They are mixed together. You cannot have ten years of preparation if
you don't have the final object.
If it was only the proposition
to wrap the bridge, without really wrapping it, there would not have
been ten years of preparation.
The people who were refusing the
project and the people who were helping, they had to really truly
believe that finally we would wrap the Pont Neuf, the real thing.
Now, when I say that it all is the work of art, it is basically that I
see my projects as having two major periods or steps. One I like to
think of as the software period and the other as the hardware period.
The software period is when the project is in my drawings,
propositions, scale models, legal applications, and technical data.
That software period is the more invisible because there are only
projections of how the bridge will look. This is different from an
architect or a bridge builder, for example, who can refer to previous
skyscrapers or previous bridges, and they can make their work look
about the same. But because we had never wrapped a bridge, each
proposition is unique, even for us. Although we make careful studies
and scale models, we never really project how the work will actually
look. In this software period, the work of art accumulates many
things. Really how the bridge would look at the end was not defined in
1975 when I had the idea. Formally, the crystal clear vision of how
the wrapping would look was not shown in the first drawings, which
were clumsy, and simple, while the final realization was the refined
idea after ten years of work.
What I would like to point out is that the creative act of making the
final object is not an isolated situation nor an abstract
phenomenon. The realized work of art, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, is the
accumulation of the anticipation and the expectation of a variety of
forces: formal, visual, symbolic, political, social, and
historical. This is why when we arrive at the hardware period - the
second part - the physical making of the work is probably the most
enjoyable and rewarding because it is the crowning of many years of
expectation. The hardware period is very much like a mirror, showing
what we have worked at, and more than that.
The final object is really the ending of that dynamic idea about the
work. This is why I see the entirety of these ten years as a creative
period. The object is really the purpose of all that energy and effort
because if it were only an intellectual exercise, there would never be
the resistance, the yes and no and give and take situations throughout
these ten years. There's so much projection and imagination that
certainly when we start to move on the site for the physical work, it
is very satisfying.
