Wrapped Coast

The passing of Christo has prompted various articles and obituaries - I have included some links below.  The Guardian published one about Wrapped Coast (1969), where Christo and Jeanne-Claude used 90,000 square meters of erosion-control fabric and 56 kilometres of polypropylene rope to transform a craggy shoreline south of Sydney into something that more closely resembled a chalk cliffscape.  I wrote about this work in my book about chalk cliffs, Frozen Air.  Wrapped Coast had its own unique qualities, moving with the wind, creating a cliff surface in constant motion, but it also obscured and smoothed over the irregularities of real earth and rock. Something like this happens when we view cliffs at a distance, as a landscape composed of shapes and simple colours. I wondered how this fake coastal feature might have changed people’s experiences of being there.

For some it must have de-familiarised a place they had known for years. Perhaps in covering over the natural backdrop to their experiences it brought old memories back into focus. For others, with no prior knowledge of that coastline, the reality of the landscape could only be imagined, hidden under a vast dust sheet. 

Screenshot from the Kaldor Public Art Project film (below) of Wrapped Coast, 1969

The Guardian article quotes Australian collector John Kaldor, who released a statement following Christo’s death. “It wasn’t an easy task to find a coastline close to Sydney and get permission to wrap it,” Kaldor recalled. “The reaction was mostly disbelief and ridicule.”  One of the volunteers who helped assemble it, Ian Milliss, recalled how the artists seemed very glamorous. 

"They would fight all the time but she was the organiser. There was a very clear division of labour: he was up in the studio putting it all together in his mind, but she made sure everything happened on the ground.”

“Little Bay wasn’t just a beautiful object in the landscape. It was a total work. You looked at it like you look at the pyramids, as a huge piece of embodied labour and organisation. To me that was the thing that was most impressive about it – more than the scale of it, more than the beauty.”

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Some additional Christo links:

Obituaries: The Guardian, Dezeen, BBC, LA Times, Vogue.

Christo's relationship with landscape and nature is not straightforward - Running Fence, the 44.5 mile-long white nylon fence they stretched across California in the mid-70s, required a 450-page environmental impact report.  I wasn't surprised to find a short notice of his death in Plastics News...

Here are three more appreciations.

• Lynne Hershman Leeson: 'I worked in the office for the two weeks while Running Fence remained on view. (Meanwhile, Jeanne-Claude operated the secret decoy unit—something she learned from her father, who was a general in the French army, so that no one would interrupt her work.) On the very last day the work was up, I took a helicopter ride over the landscape. Only from that distance could I see its entire expanse. It was breathtaking.'

• Adrian Searle:  'Surrounding a group of small islands near Miami with floating pink fabric in 1983, and extending floating, interconnecting piers or pontoons covered in yellow fabric across a huge Italian lake in 2016, the artists transformed these places, albeit briefly, into a kind of gorgeous abstraction.'

• Jerry Saltz: 'Today, the week of his death, amidst the extended three and a half years of this terrible long American night, I wish we could enlist them to wrap the White House in black fabric shroud, a hyper-lucid mummified metaphor for the ghost ship of current pain and racism. Instead we can only mourn them, as we grieve for ourselves.'