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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
The easiest way to describe the "Running Fence" or the "Valley Curtain" or Pont Neuf is as a tuning fork for nature. There's historical significance in Christo's choice of gold polypropylene to cover the Pont Neuf -- it was the color of the sandstone of old Paris. But the color also catches the spangled reflection of the Seine; it glows in the sun and becomes a burnished red at sunset. And it's not just the color that changes. Wrapped in fabric, the details of the bridge disappear, but the structure becomes intimately apparent.
In "Christo in Paris," watching a sheet of the golden fabric sliding down one of the pillars of the Pont Neuf, my initial impulse was to look away, as if I were seeing a lady roll down her stockings in public. And as this "second skin" envelops it, the shape of the bridge billows and changes in the breeze, making it susceptible to natural law. Is it natural? No, there's nothing natural about surrounding the islands of Biscayne Bay with hot pink fabric. But then art isn't natural. And yet the fabric emphasizes the shape of the islands and their relationship to one another; seen from above, they form a snaky chain through the bay. For the people living in Miami at the time, or for those who passed over the Pont Neuf on foot daily, Christo's wrappings made them take notice of what they might otherwise take for granted, allowing them to see the "art" in their everyday lives. Even the clanging of the cable against the steel poles of the "Running Fence" served a purpose, sounding a whistling echo that suggests the vastness of the Sonoma and Marin valleys. Nearly all the Maysles films end the same way, in near silence with the camera seemingly as awestruck as the participants and onlookers, drinking in the vision that has materialized before them.
Given the way Christo's work connects art to nature, and given his faith that people will want to take part in it, the disaster that befell the 1991 "Umbrellas" project was particularly cruel. The project, which opened simultaneously in Japan and California, consisted of thousands of large umbrellas (yellow in California and blue in Japan) dotting the landscape. It was troubled from the start. A typhoon that hit Japan shortly after the project opened necessitated closing the umbrellas temporarily. The typhoon passed, but several days later in California, Lori Keevil-Matthews, a spectator, was crushed to death when a freak windstorm uprooted an umbrella and pinned her against a boulder. Christo immediately ordered the project closed. (The umbrellas had been tested in a wind tunnel to withstand gales of up to 65 miles per hour. In the Maysles film of the project you can actually see the enormous dark storm cloud descending into Tejon Pass.) While the project was being taken down in Japan, a worker named Masaaki Nakamura was electrocuted when the crane he was on touched a power line.
These deaths were the darkest examples of how much Christo's art is grounded in the real world. After the deaths there was much speculation about whether he would ever again be able to gain permission for his work. So it was a surprise when, four years later, he got the go-ahead to wrap the Reichstag. It seems foolish to some people that projects that involved so much time, energy and money are temporary. But they have to be if they are to have any meaning. Gazing at the wrapped Pont Neuf, one young man in "Christo in Paris" wishes it could stay that way forever. If it did, though, it might soon be as taken for granted as the bridge was before the wrapping, as some of our greatest artworks are, simply because there is no doubt they will always be there.
It takes some courage to admit that works of art are finite. Some of the largest of painter Anselm Keifer's canvases may only be around for another generation or so because the natural elements he incorporates into them -- twigs and grass and leaves -- are decaying. We have already had the somewhat comical spectacle of restorers gluing cigarette butts back onto Jackson Pollack's canvases. But the temporary lifespan of Christo's projects, and the fact that they are subject to the ravages of nature, is a way of emphasizing that art is not just objects, but a means of affecting emotion and thought. Perhaps the knowledge that Christo's art is temporary sharpens our perceptions, in the same way they're sharpened when we're storing our sense memory of places we're not likely to return to.
None of the Maysles films show the installations being dismantled; that would be too sad. And though the history of each project is documented in lavish books (the hardcover pressings of the Pont Neuf book contain a swatch of the fabric used to wrap it), movies seem the truest way to preserve the ephemeral nature of Christo's art. Photos can capture only bits of the ever-changing installations. Film, the most transitory art form, being nothing more than shadows and light projected on a screen, is able to show the transforming effect of the elements on the works. Since movies don't exist the ways books or paintings do, because they are there and not there at the same time, what we take away from the Maysles films is the experience of, for a short time, being able to see them, the same experience of the spectators of the "Running Fence" or the Pont Neuf or the wrapped Reichstag. I said that Christo's projects were gestures, and they are, with everything fleeting that word implies. There's no reason the experience of them need be fleeting. Being able to say you brought some grace to the world seems to me about as good a legacy as any artist could ask for.
