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Christo
He's the world's greatest wrap star; his grand and beautiful public projects transcend the barriers between life and art.

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By Charles Taylor

April 11, 2000 |  Has anyone of our time produced grander poetic gestures than has Christo? The trademark of his work -- swathing landmarks like the Pont Neuf and the Reichstag in fabric, or wrapping 1 million square feet of coastline in Little Bay, Australia; erecting a fence of white nylon through 24 miles of California's Sonoma and Marin counties; surrounding 11 islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay with hot pink material -- is majestic delicacy. That Christo's art has somehow retained lyricism is all the more remarkable when considering the physical logistics and particularly the bureaucratic barriers he has to overcome before realizing them.

Even though the costs of his projects run routinely into the millions, funding them is one of his easier tasks. Among the world's best-selling artists, Christo obtains the money for each new project through the sale of the models, collages and drawings he makes. The real headache is the lobbying Christo must do to obtain permission from authorities. The "Surrounded Islands" project in Biscayne Bay required the permission of seven different federal and state agencies. The "Running Fence" for Sonoma and Marin counties necessitated not only permission from authorities but from each landowner whose property the work would pass through.

Portfolio Photographs of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work. (You will need the Flash plugin to view the images.)

Twenty-four years separated the proposal and the realization of Christo's 1995 wrapping of the Reichstag. Plans to erect 15-foot-tall gates of fabric over every pathway in Central Park, and to build a pyramid of 390,500 oil barrels in Abu Dhabi, have been pending for almost 20 years now.

And then there's the "huh?" factor. Christo has long been a convenient punch line for people who see modern art as a joke, as "something my kid could do." Since public approval is a crucial element in determining the fate of Christo's proposals, it's necessary for him to confront and overcome that kind of thinking. Let's face it, there is something loopy about the impulse to swathe large public edifices in nylon or polypropylene. The five documentaries that the filmmakers Albert and David Maysles -- best know for their documentary films "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter" -- (and their various collaborators) made about the progress of Christo's work are full of the comedy inherent in the collision between the avant-garde and everyday life. Imagine, you're taking some time out from your day, having coffee with friends, when you're approached by a slim, intense man with scruffy hair and horn-rimmed glasses who says, "Hello, my name is Christo and I want to wrap the Pont Neuf in silky fabric for 14 days."

But the Maysles' films (the best record of Christo's work and for those of us who haven't been lucky enough to travel to his installations, the best way to experience it) are also full of the unexpected beauty of these unlikely encounters. Addressing one of the numerous civic boards he must approach to obtain permission, Christo tells the assembled supporters and detractors that no matter how they feel about it, they are all a part of his project. Figuratively and literally, Christo works in the public sphere, and his proposals become tabula rasas upon which people can project the best or the worst of themselves. That he has so often succeeded in converting people to seeing the beauty in what he proposes speaks to the democratizing principle that guides his work.

That principle has grown more expansive with the scale of Christo's work. His first wrappings -- cans and bottles and packages -- combine the cheek of Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" (everyday objects offered as art) with a Warholian awareness of art as packaged commodity. But Christo and his French wife and manager Jeanne-Claude, who now cosigns his work, have said, "All our work is about freedom," fitting for an artist who escaped from his native Bulgaria in the mid-'50s when the uprising in Hungary sent tremors through the Soviet Eastern Bloc.

In her monograph on the artist, Marina Vaizey argued that Christo's wrapping technique is a direct response to his experience as an art student trained during the period of what he has called "High Stalinism." In one of the Maysles films we see a photo of the young Christo as a student in a state art class engaged in sketching an old gentleman. Allowing for the differences in the angles from which the students view their model, every drawing looks the same.

It's a startling example of how realism can be used to conceal. After growing up under an aesthetic that dictated that how things look is how they really are, what could be more subversive than revealing by covering up, blotting out details in order to more fully grasp the entirety? Christo's response to the Berlin Wall was to barricade a narrow street in Paris (where he was living) with 240 oil barrels in a structure he called "Iron Curtain." For years Christo's unrealized dream project was the wrapping of the Reichstag, which he finally achieved in 1995. Undoubtedly one of his greatest successes, it would have had even greater symbolic import in the years before reunification, when the dismantling of the Berlin Wall barely existed as a fantasy. Had it occurred then, East and West Germans would have simultaneously been able to see the former home of the German Parliament standing like a ghost among them.

But in most of Christo's work, the explicitly political is submerged by the aesthetic. His borders and fences and walls, Vaizey points out, are about transcending the barriers between life and art "although both are still clearly defined." Certainly, the story of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's romance is what you might expect from a maker of such romantic gestures. The daughter of a respected French general, Jeanne-Claude met Christo when her mother, who had seen his drawings displayed at her hairdresser's, brought him home for lunch. The two were immediately attracted to each other, but Jeanne-Claude went ahead with her planned marriage to a young officer, exactly the type a girl of her station would be expected to marry. It lasted three weeks before she left him to move in with Christo. (When you toss in the fact that they were born on the same day and the same year, the love affair sounds like kismet.)

Next page | Anyone cursed with a temper will immediately recognize Christo as a brother