“All our projects are totally irrational, totally useless. Nobody needs them. The world can live without them.”
On the website for the artist Christo, who died this past week at age 84, one takes a dazzling tour through videos and photographs of the many projects he dreamed up in his long career. One early, unrealized project of 1964 caught my attention, for it summed up Christo’s fearless, poetic vision.
He and his wife Jeanne-Claude had just left Paris to settle permanently in New York. Arriving in the harbor aboard the SS France and taking in the majestic scene from the bow of the ship, Christo was enraptured by the skyline of Lower Manhattan. Within days he made a photographic collage of it, showing two buildings towering above the others, both wrapped in fabric and tied off in rope. This was the psychedelic ‘60s, remember; but even then Christo’s idea of art must have seemed truly surreal.
And yet in the years to come Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped many grand edifices around the world, including the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris—not to mention walkways, monuments, lakes, islands, canyons, even a 24.5-mile stretch of California coastline. Some projects took decades to complete, often in the face of withering resistance and ridicule, with engineering and environmental challenges that would have dissuaded anyone else. But Christo and Jeanne-Claude calmly persevered.
Once a project was finally approved, they deployed a small army of highly-trained workers to create something that would be on view for maybe two weeks before being taken down. They paid all the costs, even to the point of removing tons of rubbish from eleven islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami in 1978 to prepare the site for the pink-colored extravaganza Surrounded Islands.
My first experience of Christo came in Newport, Rhode Island, and a project he called Ocean Front. In those days I often scuba-dived in a moon-shaped cove at King’s Beach on Ocean Drive, and it was here in August 1974 that Christo spread 150,000 square feet of white woven Polypropylene fabric. For eight magical days it floated over the water, a blinding and breath-taking apparition to rival all those dazzling twelve-meter yachts that were then competing nearby in the America’s Cup.
And in 2005 came The Gates. My children and I meandered along the snowy paths in Central Park, almost light-headed from the saffron-fabric banners snapping above our heads in the freezing wind. The children had never heard of Christo but loved the grandeur, the excitement and the joyous crowds all around them.
Even now they feel lucky to have experienced it, as do I.