Shades of Citrus

I’m just mad about Saffron…
They call me Mellow Yellow.
- Donovan, Mellow Yellow


The Gates was a project by Cristo and Jeanne-Claude which involved filling Central Park with giant saffron gates with curtains hanging from the tops. There were thousands of these gates lining every walk way of Central Park. They flowed along the paths like so many ants on their way to work. The saffron curtains billowed in the breeze. The one question that everyone in New York and around the country seemed to be asking was: Why? The only adequate response I've heard was: Why not?
Christo and Jeanne-Claude say The Gates only serve an aestetic purpose to the park. The husband and wife team struggled over three decades to construct these gates because they would look cool. Yet, this answer doesn't seem to satisfy anyone and I ask: Why not?
Let me start at the beginning of my experience with the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I was five. I was sitting in a hot Plymounth Minivan with my mother, my father and my annoying younger sister sweating beside me in the back seat. That morning my parents loaded my sister and I into the car with a picnic and drove into the middle-of-California-nowhere. Let me set the scene for you again. Me, my family, a hot car, a two lane highway weaving through the California plains and giant yellow umbrellas. I had no idea why they were there. To a five year giant yellow unbrellas in the middle of nowhere is very confusing. I wanted to know why there were unbrellas in the plains and why they were open when it was sunny and why we drove in a hot car for hours to see them and why they were yellow. To a five year old they didn't make sense. My mother simply said “Its art”, which did not clear up the confusion for this five year old and has been ringing in her ears ever since. “Its art.”
I was resistant to the The Umbrellas because I didn’t understand them. I didn’t want to get out of the car to look at them. It was enough to watch the lines they formed, the patterns that kept changing as we drove past and the yellow blooms that were tucked into the folds of the mountains. I was more interested in eating, my parents tell me. I just wanted to have our picnic. Now, I regret not fully expiriencing The Umbrellas. I only saw them from far away and from a moving car. I remember the atmosphere of The Umbrellas and the plains: yellow. Yellow doesn’t just describe the color of The Umbrellas. Yellow was the sun beating down, the smell of sunscreen, the dying grass on the hills and the interior of the car. The whole experience was yellow. I thought this yellow experience was isolated, something I saw when I was five, something that would remain in my memory, alone and yellow.
Now, as a nineteen year old I understand that they don't have to mean anything, but it took fourteen years to figure that out. Five year old me needed a reason. The Umbrellas needed a reason. So I came up with a reason. The Umbrellas were there because a big company was having a company picnic, as we were. I pictured lots of men and women in suits milling around eating picnic food while enjoying the shade of the giant umbrellas. For a five year old this was enough of a reason and when I had my reason I was ready to eat and go home. Now, I think back to The Umbrellas and the few visual memories I actually have of them stretching out across the grasslands. Then I understand something, its not a point or a reason, just a something. The presense of The Umbrellas emphasized the endlessness, expansiveness and exposedness of the plains of California. Before they were just plains, but now the complete nothingness of them seems so evident. They stretched out along the freeway and completely surrounded little towns that seemed lost in all the empty yellow. The plains are just filled with grass, and I say filled, despite how empty they are. When the wind blows through those plains along the Grapevine[1], eighteen wheelers are likely to tip over. The plains are so utterly empty; so completely yellow.
Moving across the country and going to college suddenly filled my world with Christo and Jeanne-Claude again. The yellow memories of the past that I had dismissed as an event no one else would ever share resurfaced, this time in a darker hue. When Christo and Jeanne-Claude were installing The Gates into Central Park, the same emotions, responses and questions that my five year old self had asked, came to mind again. Why are they here? This time I had a better answer: Why not?
How does this relate to The Gates? Aside from the fact that the two projects are by the same artists, The Gates is the one project that is remotely similar to The Umbrellas. The other projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude generally involve what the media calls "wrapping", a title that Jeanne-Claude does not hestitant to ridicule. The Gates are thousands of individulal structures, as were The Umbrellas, alone they might be cute and not given much notice, but when thousands of them – 7500 to be exact – line every walkway of such a public space people stand up and take notice. As I walked through Central Park the first afternoon that The Gates were "opened" other things began to jump out at me. On previous visits to Central Park I has seen the joggers and the trees and the ponds and they were very nice. When I visited with The Gates, the bright saffron invading this place of nature jumped out at me. It was intruding. It forced this unnatural creation of man into nature, almost like Frankenstein's Creature. Yet, when I started to look for The Gates as I walked beneath them and tried to see where the other paths lead, I didn't see The Gates anymore, I didn't see the saffron billowing in the wind. I saw the trees. I saw the mud. I saw the tourists. I even saw the Hawk that lives on Fifth Avenue. The Gates slowly disappeared and everything else popped out, particularly people who were wearing any shade of orange. I had never noticed so much orange before in my life. It was overwhelming and I'm not sure I care to see that much ever again. One critizism of The Gates is that all the saffron makes the park look like a construction zone. I don’t think the orange should be dismissed so lightly.
Stewart Edward White, in his book The Mountains, he talks about trying to see deer in the woods and how those unaccostumed to looking for deer, don’t often see deer. He says “A soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer”(123). Although, you aren’t likely to see deer in Central Park, it is the construction of the artificial that allows you to see the park. The Gates are obviously artificial and although the park itself it a constructed entity, it has the allusion of being natural, The Gates do not. These artificial constructs imposed on the park allowed me to see aspects of the park I had never seen before. With The Gates I did not need to forget the naturally obvious and impose the artificial on to the park with my mind, Christo and Jeanne-Claude did it for me. The Gates allowed me to see the “deer” of Central Park.
The idea that The Gates makes everything around them more visible is a really interesting and confusing idea. It confuses me now the same way The Umbrellas confused the five year old. I feel I can see Central Park better because The Gates are there. Maybe its because they offer a gateway for me to see the park or they make me really look at the park, or more likely, since The Gates are in the park and I'm looking at them as if they are an art object, I see the space around them as an art object too. The whole park becomes art and not just the park; the people, the dogs, the vendors and even the surrounding buildings. The Gates seem out of place in Central Park; as do the people, the dogs, the vendors and the surrounding buildings.
Walt Whitman wrote in his famous poem Song of Myself
Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Til that becomes the unseen and receives proof in its turn. (27)

This notion of duality is common in western philosophy. Two things – people, trees, art objects – rely on others to justify their existance. A person and their dog, a tree and the soil, a painting and the museum, The Umbrellas and California, The Gates and New York, California and New York, The Umbrellas and The Gates. Without The Gates I would never have reached a personal peace with The Umbrellas and without The Umbrellas I would never have been so open to just seeing The Gates. With both The Umbrellas and The Gates I first saw them, because they were what was intruding on the natural landscape. I had driven along the Grapevine before and through the endless plains along the Grapevine and I had walked through Central Park before, but with these old places decorated with new intrusions I just saw the intrusions. Through The Umbrellas and through The Gates I saw the landscape in a new golden light. I saw California more empty and I saw New York more crowded. The Umbrellas emphasized the emptyness of the California plains, The Gates emphasize the crowdedness of New York’s Central Park.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude helped me bridge the gap between California and New York, between childhood and adulthood. I spent my entire childhood in California with the image of the rolling plains somewhere on the other side of a free way leading to lush orange groves and yellow umbrellas somewhere deep in my consciousness. The plane trip from LA to NY becacme the literal transition from childhood into adulthood and Christo and Jeanne-Claude were there to greet me and usher me into my adulthood with something familiar, although confusing.
With the beginning of adulthood came an understanding of the unanswered questions of childhood through the connection between The Umbrellas and The Gates. I realized that not all questions have answers and not all answers have questions. The Umbrellas and The Gates are both answers and questions, unto themselves. Although, they help each other in finding the answers and asking the questions, they do not complete each other. Moving to New York seemed to be an answer to my depression all through high school, but the depression was not a question. While The Gates answered the questions raised by the five year old about The Umbrellas, The Umbrellas were not able to answer new questions raised by The Gates. However, The Gates did make me ponder whether I was asking the questions in the right way.
Answering the questions of childhood, with the questions of adulthood lets me know that I keep moving on, just as I moved across the entire country to find answers for the five year old. Although, having childhood questions answered is satisfying, and puts the child’s mind at peace, the adult keeps pushing.
Why are there yellow umbrellas here?
Its art.
Why is this art? Why are the saffron gates art?
Why not?
The cycle just keeps going. The why’s just keep proliferating.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work is temporary and immidiate, but it took me fourteen years to understand that. I thought it should have a lasting impact in the form of a “reason d’être” but the lasting effect is due to its temporality. I could go to the Met everyday of the week and stare at Da Vinci’s sketch of the Head of the Virgin and study each line and I would remember the sketch, and say I understood what Da Vinci was doing with color, light and perspective. But The Umbrellas and The Gates do not remain still and perspective, light and color change with each viewing and each movement around them you make. Da Vinci’s sketch represents the head of the Virgin Mary. Christo and Jeanne-Claude say their work doesn’t mean anything. If The Gates represent anything, whether the artists say it or not, it has more to do with peace then anything else. People from all over the country, all over the world, I'm sure are flocking to New York City's Central Park to see them. If anything The Gates are bringing people. Yet, with The Gates and The Umbrellas I saw them each once as I walked or drove around them, they exist in my memory, and The Umbrellas remained in my memory from a five year old perspective, growing more yellow with age. Only now under the influence of The Gates has that image been updated, given a technicolor rebirth through saffron.
The Umbrellas and The Gates swirl together in my memory, blending the old and the new, my past and my present, yellow and saffron. The Umbrellas and The Gates are both shades of citrus in my mind and no matter where I am, the smell of citrus will remind me of who I am.




Bibliography
1) Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Gates. New York Central Park, New York. 1979-2005
2) Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Umbrellas. The California Plains, California. 1991.
3) Da Vinci, Leonardo. Head of the Virgin. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Drawings and Prints. By Harris Brisbane Dick fund. 1951
4) Donovan. Mellow Yellow. 1966.
5) White, Stewart Edward. The Mountains. New York: McClure, Phillips & Company, 1904.Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 1993.
[1] The Grapevine is a stretch of highway that connects the coastal region of CA to the agricultural valley in the center of the state. It is called the Grapevine because of the way it winds across the plains – like a grapevine.