He changed cityscapes, landscapes, buildings, coastlines, lakes and islands, making us look afresh at our surroundings. At its most daring and spectacular, Christo’s work entered the collective consciousness, overturning our sense of scale and place in the world. At its best, his work was disruptive and transformative, leaving surprise and wonder in its wake.
Christo’s is the kind of art that persists in the imagination, however temporary his projects have been (some lasted only a few days) and however few people encountered his theatrical interventions for themselves. Wasn’t he the one who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin in a shroud, and a coastline near Sydney? His art became a kind of rumour, perhaps almost a myth.
Part of the surprise was that Christo, who died on Sunday aged 84, managed to realise so many of his grandiose projects at all. If the practicalities were enormous, so, too, were the almost insurmountable difficulties of persuading politicians, environmentalists and other authorities at every level. Sometimes this took years, sometimes decades of logistical, legal, political and bureaucratic wrangling, never mind the feats of engineering and fund-raising the art of Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude entailed. She died in 2009, but was credited as co-artist right until Christo’s own death. They funded all their work themselves, through the sale of working drawings, prints, scale models and smaller art works. If there was something visionary about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, it was also an art of persuasion, persistence and hard-headed determination.
Born in Bulgaria, displaced during the second world war and educated under postwar communism, Christo escaped to Vienna in 1956. He was indomitable. In 1958, he wrapped a tin can in cloth and string. By 1995, having conceived the idea in 1971, Christo and Jeanne-Claude realised their project to wrap the wrecked Berlin Reichstag in 100,000 square metres of made-to-measure silvery fabric panels, all trussed-up with nearly 10 miles of blue rope that took 90 professional climbers and 120 installation workers to put into place. It took 24 years of discussion and a parliamentary debate to make happen, never mind that the artists funded the whole project themselves. This for a work that stayed in place for two weeks, before all the materials were recycled.
The statistics for their works are themselves gobsmacking, whether the artists were wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris, wrapping kunsthalles and art museums, medieval towers and Roman walls, staircases and rooms. How many tons of this and miles of that, or the amount of labour that went into the work says nothing about the art itself. It would be like weighing the tour trucks of a stadium rock band to measure the music and to judge the extravaganza.
For all the technical complexities and the heavy lifting, Christo’s art can have a surprising immediacy. The wrapped Reichstag might stop you in your tracks, and the wrapped coastline might leave you gawping in disbelief, but works such as the Surrounded Islands or the Running Fence have a kind of lightness and immediacy, as if they have just happened, appearing as if by magic. Surrounding a group of small islands near Miami with floating pink fabric in 1983, and extending floating, interconnecting piers or pontoons covered in yellow fabric across a huge Italian lake in 2016, the artists transformed these places, albeit briefly, into a kind of gorgeous abstraction.
Similarly, the 18ft high, 44.5 mile-long white nylon fence Christo erected across rolling California farmland to the Pacific Ocean in the mid-70s necessitated the drafting of a 450-page environmental impact report. The Running Fence stayed up for a fortnight, and then every trace of it was gone. And the 400-metre curtain they draped across a valley in Colorado in 1972 had to be dismantled the same day because of a gale.
But the best-known works are the wrapped buildings and coastlines. Wrapping conceals, but it also reveals something about the structures that are hidden. What we see is the bulk, as though by renaissance drapery, or the cloth a conjuror drops over a object, in the moment before making it disappear, or turn into a rabbit.
The Reichstag is not a rabbit. Nor is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which Christo was planning to wrap this year, but has been delayed because of Covid-19 until 2021, a project that, all being well, will be realised.
When Hans Haacke jackhammered the floor of the Nazi-era German pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale into a wasteland of broken stone shards, his work had enormous resonance, not least in its reference to National Socialism and German Romanticism. By comparison, did Christo do more than muffle, brocade, hint at mourning with the Wrapped Reichstag? Perhaps works on such a scale always have a funerary aspect. Was his wrapped Australian coastline a kind of farewell to the natural world? It is certainly more than gift-wrapped geology.
Wanting to give delight, Christo sometimes achieved the opposite. The London Mastaba, a sculpture of stacked, painted oil drums that floated in London’s Serpentine through the summer of 2018 was to my mind pretty dreadful. Designed in the form of an ancient Mesopotamian bench, it was only big. Christo had been piling up oil drums since the late 50s, in arrangements that were both totemic and inert. His art said little about the oil industry.
He proposed an even bigger Mastaba for the United Arab Emirates – a work that would, the artist claimed, be the largest sculpture in the world. “The Mastaba is an an ancient and familiar shape to the people of the region,” Christo’s website says. Conceived in 1977, this Mastaba was to be constructed of 410,000 barrels, and was intended to be Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s only permanent public work, rising 492ft, nearly 10ft taller than the original elevation of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. It is now unlikely ever to happen.
But the best of Christo’s art is always somewhere else, alive in the imagination, and filled with associations, some yet to be made.
