Christo/Pensacola/Magazine/January 2011/ By Kelly Oden

Pensacola • Your City • Your Magazine January/February 2011

A PENSACOLA STATE COLLEGE EXHIBIT

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE PRINTS AND OBJECTS OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTO

Arts and Culture Calendar • Pensacola Opera • Expanded Galler y Nights www.pensacolamagazine.com

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Prints and Objects

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE UNIQUE VISUAL EXPERIENCES

By Kelly Oden

Switzer Distinguished Artist Exhibition Schedule Exhibit: Jan 24 - Mar 25, 2011 Artist Lecture: Saturday, February 12, Saenger Theatre, 2 pm. Call the gallery for details The Visual Arts Gallery is in the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts, located on the corner of 9th Avenue and Airport Boulevard, Building 15, Pensacola campus.

Gallery hours are 8 am - 9 pm Monday through Thursday, 8 am - 3:30 pm Fridays. Admission is free. For information, call 850-484-2550

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979-2005. Photo: Wolfgang Volz.

Copyright: Christo and Jeanne-Claude 2005

Love them. Hate them.

Don't understand them.

It seems that most people who come across the work of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have one of these three reactions. As is often the case with art that is different from the accepted norms, most people who delve deeper into both the people and their art walk away with a profound respect for both. Even if one does not understand why they would wrap the Reichstag with fabric or fill Central Park with flowing saffron "gates," the concept and undertaking are awesome in and of themselves and the finished pieces are awe-inspiring and often deeply moving.

Christo with his late wife and creative partner, JeanneClaude has created some of the most spectacular largescale artworks of the 20th century. Together, they wrapped in fabric the Reichstag building in Berlin and the Pont-Neuf Bridge in Paris. They built a 24 1/2-mile fabric fence across Northern California and strung a huge curtain across a Colorado valley. They also simultaneously placed thousands of blue and yellow umbrellas in valleys both in California and Japan.

Christo was born in Bulgaria and studied fine arts in Sofia and Vienna before moving to Paris in 1958. There he met Jeanne-Claude, who became his wife and collaborator.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the exact same day: June 13, 1935. They married in 1962, moved to New York in 1964 and began making the large artworks for which they became famous. Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009.

A recent highlight of their career was The Gates, which placed 7,503 vinyl gates, with flowing saffron fabric panels, on 23 miles of Central Park walkways for 16 days in 2005.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are perhaps the least compromised artists of our time as they refuse all sponsorship and corporate money and raise the millions needed to execute their artworks by selling Christo’s sketches, designs, and models of his proposed projects as well as earlier works.

Works in progress include Over The River and The Mastaba: Project for the United Arab Emirates. For Over The River, Christo plans to suspend 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels high above the Arkansas River along a 42-mile stretch of the river between Salida and Canon City in south-central Colorado. The Mastaba will be a work of art made of approximately 410,000 horizontally stacked oil barrels. The grandeur and vastness of the land will be reflected in the dimensions of The Mastaba, which will be 150 meters (492 feet) high, 225 meters (738 feet) deep and 300 meters (984 feet) wide. Conceived in 1977, the Mastaba will have an overall surfacing of 55-gallon stainless steel oil barrels of various bright colors. Hundreds of bright colors, as enchanting as Islamic mosaics, will give a constantly changing visual experience according to the time of the day and the quality of the light. Christo calls The Mastaba "a work of art whose only purpose is to be itself."

Pensacola Magazine had the honor of interviewing Christo in anticipation of his upcoming exhibition and lecture at Pensacola State College.

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Pm: We are located in Pensacola, Florida and our local college, Pensacola State College, will soon have an exhibition of your work as well as the pleasure of hearing you speak in person. Are you familiar with our area? Ever visited before?

I know Florida quite well. We did a project in 1983 where we surrounded 11 islands in Biscayne Bay. We spent a lot of time in Tallahassee because that is the capital of Florida and we spent a lot of time in Jacksonville because we needed to get permission from the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Jacksonville. We have a lot of friends in Florida. We lectured in Fort Myers as well.

Pm: Will you have any time to visit our area while you are here?

No, only for the lecture. We are working on a project. We have no time for tourism (laughs).

Pm: People react strongly one way or another to your work. What advice would you give to someone who is viewing or experiencing your installations for the first time? How would you encourage people to approach your projects?

People have a reaction to our works, even before the work exists. This is a part of the work of art, meaning that the work of art has already existed in the minds of the people. There are two options. There are artists whose painting is discussed before the painting is painted. Their sculpture is discussed before the sculpture is sculpted.

But all our projects are discussed before they physically exist--how awful it may be or how beautiful. The people discussing the work of art is already a great achievement because they are thinking about the art. The principal effort of any artist is to see his work making people think.

For years our projects have not hundreds, not thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people thinking how it will be awful or how it will be beautiful.

Pm: I noticed that there is a definite time line for each installation. Even when the work receives respectable notoriety and you are asked to extend it, you hold to these strict timeframes.

You know the work of art, for thousands of years the artists were doing a variety of works and were using different material, like marble plaster, bronze and of course they try to give different dimensions to their work.

Jeanne-Claude and myself would like to give this additional dimension of something that does not last. We have this love and tenderness for our childhood because we know it will not last. We have love and tenderness for our life because we know that we will not last. This type of tenderness, to think that things will not go forever, will act to embody, like a gift, additional aesthetical qualities of a work of art. That is why when the project arrives, the people feel some kind of urgency to see it because tomorrow it will be gone forever. There will never be the same things again. There will never be another Gates. We will never surround another island. We will never build another Running Fence. We will never wrap another

parliament. Each of these projects is a unique visual experience. This is why we like to do it. Because it would be very boring for me and Jeanne-Claude to go around and do the same project again and again in different places. They are all totally unique. Like the new project we have been working on since 1992 called Over The River. It is also totally something we never did before.

Oh yeah. It’s very difficult, but I try to smile. There is a lot of frustration, a lot of difficulty. Probably also because it is unique. Each time the project is a new proposition. It would probably be easy to ask permission to install another Gates in another park or another bridge or build another Running Fence, but each project is a totally new proposition.

Pm: While watching The Gates documentary, I was shocked by the fact that so many people who were opposed to it in the beginning, through time and of course once it was complete, really changed their viewpoint and came to have an appreciation or even a love for it. Do you find this is common in your projects?

It’s human, you know, because the project is a new image.

When we try to get permission, I do the drawings. They are called preparatory studies and drawings and they are always before the project is realized. And it is only through my drawings and through our speeches that we can tell the people what the project is. But words cannot substitute for the project because the project is so much richer, so much more complex, so dynamic. You see the photographs of the project, you see the study, but our projects are like living objects, they move with the wind.

Everything is very dynamic. The same thing is very beautiful to us. The visual quality, the visual beauty of the project is difficult to see through speeches and drawings.

When the project is realized, they see the courage of the work and feel that incredible power that is impossible to make you envision in a drawing. Only when you are there, the work of art absorbs all this power of the wind of the sun and the snow. All these elements that suddenly become part of the work of art.

Pm: Did the difficulty of getting the permits or permission ever influence your choice of location?

Okay. There are two ways to see how our projects happen. First is it a rural project or urban project? Some projects happen in the city like The Gates in Central Park or The Reichstag in Berlin. Even in Dade County the project was in the middle of the city of Miami. But some are rural projects like Running Fence in Northern California in 1976 or The Umbrellas. Some projects also, we know what is the site, like when we wrapped the Reichstag, the former parliament of Germany. We know what the Reichstag is.

When we did The Gates project in Central Park, we know what Central Park is. This project was designed for Central Park, and the other was designed for the Reichstag. Now other projects are different, like we have an idea to install simultaneously, thousands of umbrellas in Japan and California. We need to find the right place, the right situation. There are many aesthetical decisions to be done and this is part of the looking for a site. The same thing

Pm: Do you find that defending your work or trying to convince people to give you the permits energizes you?

No. You need to understand. These projects are so unimportant and the way that the people, especially people against the project, create so much drama and incredible difficulty is very humorous in some ways because Jeanne-Claude and myself, especially JeanneClaude, we were always saying, ‘we are the cleanest artists in the world. Nothing remains from the work from us.

When the world is populated, is full of so much things that we don’t like, but we have them. And we always say that the project will stay for two weeks and after two weeks all the material will be removed and recycled. We say to the people that the project will turn back to Biscayne Bay, for example, and they will not find any trace of the project. We try to explain, with Central Park, the project is like this moment of 14 days. Unrepeatable, a unique moment that will stay forever in our memory once in a lifetime and never again.

Pm: I’ve noticed that you approach things with a good dose of humor and an even temper in many of these permitting and town hall meetings where people say some fairly outrageous things. How do you maintain that lightness?

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happened with Running Fence, the same with Over The River.

Once we have the concept, the idea of the way the project should look, we try to find the place. And always we have at least two locations because if we don’t succeed at the number one location, we can go to the number two location. In the case of Over The River, we scouted 89 rivers in the Rocky Mountains. From 89, we came to six possible rivers. There were two rivers in Idaho, one river in Wyoming, two in Colorado and one in New Mexico. And only after we have these six rivers, a year later with our engineers we go to take rough measurements and at the end of 1996 and 1997 did we come to consensus that for aesthetical and engineering purposes of how the project should be realized, before everything aesthetical, that those 40 miles of Arkansas River were more suitable for the project. And this is how we approach the process of site for The Umbrellas and Running Fence projects. There were two preferable locations and we found the right location.

Pm: Your large-scale projects cost millions of dollars.

You raise the funds for these projects solely through the sale of your preparatory works, correct?

I want you to understand. This is important. We don’t raise money. We live in a capitalist society. I produce a commodity from my own hand. They are marketable works of art. We sell that commodity to people and we

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76.

Height: 5.5 meters (18 feet), Length: 39.4 Kilometers. (24 1/2 miles), 200,000 square meters (240,000 square yards) of nylon fabric, steel poles and steel cables. Photo: Jeanne-Claude Copyright: Christo 1976.

involved. We hire many people, and we have said to the federal government that we have a private stimulus package.

for himself. And this type of great energy was a really great part of art. Art is not related to any propaganda.

This is why we will not do commissions. This is why we are not involved with anything because anything other is propaganda.

Pm: People have said that the monies you raise for the installations of large projects could benefit the communities in which they are located in a more positive way. Knowing that funding of your projects is completely independent does this frustrate you?

Oh that is a very, very common thing. You never ask the millionaire why he should spend his money buying a yacht or diamonds. This is because they think it is very natural. It is very simplistic thinking of people. Only because the project is a work of art and it is free and it cannot be bought, cannot be owned and cannot charge tickets. Many people would do well to understand that we don’t make money off the projects. Realizing our projects gives us much greater value than simple money.

Pm: How did you feel about the AT&T commercial in which they use the saffron curtains in a clear attempt to reference your work?

This is not the first time. We have lawyers all around the world following this. It is not the first time we've had commercial company try to use us. We never ask for money. We asked our lawyer to have them put a disclaimer.

Pm: You feel very strongly about artistic freedom and freedom in general. What does artistic freedom mean to you?

Artistic freedom means that you are totally free. I can tell CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater you, nobody else needs our Miami, Florida, 1980-83 Photo: Wolfgang Volz. Copyright: Christo 1983. projects. Nobody needs Valley Curtain or Running Fence or receive money. We don’t raise money. We sell goods and Surrounded Islands. We need them. An example is artists in we receive money. It is our money and with our money the studio-- a painter has this huge white canvas and he we can do anything. We can buy houses, diamonds, has this unstoppable urge to fill the canvas with colors-summerhouses, and all these things. Instead of that, we red, yellow, blue. He does not have to give justification build projects. This is a very important part. We are not why red should be here, yellow should be here. He has an asking for money. People are buying that commodity, they enormous urge to do this project. Our projects are exactly are receiving an object that has value and they can sell it the same thing. They are totally useless, with no or keep it. It is their decision. All these projects are justification. Without Running Fence, without The Umbrellas, financed by us with all our money. There is no without Surrounded Islands--we never pretend these projects corporation involved. And of course we hire many people. are meant to make people live better or something. That These projects have professional workers and in the final is the really creative part. Take for example, the great days, like for The Gates, we hire many unskilled workers.

French poet Arthur Rimbaud. In his time, Rimbaud wrote But for many months before The Gates, for a year or a year his poems for himself, for his lover, probably, but really and a half, there were many professional workers

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Pm: New York’s Central Park is the quintessential American park. It’s a man made oasis tucked inside the arguably most progressive city in the United States. Many artists have used its setting as a backdrop for their paintings and photographs.

However, you were the first artist to be given permission to use the park for the purpose of installation for The Gates in 2005. Do you feel you have opened the door for other installation artists in urban settings?

I don’t know, but we do these works for over 50 years and probably the general interest of many artists and communities to involve more art outside of museums and

galleries has grown. Most ancient art was not in museums. The museum did not exist in the time of the Greeks and the Romans. The art was outside in the open space. Only in the capitalist society when we created a marketable commodity. Painting was invented by the rich and by the merchants who like to have art be transportable, to be a commodity. And from that you can see we have paintings in museums and art in private hands, but before that art was beyond the idea of owning and having it in closed space. It was outside very much.

Historically, having art in museums and galleries is quite recent.

Pm: How important is it to you to make sure that materials used for your projects can and will be recycled after the installation and that there is little if any impact to the environment?

It's very pragmatic, rational, really. First, everything in the world is owned by somebody. There is no one square foot or meter in the world that doesn’t belong to somebody. Each time we do a large project, we try to find who is the owner. It is always very complex, whether it is a private owner or the county or a government agency.

And we say we will return the place to the way we found it. We rented Central Park, we paid $3 million to the city of New York to have the rights to have the park, for us, for three months. And that is why to be clean and to recycle is part of a very rational thing. Also the important

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin 1971-95. Photo: Wolfgang Volz.

Copyright: Christo 1995. View of West facade

for 14 days in 1995, the structure, the architecture was highlighting the principal proportions of the building. The towers of the Reichstag were enriched by the fabric that hid all the elements--the windows, the decorations, everything was hidden by the fabric.

CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE: Over the River, Project for Arkansas River, State of Colorado.

Collage 2001 43.2 x 55.9 cm. (17x22’). Pencil, enamel paint, wax crayon, photograph by Wolfgang Volz, aerial photograph with topographic elevation, fabric sample and tape. Photo: André Grossmann. Copyright Christo 2007 thing is that we are using extremely valuable industrial materials. We use steel. For example, the fabric or steel cables when you buy these very valuable materials and they stay only for a very short time, they are still very good quality and we always try to resell or recycle them right away. I’ll give you an example. For The Gates project we bought 5,000 tons of steel. You know the gates had a steel foot on the bottom. I don’t know if you know what 5,000 pounds of steel is, but 5,000 pounds of steel is ¾ of the steel of the Eiffel Tower. And when we bought that steel, it was fabricated to become 15,000 steel booties for our gates. We work always so that before the project is realized, we can sell that steel back to the company because the Chinese need so much steel, we will actually make money selling the steel back. All this material, for The Gates there was not only steel, there was vinyl cord, there was aluminum, there were many, many parts. But of course, in all our projects we try to employ a pragmatic or rational idea for the recycling.

Pm: The use of fabric is vital to most of your projects.

What qualities make it so attractive to you?

Fabric is the principal material to translate the nomadic, fragile courage of our project. The fabric is fragile, it can break and of course one of the qualities of the cloth, the fabric, is that it really absorbs the dynamics of the natural elements--the wind, the sun and the snow--everything is

incredible. All our projects become like living objects, and the fabric is powerful and so beautiful. But also the fabric has a long tradition in the institute of art. For thousands of years, artists have worked with fabric, not real fabric, of course, but with marble, wood, frescoes, paintings to see how the fabric drapes, falls and pleats. Actually you can recognize the style of the sculpture from that--in Middle Age sculpture the folds are much more angular. Then you go to the Baroque granite sculptures of Bernini and the folds are much more rounded. But the best case of what the fabric does in the classical art is the story of French sculpture Rodin. Now this is a story not invented by me, but a true story. Now the French sculptor Rodin did two versions of the figure of the French novelist Balzac. The first version of Mr. Balzac was totally naked, big belly, skinny legs and many details. Once he finished, Rodin took the cape of Balzac and shroud the figure of Balzac with the cape. And we have that famous sculpture now in the Museum of Modern art in New York. What he did by using the fabric, he hid all these fragments of the body, all these details, and he highlighted the principal proportions of the figure of Balzac. With our wrapping projects, we do that exactly. For me, with the Reichstag, the Reichstag is typical Victorian sculpture. Architecture in the late nineteenth century was all ornament or all decoration. All these ornaments or decorations were hidden by the huge amount of fabric. And when the Reichstag was wrapped

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Pm: I know that you have been trying to organize the installation of Over The River since 1992. Do you foresee the installation in August 2014? Are you contemplating other projects at this time?

Yes. If all goes well as scheduled and we get the permission we need. It is a very complex permitting process, I hope you are aware. I was saying that everything in the world belongs to somebody and when we chose that site in Colorado, almost 99 percent of the site is owned by the United States federal government Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. Our biggest work is to get the permission from the federal government for the principal permit only. They lease that land to private companies, to ranchers, to the state, to different agencies, but the biggest, most powerful owner is the American government, the American taxpayers. That is a very complex permitting process. This is also a unique proposition. In 1969, I’ll give you a little history, the United States government owned 20 percent of the surface of the United States. And they have a special committee called the Department of the Interior whose biggest work was to lease it out to ranchers, to oil companies, to mining companies, and to a variety of other private and public agencies. Until 1969 there was no regulation on how to use the land. Curiously enough, conservative Republican president, Mr. Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969. The federal government has a very special process to lease the land to oil companies and mining companies. This applies to people who use the land for airports or highways or dams. The permitting process should go with an Environmental Impact Statement. Since 1969, no work of art has ever had an Environmental Impact Statement.

This is the first time a work of art has ever had one (for Over The River). Using $2.5 million dollars of our money, we created an incredible precedent in the archives of the National Environmental Impact Policy Act. This is why the process is extremely complex, very political. And we hope to get the permission this year.

Pm: I'm interested in your Mastaba project. How does that differ in terms of permitting and permissions in an Arab country?

Each time the process is different. The permitting process for The Reichstag was different. The permitting process for The Umbrellas in Japan was different. They are all different.

This project started in 1979 and we were working very hard between 1979 and 1982. But I hope you understand, we never work on one project. All these projects are intertwined. That is why these projects take so much time.

We take 18 years, not for the permitting process only, but also because we stopped work on Over The River twice-once to finish The Reichstag in 1994, and once to complete

The Gates in 2005. This is why the Over The River project takes 18 years to realize. It's the same with The Mastaba in the United Arab Emirates. We started in 1979, we stopped to work in 1981, and we finished Surrounded Islands in 1983 and after that there was the Iraq/Iran War going in the Gulf, and we are not very courageous to go there in the middle of very bloody things. Only after The Gates did we start working again in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Of course it's different. We need to get permission from the ruling family. It's a very intricate process and it's very different from the process for Over The River or any other project. I hope you understand that once we get permission for one project, we cannot work on another project because we need to concentrate our resources, energy, money, wisdom and everything to realize that project. So we spend money, we make efforts for Abu Dhabi, but once we get permission for Over The River, we need to put all our effort there. My lecture in February will be about these projects. I will show images of the two works in progress.

Pm: My condolences on the loss of your wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude. How has this loss changed the creative process for you?

Very difficult. I do not have a system. I work alone in my studio. I am alone. Every original work is done by my own hand. But in the office, Jeanne-Claude had three assistants, one is Jonathan Henery who is Jeanne Claude's nephew and one is Vladimir, who is my nephew, the other is Adam Blackbourn who Jeanne-Claude always said is someone else's nephew. These three young men have all different duties in the office. I cannot do my work without them because they know exactly what is going on, and I don't know anything that is happening in the office.

Probably one of the parts I miss the most is that JeanneClaude was a very critical person, very argumentative. And this is something I miss very much because all the time she was critical for everything we do. She tried to take a very critical position and sometimes we argue, we fight, we discuss. This is something very important and I try to overcome that.

Pm: Your preparatory works are beautiful. I am struck by the relationship between your drawings and your final project. You realize the project exactly as you envisioned it.

I draw all the time. People can see the evolution of the project. The very early drawings are very schematic, very simplistic. And, through the process of making the project, we learn more about the project--we have the right materials, we have the right details. All these elements start to be incorporated into the study and the drawings. I don't make any drawings once the project is realized. The very last drawings are just before, and they are very much like the real thing because I have so much more information.

Research assistance by Kassie McLean.

Sources: http://www.pjc.edu/visarts/html/exhibits.htm http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/

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