Christo's Gates

I went to see "The Gates" in Central Park yesterday.

As an excuse to amble through Central Park on a warm February afternoon, in the semi-charmed state of second childhood, the Gates will do. What struck me, other than their obvious charm, was the ironic fidelity they payed to Olmsted's original vision of the park. As Lawrence Levine tells the story in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, the original idea of Central Park was as an urban pastoral in which the masses would be civilized through genteel contact with nature. This contact, Olmsted stressed, involved walking along demarcated paths in family groups; he resisted the communal activities like sports or even picknicking on the grass.

In demarcating the "proper" paths in the park, and reemphasizing the practice of structured walking in a state of aesthetic receptivity, Christo obliquely reinforces the essentially hierarchical model of culture the park's creator envisioned, and which generations of users have successfully resisted.