So getting up at 6:00 AM on four hours sleep for a week both attenuates one’s posting schedule and increases one’s respect for anyone with both a labor-intensive job and a social-intensive calendar. Just don’t say I don’t suffer for art.
The remainder of the week doesn’t produce any celebrity sightings, just lots of Germans. We manage to get done ahead of schedule, as did just about everyone else. The last snag was poor documentation: only at the very end did inventory catch up with installation enough to determine that several locations were marked incorrectly, leading to a shortage of particular sizes that apparently were manufactured last night. In our end of the park, Gate raising pretty much wrapped up yesterday in the early afternoon, though four pesky locations weren’t finished until this morning. Christo and Jeanne-Claude showed up at what was claimed to the be the last raising, and signed our dorky uniforms (this appellation was provided by a team-mate who has worked on the last seven projects, and apparently is a consistent feature of their projects).
Our work done, we got to sightsee and play on the swings (though I was admonished later with the fact that swinging without children is a ticketable offense — is this true, and is Bloomberg responsible for this too?). I have been asked a number of times the best place to be. Having walking about 70% of the park in its not-quite-finished state, I have basically two ways to respond:
1. Pick your favorite place in the park and go there. Regardless of the number of Gates, that which you know well will result in a better understanding of the transformation. The project was mounted in February because the trees are bare, and even in the areas with the most ground cover, you can still see multitudes.
2. Walk the whole damn thing. They worked on this 26 years. A couple hundred people put in tens of thousands of hours. It’s a complete work that is best experienced in its entirety. Give yourself a couple of hours, and explore. That said, there is little point in going to several points that might seem obvious: the Reservoir and the Belvedere Castle do not provide much of a vista.
The patterns of the pathways drive the locations, and thus Olmstead’s plan is a major contributor to the process. More Gates are located in the southern end of the park, but in the open areas of the north (the North Meadow and the Harlem Meer) provide more unobstructed views, and in some instances have much longer stretches of Gates. The north also tends to be far less crowded.
It’s hard to get a sense of the interest the project is generating because my entire week has been filled with orange (sorry, saffron) vinyl and wet, difficult bolts. The preponderance of press and the internal documentary team created a strange sense of artifice to everything we did, as 70 crews were doing the same thing over and over, using by and large the same process. How many times you can shoot a Gate? Of course, had I waited that long, I too might ask someone to take a lot of pictures, just to prove that it happened. And each member of that team was carefully documenting it over and over. Thankfully, this hyper-awareness of participating in something that was laden with the air of history and significance did not prevent it from simply being fun. Snippets of interesting moments will certainly be uncovered, but at my last encounter with a film crew this week, the most accurate response I had was my strained attempt at ironic humor when my team was asked why we did it, and no one leapt at the chance to respond: “We didn’t practice our sound bites”. Chirsto said just about every time he spoke that there was no answer to the questions of why or what. And knowing, or assuming, an answer to that isn’t a prerequisite of attending. It’s a hell of a thing, no matter what. Go take a look (after, roughly, 9:30 AM tomorrow — Feb 12).
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Gates Day unhhh.
So getting up at 6:00 AM on four hours sleep for a week both attenuates one’s posting schedule and increases one’s respect for anyone with both a labor-intensive job and a social-intensive calendar. Just don’t say I don’t suffer for art.
The remainder of the week doesn’t produce any celebrity sightings, just lots of Germans. We manage to get done ahead of schedule, as did just about everyone else. The last snag was poor documentation: only at the very end did inventory catch up with installation enough to determine that several locations were marked incorrectly, leading to a shortage of particular sizes that apparently were manufactured last night. In our end of the park, Gate raising pretty much wrapped up yesterday in the early afternoon, though four pesky locations weren’t finished until this morning. Christo and Jeanne-Claude showed up at what was claimed to the be the last raising, and signed our dorky uniforms (this appellation was provided by a team-mate who has worked on the last seven projects, and apparently is a consistent feature of their projects). Our work done, we got to sightsee and play on the swings (though I was admonished later with the fact that swinging without children is a ticketable offense — is this true, and is Bloomberg responsible for this too?). I have been asked a number of times the best place to be. Having walking about 70% of the park in its not-quite-finished state, I have basically two ways to respond: 1. Pick your favorite place in the park and go there. Regardless of the number of Gates, that which you know well will result in a better understanding of the transformation. The project was mounted in February because the trees are bare, and even in the areas with the most ground cover, you can still see multitudes. 2. Walk the whole damn thing. They worked on this 26 years. A couple hundred people put in tens of thousands of hours. It’s a complete work that is best experienced in its entirety. Give yourself a couple of hours, and explore. That said, there is little point in going to several points that might seem obvious: the Reservoir and the Belvedere Castle do not provide much of a vista. The patterns of the pathways drive the locations, and thus Olmstead’s plan is a major contributor to the process. More Gates are located in the southern end of the park, but in the open areas of the north (the North Meadow and the Harlem Meer) provide more unobstructed views, and in some instances have much longer stretches of Gates. The north also tends to be far less crowded. It’s hard to get a sense of the interest the project is generating because my entire week has been filled with orange (sorry, saffron) vinyl and wet, difficult bolts. The preponderance of press and the internal documentary team created a strange sense of artifice to everything we did, as 70 crews were doing the same thing over and over, using by and large the same process. How many times you can shoot a Gate? Of course, had I waited that long, I too might ask someone to take a lot of pictures, just to prove that it happened. And each member of that team was carefully documenting it over and over. Thankfully, this hyper-awareness of participating in something that was laden with the air of history and significance did not prevent it from simply being fun. Snippets of interesting moments will certainly be uncovered, but at my last encounter with a film crew this week, the most accurate response I had was my strained attempt at ironic humor when my team was asked why we did it, and no one leapt at the chance to respond: “We didn’t practice our sound bites”. Chirsto said just about every time he spoke that there was no answer to the questions of why or what. And knowing, or assuming, an answer to that isn’t a prerequisite of attending. It’s a hell of a thing, no matter what. Go take a look (after, roughly, 9:30 AM tomorrow — Feb 12).