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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
January 2003: The steel industry was in a slump. At the Charles C. Lewis steel processing plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, president Robert Cournoyer was facing the prospect of layoffs. Then the phone rang with what would turn out to be the largest order in the company's 118-year history. This has got to be a joke, Cournoyer remembers thinking.
The call came on behalf of New York City artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, no last names. Cournoyer had never heard of them. On the phone, Vince Davenport, a contractor representing the artists, explained the couple's need to have ten million pounds of steel cut into 15,000 rectangular blocks, or bases. On these bases, the artists planned to erect 7,500 frames, or "gates," in Central Park. For 16 days starting on February 12, 2005, saffron-colored panels of nylon cloth would wave from these free-standing structures along 23 miles of park walkways. Then, everything--steel bases included--would be dismantled, melted or shredded and recycled. "The whole story was bizarre," says Cournoyer. "I don't care how you say it, that's what it was. It was hard to believe at first."
"Bizarre" is a word many people have used to describe the artists' gargantuan, short-lived projects, whether the 18-foot-high by 2411/42-mile-long "running fence" of shimmering white nylon they installed across Northern California ranchland in 1976, the 440,000 square feet of champagne-colored woven synthetic fabric they draped over the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris in 1985, or the 1,076,000 square feet of silvery polypropylene fabric in which they swaddled Germany's parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1995. Eighteen times in the past 40 years, Christo and his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude, have created such large-scale, temporary artworks to mostly enthusiastic responses from spectators, and admiration--if sometimes grudging--from art critics.
"I came here expecting not much from the ballyhooed project and found myself swept up in it," New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote of his visit to Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95. "'It' means the whole giddy affair--the revelers who turned the bleak fields around the Reichstag into Woodstock East, the art students who gathered to sketch the building, the street vendors, the posturing politicos." The effect was typical, he went on, in that "time and again," the couple's projects "have turned doubters into converts."
To the Christos, the whole process of seeking permissions and persuading skeptics--and, hopefully, astonishing them with the results--is as much a part of the project as the event itself....
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