The quintessential artist of his time

Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado
1970-1972
Nylon polyamide, steel cable, rope and
111 x 381 m
Foto: Harry Shunk

The curtain measured 381 meters in width and up to 111 meters in height, and remained clear of the slopes and the valley floor. The cables holding it in place spanned 417 meters, weighed fifty tons, and were anchored to 800 tons of concrete foundations.

So much hard work! And so much time (28 months in all) in the making! And the following day, August 11, a gale swept through the valley at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour, and made it necessary to begin removal: the temporary nature of the Christos' works was being driven home by the elements. He momentarily intervenes, as Albert Elsen has aptly put it, creating `gentle disturbances' between earth and sky in order to refocus our impressions [...] Christo believes the temporary nature of his projects gives them more energy and intensifies our response. But once he has wrapped a structure or intervened in a place, he is forever associated with that site. Again and again, temporariness becomes the issue and arguably a more pertinent issue than the somewhat airy forever invoked by Elsen, which would be a forever wholly bounded by human lifespans if there were no other witness to the Christos' projects than the memories of those who were there.

Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado
1970-1972
Nylon polyamide, steel cable, rope and concrete, 111 x 381 m
Foto: Harry Shunk

After the work has been prepared, and after the work has been put up and then taken down, it remains asserts Marina Vaizey. It remains in the memory of the thousands who will have experienced it first hand; it remains in the memory of those who will have seen the work on film, on television, in the newspapers. And an integral part is Christo's own portable art, the magnificent sketches, drawings, collages and prints that are both his working drawings and works of art in their own right. Memory is limited in time, but the accompanying and preparatory works Christo makes in the course of the projects palpably have the age-old function of defying time and insisting that they (and thus the artwork as a whole) will endure. The argument involving the memories of those who see their artworks, so often put forward, has precarious implications, since it can lead us to conclude that art need exist only in the mind a fallacy, surely. But Christo's ancillary works do indeed have the function of declaring that his creations remain. Given the artists' own insistence on temporariness, there may well be a paradox hidden here, and one not easily resolved.

The Wall, Project for a Wrapped Roman Wall, Rome
Drawing, 1974
Pencil, charcoal and crayon
165 x 106,6 cm
New York, Collection Jeanne-Claude Christo, Foto: Harry Shunk

Before their next major landscape project, the Christos returned to the urban setting once more (town and country have alternated throughout their career) for the The Wall Wrapped Roman Wall work (1974). The wall in question was at the end of the Via Veneto, one of Rome's busiest thoroughfares, near the gardens of the Villa Borghese. Two thousand years old, it was built under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped a length of over 259 meters in polypropylene fabric and rope; and, for the duration of forty wrapped days, three of the four wrapped arches continued to be used by traffic and the fourth by pedestrians. The response in Rome was a lively one.

The Wall Wrapped Roman Wall , Rome
1974
Polypropylene fabric and rope, 15 x 259 m
15 x 259 m
Foto: Harry Shunk

That same year, the Christos created the Ocean Front (1974) at Newport, Rhode Island. For eighteen days, 14,000 square meters of white woven polypropylene fabric covered the surface of the water of a cove shaped like a half-moon at King's Beach, on the southern exposure of Ocean Drive, facing that portion of the Long Island Sound that meets the Atlantic at Rhode Island. As with the Valley Curtain project, Mitko Zagoroff, John Thomson and Jim Fuller were the engineers who designed and supervised the construction itself. Work began, ran the Christos' official bulletin, at 6.00 a.m. on Monday, August 19, 1974. The bundled fabric was passed from the truck to pairs of non-skilled workers wearing life-jackets. They carried the 2,722 kilograms of fabric to the water on two-by-fours stretched between them. The fabric was laced to a wooden boom 120 meters long, secured with twelve Danforth anchors, holding in place the frontal edge of the floating fabric.

These communiqu‚s have become an integral part of the Christos' projects over the years. Their promotional and communicative skills have been widely attested, and Marina Vaizey has gone so far as to claim that the Christo presentation, the Christo interview, is itself a piece of Christo art. More level-headed, perhaps, is her observation that Christo has evolved ways of involving society in the making of his art. That, surely, is the prime implication of the famous bulletins, the media manipulations, the public persona; though some see them as narcissistic or even megalomaniac, the point is in reality a quite different one: he and Jeanne-Claude want their ideas and proposals out in the public arena, where they can be inspected, debated and considered from every angle, in a fashion that is more profoundly democratic in implication than the approaches taken by many another self-proclaimed egalitarian in art.