Dating at the Gates

It's not as politically savvy as wrapping the Reichstag, as photogenic as framing 11 Biscayne Bay islands pink or as audacious as wrapping a mile of the Australian coast. But Christo and Jeanne-Claude's temporary landscape artwork, the Gates, in Manhattan's Central Park is apt for a city of pedestrians.

That the work does not wrap around or cover anything is part of its tameness, and at 7 feet high, the bottom edge of the Gates' banners are the exact height of a toddler's reach astride Dad's shoulders. The Gates is also a work specifically American in that they suggest rows of advertising billboards.

The artists describe the Gates as offering "warm shadows" to those who pass beneath some or all of its 7,500 gates, and the illusion of a "golden river" to those lucky enough to view it from a nearby building. They also insist the color of all the gates and their pleated nylon curtains is not orange at all, but saffron.

While Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude call themselves landscape artists, not conceptual artists, their work over the years is right on board with conceptual art and its invitation to consider the alteration of space. (See Fred Sandback's strings and Richard Serra's curled steel). The Gates also draws us to interrogate ourselves and our assumptions; it is art built upon self-consciousness. Not ideal, I discovered, for a first date.

I met M on an online dating service. To avoid the usual first date disaster of interviewing each other in a Starbucks, I suggested seeing the Gates its opening weekend for an afternoon of innocuous highbrow fun.

The coordinates of our meeting were to be Central Park West and 63rd street, and as neither of us owned a cell phone — a good sign about M, in my opinion — we were living dangerously, making plans the way people did in the old days. She said she'd be wearing a black leather jacket. I said I would too and a cap I'd bought in Dublin. M ran her own new media company, and liked to shoot photos in cemeteries; she liked Britcoms and Amy, but not David, Sedaris. She did not wish to date a man who had grown up as an only child; she was adopted and had two tattoos, one around her wrist and the other, of course, in the small of her back.

Upon meeting, I saw that she also had that harried, wary look of a woman who's had too many hard-drinking, self-centered, insensitive jerk boyfriends with animal magnetism and no bank account. She did not remove her sunglasses. She spoke with a mix of toughness and caution — she seemed part dollar beer, part yoga class. She carried a messenger bag but it looked empty. Her jacket was soft black suede, not leather. She said it was nice to meet me and asked if I'd been waiting long. I said I hadn't been waiting long and my train had come earlier than I'd expected (I said I'd "overplanned").

I asked her if she wanted to go into the park to look at the art. She said she did.

A first date needs a sure thing as ballast. A dive bar, a bookstore, even a gallery hop. But not a site-specific conceptual piece of landscape art that draws your attention to your own self-awareness with a kind of sublime saffron-tinged paranoia. There was a festive atmosphere to the crowds in the Park, with plenty of representatives of the stroller class, athletic and cheery couples beaming up at the "warm shadows" and the "golden river" Christo and Jeanne-Claude assured them would be there. M said in her profile that she did not want children, a good sign, for me, as I'd found watching a friend's cat to be too distracting.

I told M I found the Gates less "aesthetically pleasurable" than I'd imagined/hoped. To view an array of them across the Sheep Meadow or fenced-in Great Lawn was kind of depressing. As I spoke, I felt I was actually critiquing the date-in-progress, with the orange landscape art as neutral stand-in.

I said the Gates were kind of distant, and not engaging. Was I talking about M? She did indeed come off as distant — those sunglasses and all. I said it was not what I expected. What did I mean by that? Was I dive-bombing the date as soon as it had started?

M and I had both brought digital cameras, as had most of the crowd. People got their friends to take their picture beside a gate as if beside Mickey Mouse. Would you have your picture taken beside a Richard Serra? An Andy Goldsworthy? Having your picture snapped beside a gate seemed suitable, and in fact the Gates is arguably an art piece designed less for the environment of Central Park and more for your picture of Central Park, the instant memory of it — a landscape art piece for the digital camera, for the creation of an instant nostalgic past. You take a picture of it and you can't wait to get home from the park to download it and see how it looks.

In my Gates picture I am squinting, looking lost at the head of a line of identical, square 16-foot-high frames. There are no warm shadows and no golden river; I'm a man with orange fabric hanging over his head wondering how he feels about the woman taking his picture and whether he likes the way she screws up her lips when taking the picture. I asked M if she wanted me to take her picture and she said No. She did not like pictures of herself, she said, nor videos of herself. Nor did she like talking on the phone; she always lets her machine pick up calls.

"I'm not a social butterfly by any means," she told me.

We joined a small crowd reaching for handouts of some of the one million commemorative limited-edition orange swatches. Like art-starved zombies, we surrounded the Gates worker as she placed little squares of nylon into our eager hands, a flattened version of the inescapable media images of Iraqi crowds or tsunami victims grabbing bags of food from the backs of trucks, now reduced to sublime, privileged gesture.

Another, less grasping crowd stood gathered around several large telescopes at the edge of the east side Boat Pond. Their lenses were aimed at the top of a Fifth Avenue apartment building, specifically at the Peregrine falcons that had recently been in the news after having their nest first destroyed and then restored thanks to pro-falcon environmentalists. A bunch of people aiming their telescopes at a 5th Avenue predator as it tore a pigeon to pieces — that was the visceral New York I knew.

M paid for my post-Gates coffee — a bad sign, I'd been told, and sure sign of her guilt over wanting to escape. She did take off her sunglasses and find us a table as I got the sugar. She had sad, tired eyes; it might have been all the saffron. We talked about Britcoms, about her tattoo, and her work, and a good nearby Mexican restaurant, and about how people look crazy talking into their cell phones' long wire extension on the street.

I mentioned a recent New York Times article about the wealthy parents of kids now headed off to expensive boarding schools. These parents up and move with their kids to the town near the boarding school, so as to avoid the pain of separation. M and I bonded over shared scoffing: these boomer parents simply refused to grow up. We felt good ridiculing those more needy than us, and yet, on the ride home, M told me that instead of taking the F with me all the way to Brooklyn, that she would prefer to stay on the C and change for the F, by herself, at Jay Street. I said that was fine and that it was nice meeting her and she said you too and I said I'll e-mail you and she said definitely.

— Stephen Bracco (sbracco@yahoo.com)