This post is from an article I wrote earlier this Fall, with the link to the now published version in .pdf. For better or for worse, the published article chops and edits the original to an almost unrecognizable mass. Here, for your consideration, are the original and published article: Number: 73 Arts journal - Scroll to last column.
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I’ve never seen Christo &
Jeanne-Claude’s work – the large environmental works that immediately spring to
mind that is – in person. The only piece I would have had the remote
possibility of seeing was in New York, February 2005. It lasted 16 days.
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| Surrounded Islands, (Project for Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami) 1983, Photo: Wolfgang Volz |
I entered college a year later,
2006, taking on the typical electives of a freshman. Art History was one of
those. The textbook, thick in format and incredibly burdensome in both weight
and inadequate information, spent much of its time on my dorm floor. But, on
the cover was an image that has since rested in my mind: three islands, of the
total eleven, stretching vertically into the horizon – all three surrounded by
pink fabric floating on the water’s surface. I would later learn that this was
a picture of Surrounded Islands, Biscayne
Bay taken by Wolfgang Volz, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s exclusive photographer
for all their projects. Or, would I have just opened the book to the verso
page. However, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, like the image, would become artists
I always returned to in order to find pure beauty in the art world (an idea I misappropriate
from John Baldessari).
The first picture I came to,
knowing it was of the two artists with their work, was at the National Portrait
Gallery in D.C.; a picture of the couple standing joyously in front of their
saffron Gates of Central Park, the
2005 work that had taken them 26 years to complete. In their embrace, I
remember Jeanne-Claude’s fiery red hair being strikingly similar to the deep-saffron
color of the Gates fabric behind
them. The photograph had a profound effect on me. Before me I saw not just two
artists, but two lovers whose love gave the world a beauty never before
realized. It’s not to say that art is love, but art definitely came from that
rapturous passion. In those wintry sixteen days that the Gates stood in Central Park, approximately four million new
visitors and $250 million in revenue for New York passed forth from the
twenty-three miles of fabric. And, after passing seventy-four years on Earth
and millions coming to love and admire her work with Christo, Jeanne-Claude
passed away in November 2009.
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| Christo & Jeanne-Claude in Central Park Gates project, 2005, photo: Wolfgang Volz |
With that, to many the Gates would appear to be the last project the artists worked on
together, the passion now lost, but their history and planned works from the
past would say otherwise. For starters, as Christo was quick to point out,
“Jeanne-Claude always started by saying that we were born on the same day, the
same month, and the same year of June 13, 1935 … but from different mothers.” She
in Casablanca, as her father was a lieutenant in the French military, and he in
Bulgaria where he would escape in his teens and never return. The two fell in
love – disapprovingly from Jeanne-Claude’s parents – in 1958 while Christo was
commissioned to paint three varied-style portraits of her mother in Paris, and
although Jeanne-Claude said she fell in love with him as an artist, “he was actually
a hell of a lover.” It was in this union, and the works that followed from
Christo’s early wrappings to their environmental works, that their legacy and
their freedom in love, art, and life began and persisted, even beyond death.
This legacy, a very small, yet
grand, part of it, was present in both the exhibit at the Lauren Rogers Museum
of Art (LRMA) in Laurel, and the evening lectures from Christo at LRMA and the University
of Southern Mississippi’s Bennett Auditorium – September 4th and 5th,
respectively. The exhibit, Christo and
Jeanne-Claude: Prints and Objects – on display until October 6th,
shared an exciting display of ninety lesser-known and less visible works and objects
from Christo’s emergent years in Paris and New York up to 2007 – many as
preparatory studies, models, and research for both realized and unrealized
projects (of which there are 37). The Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, itself a
tucked away treasure of Mississippi with exceptional works from Homer, Corot,
the Hudson River School, and a generous offering of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, was
thankfully able to be a part of this travelling exhibition and bring Christo
back to Mississippi (fabric for 1991’s Running
Fence was produced in Columbus) for these lectures – a practice in which he
receives no honorarium.
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| Over the River (Project for the Arkansas River), 1992-2012. Life-sized test for aesthetic and technical considerations |
The lectures at the LRMA and USM’s
auditorium were centered on his on-going projects at present – Over the River (Project for the Arkansas River) and
The Mastaba (Project for Abu Dhabi),
respectively conceived in 1992 and 1977. Traipsing back and forth between past
works and current projects, relating past processions of political wrangling with
the similar, present turmoil of Over the River
was not only informative in the most minute details, but also amusing
coming from his grand gestures and thick, Eastern-European accent. It was easy
to relate to past artists and gallerists – Ray Johnson, Claes Oldenburg, Leo
Castelli - who met Christo in the 60s when he spoke no English, and with
Jeanne-Claude had just immigrated to New York, saw him committed to his art and
were warmed by his friendly gestures and mannerisms. The format of both
lectures included extensive question portions, with Christo standing on stage
for another hour to thoroughly answer questions both thought-provoking and
redundant. Still, it was always just Christo standing there – starting with a
remark about Jeanne-Claude, and often saying that she could answer questions so
much more assertively. Christo, the poet of the two, was without his Calliope,
and one could see this took an even greater toll than any bureaucratic
difficulties did.
One of the most popular and
repetitive questions for Christo, asked an amusing three times in various ways during
the Wednesday lecture, has always been, “How do you fund your projects?”. It’s
an easily answered question rehearsed over time: He completes the studies and other preparatory
collages in his studio; museums, gallerists, collectors, and consultants come
to look at the work; they like the work; they pay him money; they take the
work. As has been directed many times, Christo and Jeanne-Claude do not take
donations, grants, corporate sponsorship, or any outside financial backing for their
projects – which after costs of materials, labor, fighting bureaucratic red
tape, engineering research, and leasing or land payments can amount into the
millions of dollars. The most expensive project to date is The Umbrellas, Joint Project for Japan and
USA, 1991. This bold act of freedom and of courage to produce expensive,
ephemeral works which occupy large areas of land – on different continents at
times – and fighting over decades to have them realized, is the essence of
Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s shared spirit.
As Christo remarked in both
lectures, it is irrational to produce art and is useless, it adds nothing, but
it is something he and his wife must do. However, it was in his comment, “I
never give advice to younger artists, art is not a profession,” where his
insight into what art could mean to artists – going beyond the idea of Art for
Art’s sake and any Fluxus notion – that Christo actually gave advice to
artists. It was reminiscent of a rule John Baldessari always gives to artists,
Baldessari saying, “You have to be possessed, which is something you can’t
will.” By not teaching, by not advising, by just doing and creating until
death, Christo perhaps gave the most poignant lesson for artists to adhere to.
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| Wrapped Reichstag, 1994 |
It is of course contrarian to posit
such an idea as a rule for artists, because it is without those teachers and
the academia of artists that Christo and many others would not garner so much
recognition for their work and have the possibility of invitation to lecture.
But, it is also that contrarian that never saw himself a member of the popular movements
of Fluxus or the Nouveaux Réalistes,
who instinctively did not fit into the propaganda of Soviet-controlled Bulgaria,
and who, in such an unassuming, almost diminutive stature, never once
compromised his work at the discretion of others. It is that legacy of total
freedom and of absolute courage in the presence of parliamentary leaders who
opposed his wrapping of their Reichstag that is perhaps the greatest education
and example for young artists.
It was in the sixties that art
became known for being expensive and elite, specifically with the 1961 sale of
Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating a
Bust of Homer for $2.8 million. Almost
immediately a reaction came in the succeeding years by way of conceptual and
environmental art -- to not be under control of the gallery system and the art
world-at-large. In the 80s and 90s, it returned to the market as many galleries
and artists were considered blue chip and the art markets of Japan and USA boomed.
Today, while there continues to be blue chip galleries, and art is increasingly
considered a commodity and liquid asset, a fissure among artists has appeared
in order to distance themselves from the markets and heavy criticism levied on
the pretense of art and artists as just a market index. It is possibly this inherent freedom and artistic autonomy that Christo and Jeanne-Claude embodied so
fervently that will be the lasting inspiration and legacy of their work that
will be impressed upon younger artists and their decisions in constructing
their own life’s work.
