Disappearance and Photography in Post-Object Art: Christo and Jeanne-Claude

The artistic collaboration between husband and wife team Christo and Jeanne-Claude represents a transition from traditional individual artistic identity to a more complex effacement of individual collaborators and to the identification of the collaboration itself as an artwork. Their temporary works of art survive only through documentation such as photographs, films and books. This is no accident for disappearance is crucial to the works' integrity. The couple's photo-documentations exist at the intersection of photography and early 1970s conceptual art. They are inscribed within shifting ideas of artwork and the role of the artist.

In 1969, Sydney art collector and patron John Kaldor invited Christo and Jeanne-Claude to give a series of lectures in Australia. There, Christo and Jeanne-Claude completed the first of Kaldor's "Art Projects," Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, Australia, 1969. [1] The piece attracted enormous local media coverage and considerable international attention. The London art magazine Studio International ran the following description:

Christo's latest package, 1,000,000 sq. ft. of the Australian coastline at Little Bay, near Sydney covering a frontage of approximately one mile, was realized for the period 1 to 28 November. Using a poly-propylene fabric, 35 miles of rope, two-way radios and an estimated 17,000 man-hours, and despite southerly gales and pyromaniac hooligans, Christo wrapped up rocks to a height of 84 feet. Sponsors were the Aspen Centre of Contemporary Art, Colorado, and Christo himself. [2]

These bare facts hide several stories that typify Christo and Jeanne-Claude's temporary artworks of the next three decades, and that reflect their nomadic, mobile artistic identity. Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, Australia was the couple's first major environmental sculpture. Even though Christo alone was credited for the work at the time, he and Jeanne-Claude worked as a team on the piece and shared responsibility for its completion. Jeanne-Claude was responsible for all of the project administration. Beginning in the 1980s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude rigorously and sternly insisted on retrospective joint reattribution of all works from the late 1960s onward, including Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, Australia, even though Christo's interviews continued to carry little reference to his partner Jeanne-Claude's role in the works. At first seems surprising given the couple's determined insistence on joint attribution of "Christo's" works when negotiations with magazines and researchers for exhibition participation, copyright clearance or caption checking took place. [3] But I believe Christo and Jeanne-Claude altered their attitudes and opinions about the public acknowledgement of their collaboration without wishing this shift to be solidly pinned down. As signs of intense individuality the work was recognized in critical commentary and newspaper cartoons and gained a level of trademark recognition achieved by very few other artists (e.g., Jackson Pollock's drips, Joseph Beuys's hat and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans). [4] But the work was the product of two artists:

Nous approchons d'un espace plein de ressources. Au depart, nous empruntons l'espace et subitement nous essayons de creer des obstacles, des divisions, des difficultes. (We come to a space and create a subtle disturbance. Basically, we borrow a space and all of a sudden we make obstacles, divisions, and difficulties.) [5]

In a joint 1994 interview with Christo, Jeanne-Claude said, "I'm not only an administrator of Christo's beautiful ideas. For instance, The Surrounded Islands was my idea. Most of the people don't know that." [6] If, in a 1989 interview, Christo seemed to deny this, it seems more likely that he was distinguishing between his authorial name--the name "Christo" for which he had become famous--and the names of the two artists behind that brand name. He said:

[The work] is the idea of one man. I make the point in discussion of my art that I do not do commissions; I decide my projects and how to do them. The projects continually translate this great individualism, this creative freedom. [7]

In 1990 Christo was quoted as saying "the work is a huge, individualistic gesture that is entirely by me." [8] Although his emphasis on "individuality" seemed to contradict his collaborative working method, by the 1980s the name "Christo" had come, I believe, to denote a corporation, a trademark idea and

copyright ownership as well as a single man and even the collaboration between Christo and Jeanne-Claude itself. Even their insistence on financing each work themselves was an artistic decision as well as a pragmatic choice. It was part of their creation of a corporate (and transnational) artistic identity. It seems clear that individuality was instrumental and iconic rather than subjective and reflective of sole artistic authorship. Eliminating his surname Javacheff in favor of "Christo" was a result of the same process. Christo's statements and interviews were consistent with this scenario if it was understood that his use of the pronoun "I" was equivalent to "we": I think that by "I" he meant "Christo" the artist, not Christo Javacheff the person, allowing himself to be subsumed by his doppelganger, the Christo corporation, which includes the work of Jeanne-Claude.

Equally, the performative characteristic of the temporary work of art such as Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, Australia transformed labor and raw materials of considerable monetary value into an aesthetic gesture valued at nothing, for they were spectacularly unsaleable and resistant to commodification. Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid in part for these expensive gestures by the sale of drawings and assemblages, not photographs, books or films. But these objects were representations rather than working visualizations--scaled-down versions, sometimes made after the event. Even so, it was Christo and Jeanne-Claude's own corporation--their own doppelganger--that financed their work, employing the graphic design and draughting skills of its employee Christo, and the marketing skills of its director Jeanne-Claude to pay the bills. In 1990 Christo observed, "My wife, Jeanne-Claude, who is the manager of all the projects, is the president and treasurer of the corporation." [9] Christo and Jeanne-Claude's corporate doppelganger could have been seen figuratively as the collaboration's corporate "business arm." Their constructed corporate identity mimicked the relationship between financial and cultural capital: great emotional, psychic and financial investment resulted in the loss of financial capital but the creation of considerable cultural capital. Christo and Jeanne-Claude freely emphasized the capitalist underpinning of his calculations, insisting that exaggerating the libertarian aspect of free enterprise gave them artistic freedom: "This is simply a capitalistic venture." [10] As they were creating ephemeral projects, this process depended on a leap of faith. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's relationship with the public and anxious worried assistants and bankers, as The Wall Street Journal once reported, was one of almost messianic belief in their own importance and the self-sustaining momentum of their doppelganger; this belief communicated itself to their associates with an assurance that cr eated similar empowerment." [11] A letter dated June 21, 1969, from Christo to Kaldor read, "From your telephone call this morning, I understand that you are afraid. Do not be! Everything will go all right. It will not be easy--of course--but it will be OK." [12] It should be noted that Kaldor was not involved in any real estate activity or development associated with venues where the Art Projects were executed, nor did he own the works the artists presented, although he did purchase works by the artists during and after their tours. He was not involved in commissioning art: he was facilitating its realization. In a telephone conversation with the author (March 1995), Jeanne-Claude made this distinction absolutely clear. Christo and Jeanne-Claude so often reiterated their refusal of corporate sponsorship that this refusal must be seen as integral to their perception of how their art was to be seen. To a certain extent, the business-like nature of this collaboration had affinities with corporate modes of organ ization, but I see no evidence that Christo and Jeanne-Claude (nor other artists sponsored by Kaldor, including Gilbert & George) were nudged in any corporatist direction by Kaldor's Art Project: they retained the structure of collaborative partnerships, and authority and decision-making were not delegated. As for the Art Projects, Kaldor was not involved.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude also made two lesser-known works during the Australian visit--the Wool Works (1969) at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. In the National Gallery's penitential, gray, rain-soaked Murdoch Court, museum staff wrapped two semi-trailer loads of wool bales in dark tarpaulins. Indoors, in the silver foil-walled temporary exhibitions area, they arranged 75 partly-opened wool bales separated by steel barriers in two long rows across the floor. The wrapped bales in the courtyard were visible through the large windows in the temporary exhibitions space, creating an ambiguous link between the two temporary artworks that suggested two stages in an obscure, quasi-industrial process.[13] Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wool Works embodied the physical logic of process over minimal presence, for each work implied a narrative of movement and energy, and each used a natural insulating material-wool--to do this. The monolithic dark forms of the wrapped bales outdoors were an ominous backdrop to the overflowing wool bales inside that looked as though the process of being emptied onto the floor had been interrupted. The result was uncanny, as Ross Lansell observed in his review in Nation:

Although Christo denies he is an environmental artist, one of the [Allan] Kaprow species, the bluntness, the primality, the rudeness of this particular "Wool Work," dominates its setting, primarily because of its very strangeness, and shows up the fine artiness of the building.... Christo, that Buster Keaton-like figure in an absurd world of his own making, is upon us. [14]

Christo and Jeanne-Claude had chosen to wrap a product of immense economic importance to Australia and in particular to Victoria, which had historically been the wool industry's national center. Wool traditionally represented financial power for Melbourne, and the contrast of opened and wrapped bales connoted transactions and the transference of both kinetic and economic energy. The energy transfers mapped in these temporary artworks were unseen; the sense of sight was an inadequate mechanism to trace the implied movement of capital indicated by bales of wool. Capital is resistant to visual representation for although it can be visually symbolized, it has no fixed shape. Christo and Jeanne-Claude covered their objects in opaque or semi-opaque material so that they could not be seen.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude often veiled or at least partially covered their subjects. In one early solo work, Wrapped Woman (1963), made before the collaboration with Jeanne-Claude commenced, Christo wrapped a living, naked woman. In 1970, a reporter wrote: "In Germany, in 1963, he wrapped his first girl, a well-rounded nude blonde with a demure page-boy hair-style. In a well-rehearsed 'strip-tease in reverse', he swathed her in hundreds of feet of transparent polyethylene and then tied her into a package with rope. (The girl lived, of course, because arrangements had been made for her to go on breathing outside air. The 'sculpture' lived because the entire wrapping was recorded on film.)" [15] Later Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped or covered things and places; their works actively flaunting the ubiquitous artifice, patterning and disguise of elaborate drapery. [16] Retrospectively, Wrapped Woman seems oblivious to its sexual-political implications, much as did Yves Klein's performatively painted "Anthropom etries" of the 1960s. Like the work of other Nouveaux Realistes, Christo's early work depended on the audience's acceptance of a repeated, emphatically masculine, signature gesture. From the environmental wrapped installations onward however, Christo and Jeanne-Claude understood and wished to avoid this overtly mannered theatricality. In a 1977 interview Christo vigorously rejected any link with theater in their art, "Some people say I make theatre art, but [it] is not theatre, because there is not one element of make-believe anywhere." [17] Attention was displaced from both wrapped object and drapery alike into a performative drama and onto a sense of hidden potential tragedy around which the curtains were definitively closed. Christo and Jeanne-Claude made veils rather than wrappings, and their veils were metaphors for divisions between the material world, its descriptions, and the action of erotic desire. [18] Their veils both obscured and revealed the chosen object. In a sense, the artists' later industri al-strength veils, presaged in their 1964 and 1965 "Store Fronts"--sculptural installations that simulated curtained, closed-up shop windows--were dramatic distancing devices that recapitulated something of the effect of photography: the wrappings were like a photographic print's chemical membrane. The doubleness of this membrane--its materiality and its illusionist transparency--was the subject of much conceptual photography at this time, in work as diverse as Ed Ruscha's Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1962) and Jeff Wall's Landscape Manual (1970). At the same time Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a part of the wider post-object art movement in which art disappeared into life: Udo Kulterman's book Art and Life (1971) featured Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, Australia. [19]

Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, Australia was, according to the artists, their "first project not concerned with one single object. [20] It was also the first of their projects that required and even encouraged the viewer's physical movement across and into the no longer monolithic sculpture. Christo observed, "people would take time to walk from one side of the project to the other. For me, that element of time is the most significant and influential part of the project" [21] Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, Australia could not be seen as a discrete object in its totality but rather from a number of different perspectives. Because of its temporality, the audience viewed Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, Australia within the terms of the indexical traces of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's careful and exhaustive photographic documentation. As with all their subsequent projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude accentuated photography's tran sparency--its putative ability to communicate a neutral, documentary truth--by commissioning and assembling an overwhelming quantity of beautiful photographs. However, these were no more than compensation for the projects' transience; Christo and Jeanne-Claude actively stressed the fact that the temporary works of art were no longer available, and that their life as memories was fragile and unstable. [22] Photographic documentation did not constitute a proper memory. But why not? Why did Christo and Jeanne-Claude not consider this documentation to be traces of their disappearing temporary works of art, especially since their intention was not to make fine art photographs? Their refusal to assume that the works could be preserved in memory was a meditation on what memory might mean and whether or not it could be an active faculty specifically in an economy flooded with photographic representations. This raises other questions as well: would photographs, if arranged in archives, create or constitute memory disc ourses, especially if the artists overtly or covertly wished to avoid spelling out their intentions? The question implicit in minimal/conceptual photography remains whether memory can be activated by a collection of photographs, and whether or not this activation is merely nostalgia.

For Christo and Jeanne-Claude the answer was clear. Their works had literally disappeared from the face of the earth, for they were dismantled almost as soon as they were erected. According to Christo:

There is a kind of simplicity in these projects--they are temporary, almost nomadic. This impermanence translates into an awareness of the vulnerability of things, of their passing away. [23]

Collaborative authorship for Christo and Jeanne-Claude was more than personal idiosyncrasy--it was one solution to a disbelief in traditional ideas of what art might be as there had been a loss of confidence in the properties of aesthetic experience, and even in the visual, as a means of gaining knowledge. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw artists gradually reassess the properties of photographs, and come to see the most crucial property of photography as its anthropological capacity rather than its ability to be the source of quasi-surrealist wonder. Vancouver artist Wall wrote that the crisis of painting was a microcosmic view of the crisis of representation. [24] According to Wall, photography, an indexical form whose proper (in the Greenbergian sense) aesthetic domain of competence was its transparency, remained capable of retaining its representational capacity. The important property of photography was its transparency--its lack of opacity. [25] Where photography becomes opaque, in the sense of adaptin g painterly connections or signs of manufacture (as in art photography), it moves away from its strength which, according to Wall's gloss of Clement Greenberg, is its indexical relationship to its referent, even when this referent is itself culturally and artistically mediated. The strength of photography--its illusion of transparency--was crucial in the activity of legitimizing post-object art, for it was the chief means by which performance and installation artists memorialized transient events. It is the medium through which we now approach transitory art forms such as those of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's audience was a constrained but active participant in a modern pastoral drama. The work of art was a part of "real life"--an obstacle, a tourist attraction--rather than an art gallery experience. Even though the wrapping was synthetic, the temporary works of art had left the gallery frame behind. Just as importantly, impermanence was not only a property of the works but an element of identity, existing side-by-side with the intense subjectivity of Christo's individualistic wrapped gestures. The artists constantly reminded the public that they were without commercial gallery representation, for they wished to present themselves as artists who had left the stable world of galleries and museums and who were in effect homeless. As Christo noted; "My works have to do with this displaced dimension. They borrow many elements. I am not German, or French, or American--my projects address this idea of rootlessness? [26] This homelessness implied a transient art object that would, despite the claims of photography and the often-triumphalist claims of memory discourse, disappear or be effaced. At the same time the artists carefully constructed a particular figure of the "artist" and an enormous archive of photo-documentation:

John [Kaldor] became involved with art that was beyond the collectible dimension. With us, Gilbert & George, Charlotte Moonnan and Nam June Paik, the important thing was not that there would be some permanent object, but that there was another dimension that needed to be experienced. [27]

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were representing themselves in a particular way: neither they nor Kaldor were bound by tradition and, more significantly, they were attempting to make art beyond the physical, mental and memorial boundaries of the art world. Their movement beyond traditional authorship is ambivalent, and their constitution of a singular artistic identity replete with a trademark signature style coexists with a corporate and highly cooperative collaborative working method.

CHARLES GREEN is an art critic, artist and author of Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-94 (1995). He is a lecturer in the School of Art History and Theory at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. His book Thief in the Attic, on artist collaborations and artistic identity, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

NOTES

(1.) For a full description of the work's genesis see Nicholas Baume, "Critical Themes in Christo's Art, 1958-1970," in Anthony Bond, ed., Christo: John Kaldor Art Project 1990, exhibition catalog (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1990), pp. 33-42.

(2.) See untitled, unsigned paragraph in editorial columns, Studio International, Vol. 178, no. 917 (December 1969), p. 206. In fact, the piece existed for 10 weeks from October 28.

(3.) I cite my own experience preparing illustrations for my book, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-94 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995). The two artists checked several times that I had the caption details listing both artists absolutely correct; they were extremely concerned that I credit Jeanne-Claude as equal author.

(4.) See Frank Benier's cartoon, "Well--that just about wraps it up Mr. Christo," in The Sun, Sydney (June 13 1969), reproduced in Baume, "Critical Themes in Christo's Art," p.41.

(5.) Christo quoted in Anne-Francoise Penders, ed., Christo & Jeanne-Claude: Conversation with Anne-Francoise Penders (Gerpinnes: Editions Tandem, 1994), (Penders's translation, not the artists'), p. 14.

(6.) Jeanne-Claude quoted in Penders, p.22.

(7.) Christo quoted in Nicholas Baume, "Christo," Art and Australia, Vol. 27, no.1 (Spring 1989), p. 91.

(8.) Quoted in Patricia C. Phillips, "Christo: Independence is most important to me. The work of art is like a scream of freedom," Flash Art, no. 151 (March-April 1990), pp. 134-7.

(9.) Ibid, p. 135.

(10.) Ibid.

(11.) For a thorough description of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's sophisticated, entrepreneurial financial organization see "Prime Property: Beside Being an Artist, Christo has distinction of being the Principal Asset of CVJ Corporation," The Wall Street Journal (July12, 1984), p. 1 and p. 18.

(12.) Quoted in Baume, "Critical Themes in Christo's Art," p. 15.

(13.) For a hostile review of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation, see Alan Warren, "Not Wrapped in Christo," The Sun (November 5, 1969), p. 36. Warren observed, "Scale and ambiguity were important ingredients of the action at Sydney's Little Bay.... But they were forgotten when Christo wrapped up some wool bales in the keith Murdoch Court. The result can only be described as obvious, the type of job one would expect from any truck driver." This review appeared the exact day Joseph Kosuth's Art as Idea as Idea (1969) was published in the same newspaper and others across Australia.

(14.) G. R Lansell, "Baleful Christo," Nation (November 15, 1969), p. 15; although Lansell was incorrect in his assertion that Christo had denied he was an environmental artist.

(15.) Ian Ball, "Christo the Wrapper," in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, no. 284 (March 27, 1970), pp. 18-20 and p. 23.

(16.) See the .superb photograph by Anthony Haden-Guest taken during filming in Charles Wilp's London studio, which is reproduced in Baume, "Critical Themes in Christo's Art," p. 19.

(17.) Christo quoted in Calvin Tomkins, "Onward and Upward with the Arts: Running Fence," The New Yorker (March 27, 1977), p. 801 In the same interview, Christo fastidiously distanced himself from minimalism.

(18.) Anthony Bond, "The real and the revealed," in Christo: John n Kaldor Art Project 1990, pp. 19-23.

(19.) See Udo Kulterman, Art and Life, John William Gabriel, trans. (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp.206-7.

(20.) Christo quoted in Baume, "Christo," p.85. Donald Brook so observed that Wrapped Coast, Little Bay, One Million Square Feet, Sydney, was "more environment than object" ("Review," Sydney Morning Herald [October 14,1969]). Christo had in fact created an earlier outdoor installation (Le Rideau de Fer [1962]), as opposed to an outdoor sculpture, several years earlier.

(21.) Baume, "Critical Themes in Christo's Art," p. 39.

(22.) Jeanne-Claude, telephone conversation with the author, August 19, 1999.

(23.) Christo in Baume, "Christo," p. 85.

(24.) Jeff Wall, "Unity and Fragmentation in Manet" (1984), in Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc and Boris Groys, eds., Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon, 1997), pp. 78-89.

(25.) Jeff Wall, "Photography and Liquid Intelligence" (1989) in de Duve, Pelenc and Groys, pp. 90-93 and "Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, conceptual art" in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, eds. Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-75 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), pp. 247-267.

(26.) Phillips, p. 135.

(27.) Christo (in a letter dated August 26, 1988), quoted by Baume, "John Kaldor: Public Patron/Private Collector," in Baume, ed., From Christo and Jeanne-Claude to Jeff Koons: John Kaldor Art Projects and Collection, exhibition catalog (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), p. 25.

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