Area 1, Section 7: Done
My eight member team erected our last gate at 3:03pm today. Sadly, the last gate was on a funny angle and had to be taken down and put up another three times.
Erecting these gates has been an incredible experience and today was an amazing end to the construction portion of the project.
Every day this week I have woken at 5:30am in order to arrive at the Central Park Boathouse before 7am. This morning was by far the hardest morning yet. My muscles ache from three solid days of physical labor and my head was light.
Yet, when I got to the Command Center I felt an incredible energy to again to outside ready to work on the project, ready to finish the most important phase.
As I drank my morning coffee and assembled my team, Martha - a literary agent on my team - told me that former Texas Governor Ann Richards was a few feet away and has been here all week working on the project.
I made a b-line to the former Governor and had my picture taken with her.
Although I missed seeing him, John Cameron Mitchell, of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame, is working on the project as is one of the members of Ween.
Our group is celebrity free but as we worked this morning in the rain, Christo and Jeanne-Claude stopped their car near us and came out to help us put up a gate.
Of course everything went wrong the moment they showed up. Christo saved the day by getting a stuck crossbeam into a vertical and then agreeing to pose for a group photograph.
Their joining us for those few moments really drove home their personal connection to their art.
This project is an amazing feat of group effort but it is ultimately a work from their hearts for their own pleasure.
Standing there with them, all the members of our group felt the energy of the project and really bonded in a way that the tensions from earlier in the week had prevented. In these few days of manual labor we got to know and like each-other.
Sadly, Henry, the older gentleman in our group, did not join us for fear of exhausting and hurting himself. I hope he makes it out tomorrow because it would be nice to have him join us for the end of the project.
All day we worked and photographed and talked. We talked about art and politics and ourselves and the project. I genuinely like my group a great deal and have delighted in working with them. Talking to people outside my usual world has made me feel incredibly connected.
I often wonder how my perspective is limited by associating so much with people who agree with me. Although individuals who travel across the country to work on an art installation are not representative of the population it is refreshing to talk to someone from South Carolina, or Minnesota, or Washington state, or Florida, or the Upper West Side and find similar perspectives.
Yes we all hate Bush. But more interesting than that is how similar ideas of individuality and interests in music or other things cross all kinds of boundaries.
This project is in many ways for New York exclusively. One must travel here in the 16 days it will be on display to see it. During the construction, however, I learned that the project is also an event of globalization in its most positive sense. People came from all over to build it and tourists came to see it being built from all of the world.
Couples came by from all over Europe. I was interviewed by Good Morning America and a Norwegian newspaper.
As we worked our pictures were taken by hundreds of passersby. Somewhere, when someone talks about this project there will, in their photo album, be a picture of me and my crew erecting a gate.
Tomorrow we enter the last stage of preparation: we must fix errant gates and clear the park of all evidence of construction. Then, on Saturday morning, we get the honor of unfurling the cloth that hangs from each gate. For the rest of the day we will stand ready to answer questions and hand out cloth samples to the anticipated throng.
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Who is this guy?
Sam, once again I apologize for not being able to record your potential appearance on GMA. But let me use this platform to ask you and your loyal readers to contact your Congressman/Senator to push for legislation that requires digital satellite set-top boxes to have methods for offloading digital materials for archival purposes, i.e. active Firewire ports. The FCC currently requires Cable companies to provide active Firewire ports for this purpose, but there is no equivalent in the Satellite industry.
Oh, and congrats on the job well done!