The quintessential artist of his time

Vaizey's statement may seem extravagant at first glance, but it repays careful consideration. It is the age of information, and of propaganda, of advertising, packaging, presentation and wrapping, Vaizey reminds us. We are inundated with images as never before. And in this brave new world, ancient longings familiarly surface among the people in it: It is an age of mass production and of a longing for nature, the natural, the individual, the handmade. In the late twentieth century, people are acutely aware of an astonishing melange of contradictory hopes, dreams and desires, of many realities. And art is not only the physical embodiment of aspirations and faith, the way in which we can explain the world to ourselves, make patterns by which to grasp the unimaginable and incomprehensible, but also a commodity and a currency.

Against this background, they can be seen as the very personification of the contrarieties, aspirations, stresses and capabilities of art in the modern world. Christo, declares Vaizey, is the artist who inimitably has come to combine in his art the force of the individual creator with the methods of industrial and post-industrial society: capitalism, democracy, enquiry, experiment, collaboration and co-operation. In the course of so doing, Christo has moved from eastern Europe, from Bulgaria, to a Europe that was temporarily neutral, to Austria, to France and Paris, the traditional capital of the avant-garde, and finally to New York, the post-war art capital, the essential consumerist, capitalist city. Both in its shape and in its implications, the Christos' career has offered the definitive map of art in today's society.

Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, Australia,
1968-1969 (detail)
Polypropylene fabric and rope, 250 x 2,400 m
Foto: Harry Shunk

In the decade from the late 1960s to late 1970s, the Christos created some of their most startlingly beautiful works in natural environments. The first, one of their greatest triumphs, came about when John Kaldor, a Sydney textiles businessman, invited the Christos to Australia to exhibit and lecture. The invitation coincided with their need for a site where they could realize a project to wrap a stretch of coastline, and the result was the Wrapped Coast (1968-1969) 100,000 square meters of wrapped coast at Little Bay, Sydney. To this day, the Christos' name has remained synonymous with that project in Australia: it was a watershed for contemporary art in Australia, as Kaldor later observed, and did more for contemporary art in Australia than any other single event, as Edmund Capon, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, put it.

Wrapped Coast, Project for Little Bay, Australia
Drawing collage, 1969
Pencil, crayon, aerial photograph, tape and woven polypropylene fabric sample, 71 x 56cm
Private Collection
Foto: Harry Shunk

Little Bay is about 14 kilometers south-east of Sydney. The craggy shoreline stretch that was wrapped was about 2.4 kilometers long, up to 250 meters wide, and ranged from sea level at the sandy beach to a height of 26meters at the northern cliffs.

100,000 square meters of erosion-control fabric (synthetic woven fibre, usually manufactured for agricultural purposes) were used for the wrapping and 56 kilometers of polypropylene rope three centimeters in diameter tied the fabric to the rocks.

A team of 15 professional mountain climbers, 110 laborers, and students of art and architecture from the University of Sydney and the East Sydney Technical College, toiled for some 17,000 man-hours, joined by a number of Australian artists and teachers eager to lend a helping hand. The expenses were met by the Christos from the sale of original preparatory drawings and collages.

It is worth emphasizing that after the ten-week period for which the coastal stretch was wrapped (from October to December 1969) the materials were removed and the site (which many thousands had visited) returned to its original state.

Landscape or environmental art of the Christos' kind has no exact paRallels, but it is striking that comparable art art that makes use of available natural landscape does not always respect the environment as scrupulously. The famous Blue Mountains north of Mount Sinai, for instance, are a breathtaking example of land art created in two months in 1980 by Belgian artist Jean V‚rame, using only paint and brushes. Beautiful as this painted rocky landscape in a remote region is, though, it bears the artist's imprint permanently: the landscape cannot be returned to its natural condition (as it can after the Christos have completed a project).

Christo's art, wrote Albert Elsen in a 1990 Sydney exhibition catalog, is the creation of temporary, beautiful objects on a vast scale for specific outdoor sites. It is in the populist nature of his thinking that he believes people should have intense and memorable experiences of art outside museums. Or, as Jeanne-Claude put it to the present writer, Each one of our works is a scream of freedom. As the 1970s began, the Christos conceived a number of projects on a smaller scale before going on to the Valley Curtain, and one of these is particularly worth mentioning. In 1970 the city of Milan organized a major exhibition to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Nouveaux Réalistes. For that the Christos devised two temporary projects.

Wrapped Monument to Vittorio Emanuele, Piazza del Duomo
Milan 1970
Polypropylene fabric and rope
Foto: Harry Shunk

One was the wrapping of the monument to Leonardo da Vinci (1970), which remained enveloped in white fabric and rope on the Piazza della Scala for several days; the other was the wrapping of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele, the last King of Italy (1970). This imposing statue, in front of the Duomo in Milan, remained wrapped for forty-eight hours. The Milanese wrappings brought the issue of dignity (and its arguable infringement) to a head for the first time as the cases for and against were thrashed out.

Wrapped Monument to Leonardo, Piazza della Scala, Milan
Collage 1970
Collection The Lilja Art Fund Foundation
Foto: Harry Shunk