It’s been a decade since those 16 days in February 2005 when the artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed 7,500 gates along New York Central Park’s walkways, each adorned with shimmering saffron-coloured panels creating what Christo described as “a golden river appearing and disappearing through the branches of the trees.”
It was a spectacle like no other in the park’s long history. The $20 million project, financed by the sale of Christo’s artworks, pumped nearly $250 million into the city’s economy and attracted 4 million visitors. “It put New York City in the international headlines for something hopeful for the first time since 9/11,” recalled Patricia E. Harris, the former deputy mayor and, for decades, a leading supporter of the project with her boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “It reminded the world that our city’s artistic spirit was alive and well.”
And also showed the world that art has the power to change the landscape. Whether they were wrapping the Reichstag in a million square feet of fabric or raising a 365-foot-high curtain across a valley in Colorado, Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced visual feats that resonated with the public in a way few artists ever have. “You become part of the dialogue,” said Germano Celant, the Italian curator. “These projects are a kind of dream, one that everybody can understand and everybody can participate in.”
But since Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009, from complications of a brain aneurysm, some wondered if the dream had died too. It seemed to many that Christo had disappeared from public view. The couple had been inseparable for 47 years, collaborators for most of that time. She was the more vocal and visible, with her flaming red hair, a shade she enjoyed telling people was specially chosen by her husband.
Quietly busyIn fact, Christo has been quietly busy, juggling several projects at once. And now, he is poised for a comeback on his own. His first commercial art exhibition in nearly 50 years opens November 6, at the Craig Starr Gallery in Manhattan, with examples of some of his earliest works, his Show Windows and Store Fronts, architectural installations he started making in the early 1960s, shortly after he and Jeanne-Claude arrived in New York from Paris.
But it is “The Floating Piers,” his first fantastical outdoor installation since “The Gates” and the first project conceived since Jeanne-Claude’s death that consumes his every waking hour. For 16 days starting June 18, on Italy’s Lake Iseo, the public will be able to walk for nearly 2 miles on water, atop 2,00,000 floatable cubes covered in glittering, dahlia-yellow fabric fashioned from tightly woven nylon.
“They will feel the movement of the water under foot,” Christo said. “It will be very sexy, a bit like walking on a water bed.”
Christo recalled a car ride he took last year from Stuttgart, Germany, to his warehouse in Basel, Switzerland, with his nephew Vladimir Yavachev, and Wolfgang Volz, his photographer and the project manager of “The Floating Piers.”
“I cannot wait so long anymore,” he told them. “I am not sure I will live another 10 years. I think we should do something not so complicated. Something we can manage. Something we can actually get done.”
“I’m always missing Jeanne-Claude,” Christo said a bit wistfully. A brilliant problem-solver, “her ferociously critical mind” has left a huge void, he said.
He is also carrying on the couple’s two remaining projects, both challenging. One, intended for an oasis about 100 miles west of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, was conceived in 1977 and is an immense trapezoidal bench-like structure called “The Mastaba.” It will be the tallest project in his career, reaching nearly 500 feet high, fashioned from 4,10,000 multicoloured barrels.
The other work in progress is “Over the River,” begun in 1992, a temporary installation that involves suspending 5.9 miles of silvery fabric panels high above the Arkansas River in south-central Colorado.“The Floating Piers,” 60 miles east of Milan, has been a breeze. Lake Iseo is perhaps the least known of Italy’s northern lakes, an idyllic spot with two small islands not yet overrun with tourists.
To Christo, Lake Iseo also offers a storybook landscape. “It has beautiful small villages and houses and churches and Roman ruins. To go to the mainland, residents go by traghetto,” he said, using the Italian word for a small boat or ferry. “The Floating Piers” will connect the islands to each other and to the mainland. “You will be able to walk the entire area,” Christo explained.
The project will also be visible from the surrounding mountains. As the light changes throughout the day, the view of the piers will change, too, from deep yellow to shimmering gold to a reddish hue when wet.
— New York Times News Service
