OFFERING
A NEW VIEW OF THE WORLD

Topics: Awe; Beauty; Creation; Nature; Perception and Reality; Spiritual Perception

References: Psalm 119:18; John 9:25; 16:15; 2 Corinthians 5:17–18

Christo and Jeanne-Claude hung 142,000 square feet of orange nylon fabric between the mountains on either side of Rifle Gap in Colorado in the early 1970s. Ten years later they surrounded two islands off the Florida coast in bright pink fabric. Later they “wrapped” the German Reichstag and the Pont Neuf in France.

Since the early 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been creating unique art installations for a public often skeptical, sometimes welcoming, and usually completely unprepared for what they are about to experience. The artists call their work “environmental art,” because they use large pieces of fabric to highlight and set apart natural environments—urban or rural—for a short period of time. Each project typically requires years of logistical planning and negotiations with local governments. The artwork demands sophisticated feats of engineering and hundreds of crew members, not to mention lots of money.

What would possess anyone to create such massive (and temporary) works of art? What purpose could they possibly serve? According to Robert Storr, professor of modern art at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, “They see it in terms of making what is already in the world more visible … and visible to us in different ways.” The installations are only a part of the artwork. The other part is the world that is already there, “which we often pass by without paying any attention to it,” Storr says. The artists highlight one part of the environment. “In doing so, we see and perceive the whole environment with new eyes and a new consciousness,” Christo and Jeanne-Claude say on their website.

Adam Cieselski and Jok Church, who were crew members on the artists’ California coastline project titled Running Fence, said that the artwork served as “a landscape with an obstructive membrane in place to block and alter the view, which transforms the way people perceive it.” Decades later Cieselski and Church can drive through Western Marin and Sonoma counties and still find Running Fence. The landscape is untouched, unaltered, and unchanged. “The thing that has been changed is us,” they say.

Note: Images of the artworks can be viewed at www.christojeanneclaude.net.

—“Central Park’s Bright New Clothes,” npr.org (February 10, 2005)