Christo: Artist at the Crossroads
Marxism, Capitalism: Ideology and Art
by Lorne Fromer
Published in PHOTO COMMUNIQUE, Winter 1982/1983.
Fromer writes about the Marxist-Capitalist dialogues in Christo's work concentrating first on his history and then on those political questions which arose during the processes of Running Fence and its documentation, and finally on the ideology it depicts.
Christo has become one of the most controversial artists of our times.His work and life embody one of the central conflicts of the twentieth century; the political relationship between East and West. This issue, however, is never confronted directly. It is disguised behind Christo's relationship to objects and private property. The values inherent in this relationship are the true content of his work.
They force us to re-evaluate our own concerns, both individual and collective.
Christo (Javacheff) was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria in 1935, and studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia. He escaped Communist Bulgaria concealed within a shipment of supplies that were going from Prague, Czechoslovakia to Vienna, Austria. Reminiscing about his background, Christo explains: "I don't like to look Marxist, but the economic structure has everything to do with our existence. I studied in Bulgaria until I was twenty two, and certainly my Marxist education was very significant in the things I do. Probably my interest in public art comes from my training in Bulgaria. I was terribly influenced by the Soviet constructionist* artists of the early twenties — especially the period of propaganda art.
Christo's upbringing in Communist Bulgaria provided him with a multi-leveled education that stressed economic, political and social concerns. All official art in the closing years of the Stalinist era (Social Realism) served rigid didactic and political ambitions. Although Christo was able to escape physically, his ideology remains grounded in his early education.
Upon his arrival in Paris in 1958 Christo began his Packages and Wrapped Objects series. By wrapping familiar objects (bottles, table and chair, a car, a camera, etc.) in cloth or plastic Christo "violated our operational relationship''' to them. Yet to consider these everyday objects as neutral would be missing Christo's point. For they are also commodities — products of a consumer society. By wrapping them and exhibiting them as art, Christo is tampering with their use-values and exchange-values. It was at this time that Christo married Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon, daughter of a Gaullist general. They began to work together, developing environmental projects that existed in spaces outside of the museum or gallery.
It was not until 1968 that Christo was given the opportunity to apply his wrapping technique to a public building even though he had outlined this idea in photomontages since 1961. The work embraced public interaction on many levels. It required permission from the building's owner (in this case curators, director and staff of The Kunsthall, Bern), as well as teamwork and collaboration, and it engaged a non-select audience. Rather than creating 'art objects' with exchange-values in an art marketplace Christo was slowly moving into the realm of 'idea art'. Yet he was not the first artist to play with these notions. Within art history a concern for the 'idea' can be found in the writings of da Vinci and Baudelaire, and in the Ready-mades of Duchamp. What makes Christo's work so important is that it carries these ideas outside of the museum context. It is public art, monumental art. It neither symbolizes nor glorifies. One day it exists and the next day it is gone.
Running Fence is Christo's best known North American project. The 18 foot high white fabric fence emerged from the Pacific Ocean and spanned 24½ miles of rolling countryside in Marin and Sonoma counties, California. It consisted of 2,050 panels of woven nylon fabric supported by cables and 2,050 steel posts. It took four years to plan and erect at a cost of over three million dollars. The completed fence remained in place for a period of two weeks and was subsequently removed.
It is difficult to determine the number of people who actually experienced Running Fence in its original form.3 Most of us know of it secondhand through conversation, reviews in art journals or the popular press, museum exhibits, or the books which were published in 1977 and 1978. We experience Running Fence not as an object but as a myth, carefully constructed through documentation and presented to carry an ideology — an ideology in direct confrontation with North American social/legal practices. For the materials that Christo works with are not just nylon and steel, but are a network of structures that govern our use of land. Initially he required the permission, not of curators, but of sixty ranchers over whose land the fence would cross, then of the State of California, which held jurisdiction over the coastal section. In all, Christo attended seventeen public hearings and several court sessions. Christo sees each activity as an important part of the completed project.4 Planning, the rallying of community support and legal battles were just as important as construction.
C hristo's exhibit, Running Fence Documentation 1972-1976, shown at the Musee D'Art Contemporain, Montreal (July 9-September 13, 1981) challenges our notion of the 'art object'. Most of the work — including photographs, collages, engineering drawings, legal briefs, an environmental report, correspondence, a scale model, and an actual section of the fence, as well as a film — was included primarily for information value rather than aesthetic significance. Each reveals a part of the process and helps to demystify the workings of our social and political institutions.
Running Fence 1973-1976, the film by the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zverin, provides the most comprehensive document of the politics behind the actual construction of the fence, from original idea to completion. Perhaps the narrative nature of film makes it ideally suited for a statement about process. The film concentrates upon Christo's engagement with a community, defined and assembled for the express purpose of realizing Running Fence in a material form. Transported to rural kitchens and front porches we witness Christo and Jeanne-Claude patiently explaining Running Fence's position in a history of Modern Art, a notion quite incongruous to this isolated group of ranchers.
Christos proposal eventuallypolari:es this quiet community. In support ot the idea are the ranchers whose property the fence would eventually cross. Even though they may own their land, we become aware of just how little power thev have in determining its use. We meet the opposition, The Committee to Stop the Running Fence, in the footage recorded at public hearings — a collection of petty bureaucrats and reactionary town citizens who can find no place in Marin and Sonoma Counties for an idea as eccentric as Running Fence.
Yet to imagine Christo as David out to defeat Goliath, armed with a slingshot and a handful of pebbles, would be absurd. He employed his own army of professionals including lawyers, engineers and biologists who justify and certify the project from within their specialised fields. The process would be similar to building a highw.ay; determine a need, plan a route, complete feasibility and environmental studies, expropriate the land and then engineer and construct the actual highway. Christo's project departed from this model on two essential points: 1) it was instigated from within the private sector (and not even by a member of the community) and 2) the apparent irrational nature of the project would serve few community needs or interests. Christo both created the need and proceeded to satisfy it.
One can look at Running Fence in formal terms, as a line crossing a ground of actual countryside. Bruce Ferguson has suggested that we consider this countryside not as virgin land, but as land that has been divided into sections of private property.' By crossing sixty such parcels of private property, Running Fence metaphorically transcends these divisions and returns the land to its pre-divisional state. Again it is Marx who deserves the credit for this idea. In his Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts 1844 he observed a state of alienation arising out of private property in industrial capitalist society. He saw a solution to this situation in the transcendence of private property: The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes.'6
The film confirms Christo's adherence to Marx's proposition. It subliminally portrays a proletarian struggle against its oppressors. Christo plays the revolutionary guerilla who unites the peasants (the ranchers) in ideological battle against the ruling class (the bureaucrats). Once the battle (legal) has been won they begin construction of the 'new society' (the fence). They are happy in their work and willing to undergo extreme hardship (a shortage of drinking water, minimum wage, oppressive climatic conditions). The last scenes of the film portray the tranquility after the battle. Absent is the crew, the rumble of trucks and heavy machinery, the frenetic energy that went into the construction. In the end all is silence. Jeanne-Claude, who has been manning the office and directing communications, is finally reunited with Christo. They walk the final coastal section of the fence and calmly discuss the project. They have found their peace and appear united in human bliss.
As much as Christo would like to downplay his Marxist background, it is difficult to ignore its centrality in all of his work. Although we usually associate documentary films with Realism, one cannot overlook the sentimental Romantic outlook portrayed in Running Fence 1973-1976. Had Christo wished to carry his metaphor further, he would have given us a glimpse of post-revolutionary life in his new society'. Absent is any footage depicting the dismantling of the fence, or of life in the community long after the project.
Christo's community involvement raises important ethical questions as well. He provides a community with a work of art, temporary jobs and an important issue for debate and involvement. Yet the long-term benefits really belong to Christo, providing him with all the glory, strengthening his reputation, as well as giving him the raw materials for future exhibits, books and postcards.' Yet, in spite of this issue, Running Fence serves to carry a message beyond the community of its conception. It also speaks of a universal concern — the power of the individual in the face of anonymous bureaucracies vested with the power to control.
Another contradiction worthv of examination is Christo's means of production. As close as his work adheres to Marx's vision of art representing "good ideas or emotions in man", the enormous sums of money required for each of Christo s projects are raised primarily through the sale of his drawings and collages in an art marketplace. On the one hand Christo condemns our attachment to private property, while on the other he exploits it. A similar contradiction arises in his use of Wolfgang Vol:'s photographic'documentation displayed in the exhibit. The ranchers, depicted in a small group of candid portraits, appear all the more insignificant in the context of a whole gallery devoted to the completed fence. These fence photos are poetic. They petrify the elegance of Running Fence as it weaves its route through some of California's most spectacular scenery. The beauty and scale of these images diminishes their significance as information, and posits them in the real of `art objects'.
Christo treads a fine line between 'art object' and 'art as idea', refusing the limitations of either approach. He is not a purist. He utilizes whatever means are at his disposal to convey his message. Some may go so far as to call him an opportunist, yet I believe he is sincere. He has chosen to work within a system and so must accept its limitations. He mirrors this system so effectively because he understands it — not as someone born and bred here but as an outsider who has studied it from afar, and he knows its weaknesses and contradictions. Every capitalist contradiction that Christo embraces, he does so for his art. I don't believe that all the attention he has received is simply media-hype. For by vesting his work with a Marxist ideology, and positing it in the midst of contemporary capitalistic society, Christo is instigating a clash of values. It is this clash that forms the true content of his work, and it occurs at a time when capitalism's hold on Western tradition is showing severe signs of distress. Christo engages us in a reassessment of our values — not simply visual or aesthetic, but those perpetuated by the social/political) economic system in which we live.
Notes
* Probably misquoted: should read Russian Avant-Garde.
1. Carol Caldwell, "Wither Christo", Rollin Stone, July 9, 1081, page -74.
2. Lawrence Allowav, Christo, New York, Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1%0, VI.
3. Christo has calculated that approximately 300,750 cars carrying an average of two people per car drove by Running Fence.
4. Press release, Newport Harbour Art Museum, California.
5. Classroom discussion, Fall, 1981.
6. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844", quoted from Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, edited by Lee Baxandale and Stefan 1\lorawski, St. Louis, Telos Press, 1073, page (. Christo receives no royalties from the sales of these objects. cc
Lorne Fromer is a Toronto-based photographer and writer.