Christo and Jeanne-Claude.(Critical essay)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are artists who work together and create large-scale environment works. These works are temporary and they are removed from the site where they are installed, typically after about two weeks. Christo and Jeanne-Claude choose part of an environment in which to make their art and people then see the whole environment with fresh eyes, even after the artwork has been removed, for it remains in the memories of people who have viewed the transformed environment.

Even though they are world-famous artists, if one were to look for a name by which to call their art, Christo and Jeanne-Claude would be comfortable with the label, "environmental art." This label suits their work well not only because they often create their artwork in a specific location but they are also environmentally responsible, as they restore the location to its original condition, but with two exceptions.

One exception is Valley Curtain in Rifle, Colorado, between Grand Junction and Glenwood Spring, where a group of workers fastened an orange curtain made of woven nylon fabric in the Grand Hogback Mountain Range. The Valley Curtain project took 28 months to finish. On August 11, 1972, twenty-eight hours after completing the Valley Curtain, a gale estimated at 60 miles per hour made it necessary to start the removal. The owners of the east slope and west slope of the valley in which the work was installed asked that Christo and Jeanne-Claude leave the main foundations in the mountain as a memento and said they would be sad if it was removed. So, Christo and Jeanne-Claude left the main foundations of the work installed in the mountain at the landowner's request.

The second exception is Surrounded Islands, a project in which the artists did not put back the forty-two tons of garbage from the beaches of the islands in the Biscayne Bay of Miami, Florida, which they had removed in order to create the work. Eleven of the islands were surrounded with pink woven polypropylene fabric covering the surface of the water, floating and extending out from each island into the bay. There were eleven islands, but on two occasions, two islands were surrounded together. The fabric was sewn to follow the contours of the islands.

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The Surrounded Islands were designed to be seen from the buildings, all around the Biscayne Bay, from the bridges, from the roads, by boat, and also from the air. The shiny pink fabric was in harmony with the growing tropical plants and grass on the island, the light of the Miami sky, and the colors of the shallow waters of the bay. Their use of fabric or cloth highlights a fragile, sensuous, and temporary nature in their art.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's artwork embraces process but first it involves their vision, which comes from either Christo or Jeanne-Claude. Christo makes drawings to help visualize their ideas. By the completion of a project, Christo has made many drawings in order to clearly outline the project in such detail that the finished project can be created on location as it appears on paper. These preparatory drawings, collages, and scale models show the evolution of the details of the project, the development and crystallization of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's initial idea. The preparatory works reflect the years of research Christo and Jeanne-Claude have done about the location and information about the site, the people who use that area, and the technical details of the structure.