapped and Wrapped Reichstag; behind it, Land Art and the old festive decoration of cities. The departure is in place and in kind of encounter: such a work in the most visited urban park in the United States, walked through rather than looked at, in thousands of identical units. The stake was real and paid: twenty-six years, a refusal, the artists’ own money. But it was a wager on a proven path, and a gate with a curtain extends Running Fence and Valley Curtain rather than turning from them.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The gate, rather than a banner, a wrapping or a canopy, is the instrument: a frame set across the path at the path’s width, so that each gate measures the walk it stands on and the whole set draws the park’s plan, and the walker cannot see the work without moving through it. The panel, stopped above head height and free at the hem, makes the wind visible and turns a still frame into a moving ceiling. One colour against the bare trees of February, the month chosen for leafless branches and low sun, lets the line read from above. The impermanence is form too. Held below 8 because the unit is repeated without development: the knowledge is complete after a few hundred yards.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: twenty-one years, and the work can be returned to only as record. The questions it has sustained are real but few. Is the work the installation, or the twenty-six years of hearings and refusals that made it possible? What does a self-financed public work, with no message and no sponsor, mean in a city where nearly everything public is sponsored? Is a work that pleased a great public and asked little of it serious, or is its pleasure its seriousness? Is the impermanence a statement or a condition of the permit? Return to the record yields the same images, the line seen from above and the crowd under the panels, and much of the writing returns to the partnership’s method rather than to this work. Forecast more than shown.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The field is public and large-scale installation art in the early 2000s, in New York and beyond. Intrinsic force: not a reorganisation of possibility. The temporary, self-financed environmental project, its process counted as the work, was the partnership’s own from the late 1960s, and the reorganisation belongs to those works; this one carried the method to its largest public and into the centre of a city. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: very wide in attention, a mass public event that put contemporary art before people who seldom meet it, cited in accounts of temporary public art in cities since; the partnership’s own The Floating Piers (2016) is its plainest heir. That it redirected the practice of others is not shown. Wide reach, small reorganisation.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, for the work as it can still be shown. Form: the installation was removed after sixteen days, by design, and what stands is the record, the photographs, the film, the book, the drawings and collages. The record carries the image well, the line of saffron through bare trees, but not what the work was for those who walked it: the passage under thousands of moving panels, the duration, the cold. That the loss was intended is credited elsewhere, as form and as law; this axis measures what survives, and intended loss is still loss. Presence: twenty-one years, famous, met now in reproduction, and fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: none survives as the work. The span alone would place the figure well above this one.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Judged as command of the medium, which here is the making and placing of a large temporary structure in a public landscape, with the fabrication and installation by others credited to the work. The command is high and organisational: thousands of gates made to the width of each walkway, installed and opened across the park in a few days, kept through sixteen days of public use, and removed. The decisive visual choices are exact: one colour tuned to winter light; the panel’s hang stopped above head height so that it moves and clears the walker; a height of about sixteen feet scaled to the bare trees and the paths. The making is load-bearing. Held below 8 because the unit is plain and industrial at close range, and much of the craft is logistics rather than shaping.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a narrow gate on a footpath in a wooded corner of the north of the park, and the widest gate on a broad promenade in the south, seen by crowds and from the towers. They obey one law: a gate set across the walk at the walk’s width, one colour, one hang. The law holds through every gate and every view, from the ground to the air, and through the work’s time, shown for a fixed span, removed, the ground left as found. The process obeys it too: no sponsor, no public money, nothing left behind. Nothing breaks the law. What holds the axis: narrowness is not coherence, and a law that governs one repeated unit is easily kept. The range is vast in space and small in form.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The orders held are several, and the walk integrates them: the natural order in a made landscape, the trees, the weather, the winter; the city, its paths and its crowds in their winter clothes; the state, the permits, the hearings and the officials, the twenty-six years, all counted part of the work; the economy, a free public work paid for by the sale of drawings; and art and its public. The walker holds them at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no person but the crowd, no family, no labour shown, though hundreds of paid workers installed it, no history beyond the park’s, and no sacred order but by projection. A single repeated unit in one landscape is wide in extent, not in orders.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Inner Law at 8.0, then The Living Form and The Made at 7.9 and The Inevitable at 7.7. One law, a gate across the walk at the walk’s width, one colour, one hang, kept by every gate from a wooded footpath to the widest promenade, and by the process, which left nothing behind; a form whose gate measures the path it stands on and whose free panel makes the wind visible; a making exact in colour, hang and scale and load-bearing in its logistics; and a rule that compels the count and the scale, so that 7,503 is a number the park chose.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: nature, the city, the state, the economy and the public are held by the walk, and there is no person but the crowd, no family, no labour shown, no history beyond the park’s. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep and The Bottomless Well at 7.0: a threshold built and then flattened into rhythm, and a few real questions, returned to only through the record. Then The Swerve at 7.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.2: a costly extension of the partnership’s own method, wide in reach and small in reorganisation. These hold the work below Tier IV: one plain unit repeated without development in one park, strong in its rule and its making and lesser on every axis of consequence.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.9, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 7.5, The Unconcealment at 7.4, Pressure on Tradition at 7.2, The Swerve at 7.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.0 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Unconcealment, 7.4, The Sublime, 7.4, Pressure on Tradition, 7.2, The Swerve, 7.1, The Archetypal Deep, 7.0, and The Bottomless Well, 7.0, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 88.9, an average of 7.408 that displays 7.4. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.4, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work and its record; the installation was not walked for this reading. The work is known well in outline and in its principal facts, its critical literature less well, and its physical specifications only at the level of the widely published figures; where a judgment turns on them it is held more loosely. The work scored is The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979-2005, by Christo (1935 to 2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935 to 2009), credited to the partnership: the installation of 2005 as made and as recorded, 7,503 gates along about 23 miles of the walkways of Central Park, each a frame of two posts and a top bar about 16 feet high with a free-hanging panel of saffron-coloured nylon, shown from 12 to 27 February 2005 and removed from 28 February as planned. The twenty-six years of proposal, refusal and permission are weighed as the work’s process, as the artists defined it. Nothing of the installation stands; what stands now is the record, the photographs, the documentary film, the artists’ book of the project and the preparatory drawings and collages, and the loss is weighed on survival in proportion to what it takes, and on no other axis. The partnership’s earlier and later projects, the preparatory works as objects sold in their own right, and any later display of a gate are context and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given, among them the range of the gates’ widths, the material of the posts and their footings, the weave of the cloth, the cost, the names and years of the officials who refused and permitted the work, the attendance, what became of the materials, the makers of the documentary film and of the photographs, and the weather during the run.