CHRISTO: ONCE UPON A TIME
“It’s like a flower, it will be gone. Each project is an expedition. It will never be repeated. They will go away, but remain as “once upon a time””, said Christo & Jean-Claude of their work. Ephemeral duet of visionary and practical, born the same year - the same day disappeared as their projects: Jean-Claude in 2009, & Christo this May. Their grandioze pieces that would be carefully planned - built - disassembled afterwards, leaving only documentaries, photos + memories of people who have seen them. I recall being around 10, & getting glossies (mostly free catalogues from Galeries Lafayette + a couple of Elle’s) from my aunt’s girlfriend married to a Parisian guy (it didn’t work out eventually). Magazines with Jean-Paul Goude ads and Christo’s Pont-Neuf. It was something to wrap my head around. To enclose the bridge in sunny couture like fabric for 14 days? A couple of insights trying to explain their work >
Sophie Gilbert // The Atlantic > “Their signature works couldn’t be commodified because they existed for only weeks or months at a time, free for anyone to behold and funded by the artists themselves. They were, in Christo’s own words, “absolutely irrational, with no justification to exist.”
William Grimes // New York Times > “Christo - he used only his first name - was an artistic Pied Piper. His grand projects, often decades in the making and all of them temporary, required the cooperation of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of landowners, government officials, judges, environmental groups, local residents, engineers and workers, many of whom had little interest in art and a deep reluctance to see their lives and their surroundings disrupted by an eccentric visionary speaking in only semi-comprehensible English. Again and again, Christo prevailed, through persistence, charm and a childlike belief that eventually everyone would see things the way he did.”
Adrian Searle / The Guardian > “For all the technical complexities and the heavy lifting, Christo’s art can have a surprising immediacy. The wrapped Reichstag might stop you in your tracks, and the wrapped coastline might leave you gawping in disbelief, but works such as the Surrounded Islands or the Running Fence have a kind of lightness and immediacy, as if they have just happened, appearing as if by magic. Surrounding a group of small islands near Miami with floating pink fabric in 1983, and extending floating, interconnecting piers or pontoons covered in yellow fabric across a huge Italian lake in 2016, the artists transformed these places, albeit briefly, into a kind of gorgeous abstraction.”
Michael Kimmelman / New York Times > ”It riffed on the utopianism of Soviet Socialist Realism, which postured about being an art for Everyman. In lieu of that sham populism, which produced supersized monuments to Marx and Mother Russia - public works meant to last for the ages and imposed by the state on a captive populace - Christo flipped the script. He trafficked in a passing sort of abstraction whose meanings remained open-ended and up for debate. Its creation was a personal obsession requiring public consent - dependent on a messy, slow political theater that was the ultimate conceptual point of the art. (…) Which made the wrapped bridge or building the after-party, a celebration of hard-earned consensus, the affirmation, through art, of an open society. (…) Headstrong, impish, endearing. That was Christo.”
Always self-funded, Christo sold sketches, photographic documentation and preparation work to make their projects happen. New York “The Gates” instalation cost them 10 million dollars and took 26 years in the making.
“Wrapping conceals, but it also reveals something about the structures that are hidden. What we see is the bulk, as though by renaissance drapery, or the cloth a conjuror drops over a object, in the moment before making it disappear, or turn into a rabbit. But the best of Christo’s art is always somewhere else, alive in the imagination, and filled with associations, some yet to be made.” (Adrian Searle / The Guardian // photo: Wolfgang Volz).
“The public loved Christo. Art critics delivered mixed reviews. To some, he seemed more showman, or even charlatan, than artist. “The fact that their work is so accessible is a factor in the disdain and hostility it evokes in certain quarters,” Calvin Tomkins wrote in The New Yorker in 2004. “It makes some critics and quite a few artists exclude them from the pantheon of serious art.” Both camps saw him as an unclassifiable figure. The artist Saul Steinberg, a good friend, said of Christo, “He not only invented himself, he invented his art and, even more amazing, he invented his public.” (William Grimes / NYT // photo: Ellen Waugh).
“Wrapped Cans”, 1959-60, Tate museum.
Gilded magic: the oldest bridge in Paris, Pont-Neuf wrapped in silky fabric in 1985. How it all started: “at the beginning of his professional career, in his Paris studio Christo began collecting bottles, paint cans, oil drums and wooden crates, some of which he wrapped in resin-soaked canvas, tied with twine and coated with black or gray automobile paint in an evolving work he called “Inventory.”” (William Grimes / NYT // photo: Wolfgang Volz).
Ripped “Valley Curtain”, Colorado // “The crew was ecstatic. They passed around champagne and gave Christo a dunking in Rifle Creek. Anthony Macchione, Rifle's bigwheel businessman and rancher, paraded up and down on his brown quarterhorse, Al. “I think it's beautiful,” he said. But a woman tourist from Iowa, one of the first allowed to drive through the gap after the curtain was down, was not so pleased. “Will it have a painting on the other side?” she asked. (…) “I will not,” Christo said later, “do another curtain. Have learned everything I wanted from this.” (Grace Glueck / NYT, 1972 // photo: AP).
DETAILS: “Christo filled the car with nervous, ecstatic chatter and the scent of garlic, which he consumed like vitamins to ward off illness.” Michael Kimmelman / NYT on The Gates > // photo: Big Air Package instalation in Germany, 2013, Wolfgang Volz.
THE COUPLE: “their partnership, which lasted more than five decades, was spiritual and practical - when they traveled internationally, they reportedly flew on separate planes so one could continue to finish the pair’s work in the event of a crash.” (Sophie Gilbert / The Atlantic // photo: Wolfgang Volz, Miami, May 1983. Surrounded Islands project).
Demonstrating his wrap-it art in 1963, Christo applies a polythene sheet to an ancient sculpture in Rome. With the plastic sheet and some string, Christo explains, "The sculpture takes on the loving form of mystery." // Photo: Bettmann / Getty.
Christo about their work: “It is freedom. Freedom is the enemy of possession, and possession is permanence.” // Photo: “Wrapped Coast”, 1969, Ellen Waugh.
"And the most beautiful part of the floating pier is to see the entire project is about the people walking nowhere. About the feeling of the surface of the land or the water. And your feet actually, many people walk barefoot. And they walk, they walk. It's not like going to shop, not going to see your friends. It's going really nowhere." (Christianna Silva / NPR // photo: Wolfgang Volz).
“Temporality was the link. Once their practice moved out of the gallery into rural and urban spaces, impermanence became the sine qua non. (…) For Christo, “the energy of the elements is a necessary part of my existence” and viewer participation exacts the voluntary surrender to extremes of climate; “wet, dry, warm, cold, dark, light”. A successful work has to communicate that energy and evoke elemental emotions from the seemingly serendipitous but intentional interventions - wind rippling fabric, sun glistening on water and late afternoon shadows - constituting the sense memory that alone will endure. (Jill Spalding // photo: “Yellow Umbrellas, 1991, California. Wolfgang Volz).
more suggestions from JUNETHINGS:
> Documentary “Valley Curtain” by The Maysles Brothers & Ellen Giffard (PART 1, 2 &3), 1974.
> 60 minutes: Christo & Jean-Claude , February 2005 on “The Gates” instalation in New York City.
> Christo: The Pont-Neuf wrapped project for Paris book by Arcana books, (signed).
> More of their work to purchase.
> HBR case study: Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Art of the Entrepreneur.
> About Land Art / Earthworks.
