#Industrial Woven Wire Cloth dealer | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

processproductionsophielindsay · 3 years

Text

CHRISTO AND JEANNE CLAUDE

Wall of Oil Barrels - Rideau de Fer (The Iron Curtain) (1961-62)

https://doyle.com/auctions/13dd02-n-a/catalogue/133-christo-iron-curtain-wall-of-oil-barrels-color-offset-lithograph

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's first collaborations involved wrapping dozens of oil barrels with cloth and rope, and stacking them in layers across public spaces to partially or completely block access. Earlier iterations of this site-specific work on Rue Visconti in Paris included a version in the courtyard of Christo's studio, as well as 1961's Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Packages, both of which were installed for two weeks on the harbor in Cologne, Germany. Particularly in Wall of Oil Barrels, the artists expanded the scope and scale of the previous works, creating a larger and more impenetrable wall of both wrapped and unwrapped barrels that blockaded a section of a city street. Christo was propelled by the idea of spatially reconfiguring a specific outdoor location with a common, contextually misplaced object, a notion that would play a role in many of his future creations and collaborations with Jeanne-Claude. The piece used 89 barrels, and measured 13.2 feet wide, 2.7 feet deep, and 13.7 feet tall. It took eight hours to assemble. An expression of the artists' views on the disruptive nature of the Cold War and the Berlin Wall, which was then being built, Wall of Oil Barrels commented on the politics of space, freedom, and mobility under increasingly conservative and divisive governmental policies throughout Europe. Since they installed it without permission, Parisian authorities demanded that the piece be dismantled, but Jeanne-Claude could persuade them to allow the work to remain in place for several hours. This monumental work and its brief celebrity as a public nuisance helped Christo and Jeanne-Claude gain early notoriety in Paris. Oil barrels became an important medium for Christo in 1958. He had been using smaller, every day, affordable objects like beer cans, but the barrels started a significant shift towards larger works, while still adhering to a distinct type of sculptural form. Wall of Oil Barrels was Christo's first large-scale work, and marked the beginning of the collaborative, massively scaled, site-specific works for which he and Jeanne-Claude would become famous.

Wrapped Coast (1968-69)

http://www.panthalassa.org/wrapped-coast-by-christo-jeanne-claude/

Using one million square feet of erosion-control synthetic fabric, 35 miles of polypropylene rope, 25,000 fasteners, threaded studs, and clips, Jeanne-Claude and Christo wrapped 1.5 miles of rocky coast off Little Bay in Sydney, Australia to create Wrapped Coast in the late 1960s. This method of wrapping was something that Christo had experimented with previously, using smaller objects, but this monumental effort became the largest single artwork ever created surpassing Mount Rushmore. It remained wrapped for ten weeks, beginning October 28, 1969. The draping of the fabric over the coast helped to re-contextualize and de-familiarize a well-known natural setting, and revealed the essential form and shape of the coast as a discrete object. Passersby experienced a shift in their commonplace perspective of the landscape by having limitations - both visual and physical - imposed upon the viewing process. This selective imposition also brought about new and unexpected revelations about the coastline, particularly its formal and structural qualities as a cohesive object with a distinct shape, substance, and volume.

Valley Curtain (1975)

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/christo/artworks/

In the Spring of 1970, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began work on Valley, a 200,200 square foot section of orange, woven nylon fabric that stretched across an entire Colorado valley. The gigantic, crescent-shaped fabric was suspended on a steel cable and anchored to two mountain tops, between Grand Junction and Glenwood Springs in the Hogback Mountain Range. They tied it down with 27 ropes and spread across the valley at a maximum measurement of 1,250 feet wide and 365 feet high. Valley Curtain was a tremendous feat of engineering and coordination that experienced significant and expensive setbacks. Christo and his team first attempted to install the curtain on October 9, 1971, but a gust of wind caught the fabric and it flew away, ripping on the surrounding rocks and construction equipment. On August 19, 1972, it was at last erected successfully, but it remained intact for only 28 hours, until a wind at over 60 miles per hour threatened to tear through it once more. Workers dismantled the piece shortly thereafter. For the brief time that it was in place, the bright orange drape slung between the craggy mountains reinvigorated the valley's contours, highlighting its natural flow, rhythm, and volume. Like many of the duo's large-scale environmental works, it brought new perspective to a familiar landscape, and encouraged a refreshed appreciation of the natural world. The bold color of the fabric popped against the bright sky, the muted blue mountains in the distance, and the greenery covering the nearby hills. Few viewers could see it live in its short, 28-hour existence, which added to the work's sense of fragility, vulnerability, and urgency, while also stimulating an awareness of the emptiness that accompanied its eventual dismantling. The work was documented extensively in photographs: ultimately, the most prolific medium of earthworks, these types of works which are purposely subjected to environmental change, impermanence, and decay.

The Umbrellas (1984-91)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Umbrellas_(Christo_and_Jeanne-Claude)

This piece took place simultaneously in two different rural locations, one in Japan outside the city of Tokyo, and the other in California north of Los Angeles. The umbrellas were assembled in California and composed of fabric, aluminum, steel, wooden supports, bags, and molded base covers. Each umbrella was 19 feet high and 28 feet wide. 1,340 blue umbrellas were installed in Japan, a color chosen to evoke the rich vegetation and water resources of the area, and 1,760 yellow umbrellas were placed in California, reflecting the golden grass that covers the nearby grazing hills. In Japan, the umbrellas were placed closer together following the geometry of the rice fields, and they were spread further out in California, where vast expanses of agricultural land dominate much of the Central Valley. The usage of umbrellas in each location symbolizes the similarities, and the differences associated with the ways of life and the land usage in each area. They represented the varied availability and character of the land, and the temporary cycles of cultivation wrought by human industry. After years of preparation and planning, environmental studies, wind tests, and negotiations, the first steel bases went down December 1990. The exhibit was finally unveiled on October 9, 1991, and received about 3 million visitors. It became a huge tourist attraction and a popular site for picnics and weddings. The work quickly turned controversial, however, when one umbrella caught a strong wind and pinned a woman against a rock, ultimately killing her and injuring three others. The project was cited for removal and during the dismantling process, a Japanese worker was electrocuted when an umbrella he was holding hit an electrical wire. Some critics responded to these tragic accidents by taking umbrage with the egocentrism of Christo's spectacle-oriented, massively scaled visual productions, and subsequent projects became more difficult for the artists to find financial and governmental backing.

Christo's early education in Soviet Socialist Realism, and his experience fleeing his home as a refugee of political revolution, informed his career's many forays into real-world politics as a primary subject and source of his art making. His 35-year collaboration with the artist Jeanne-Claude, and the large-scale site-specific works they co-authored, stand out as his career's greatest achievements. Together, the duo created monumentally scaled sculptures and installations which often used the technique of draping or wrapping large portions of existent landscapes, buildings, and industrial objects with specially engineered fabric. Christo and Jeanne-Claude made works that stand out as some of the most grandiose, site-specific artworks ever. While they often insisted that the aesthetic properties of their art made up its primary value, reactions from audiences and critics worldwide have long recognized a broader commentary operating across their work, and themes ranging from environmental degradation, to the vexed history of the 20th century and the Cold War, to the perseverance of democratic and humanist ideals.

· Christo and Jeanne-Claude's interventions in the natural world and the built environment altered both the physical form and the visual experience of the sites, allowing viewers to perceive and understand the locations with a new appreciation of their formal, energetic, and volumetric qualities.

· The artists' choice to remain intermittently inside and outside the frameworks of legality lends much of their work a built-in aspect of dissent and resistance. It also expands upon and emboldens a long legacy of quasi-legality in art, where art exists in a realm somewhere between the "real" world and fantasy, and affords the art world with distinct privileges and restrictions.

· Christo and Jeanne-Claude often worked outside the gallery system, refusing to negotiate sales of drawings and commissions through an art dealer. In this respect, they took a definitive stance on the political and economic infrastructure of the global art market, and set a precedent for artists working outside the system who still cultivated an international level of success.

· Whereas Land Artists usually made a point of blurring the lines of distinction between the artwork itself and its natural setting and/or materials, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's art relied on developing a high contrast between the engineered, man-made elements and the site's organic characteristics. Their work therefore pushes the envelope of what makes up site-specific, large-scale installation art, and expands the genre discourse to incorporate controversial themes of industrialization, bureaucratization, and late capitalism.

2 notes · View notes