#a87 :: Fabric from Christo’s “The Gates”

Let’s skip the art theory and get right to the point: Christo’s work impresses on a visceral, order monumental level.

I’ve been fortunate enough to see two of their works:

Surrounded Islands (1982 or so?) – drove down with a colleague to Miami to where the artist had floated skirts of bubblegum-pink polypropylene around 11 or so of the Biscayne Islands. The lurid, prescription glistening aprons changed the mangroves into a miles-long array of alien lilies, the pink intensity of the work contrasting intensely with the dark green mangroves and the Bay’s aqua blue.

And my then-fiancee and I were fortunate enough to see the California half of the Umbrella Project in 1991: The artist(s) erected 1,760 6-meter-high yellow umbrellas in the Tejon Pass and another 1,340 blue umbrellas in Ibaraki. We were sitting at the base of one umbrella, halfway up the wall of the pass when a huge storm blew through it. Cars scurried southward with high beams on, fleeing before a roiling wall of black cloud and rain that surged up the valley, and we headed back home toward Los Angeles. We later learned that one of the umbrellas blew off its moorings and killed a woman, which always struck me as at once horrible and awe-inspriing.

I wasn’t lucky enough to see The Gates, but at some point, a scrap of the fabric from that curtained promenade through Central Park floated through our house and stayed.

It’s a dense pattern-weave of glossy orange nylon, with a whole lotta moxie to it.

I’m not sure what to make, then, of this announcement on the site:

Fabric, parts and separate Gates are NOT for sale and NOT available for any use whatsoever. eMail on this subject may not be responded to.

Wish I had a couple dozen yards of it, I’d redo a sofa.