Revelation through Concealment
With ordinary fabric and cord Christo and Jeanne-Claude have wrapped an imposing bundle of work and secured for themselves a prominent position in mid-century art. They have wrapped everything from tin cans to entire buildings...
...In all of his early "packages" Christo transforms familiar objects into ambivalent presences, sometimes rendering them unrecognizable and often raising doubts about their past, present and future identity and function. In their more epic endeavors, Christo and Jeanne-Claude question the relationship of art to both the urban and natural environments. In a materialistic age, their art is a profound comment on the chronic expectations and frustrations aroused by the increasing number of consumer products that are "enhanced" through packaging.
...Wrapping can connote gifts, death, preservation and eros, but it almost always implies value-that the object is worthy of such attention. But while wrapping suggests worth, it also reduces everything to the level of object: the contained object is a physical thing before it is anything else. As a result, we are confronted by an isolated thing that, by virtue of its being wrapped, is given more value than it might merit in its unwrapped state. A gift-wrapped object is guaranteed to elicit curiosity, the promise of a surprise withheld. Concealment also implies preservation and, in some cases, suppression and censorship. Egyptian mummies tell us that wrapping is related to death and the preservation of matter for the afterlife. The erotic aspect of wrapping has been with us as long as the striptease. Clothing-as-package touches most of us every day. And at nightfall, most of us get into cars or subways (transportation packages) to go to our homes (architectural packages).
...Since the first project for a wrapped public building in 1961, scale has been a prevailing element in Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work, often indicating that more of something is better-that is, quantity is tantamount to quality.
...In Christo's early art, materials have the same reality they have in everyday life. A wrapped chair, for instance, is literal to the core-it consists of a real chair shrouded in real polyethylene. What is disturbing is that the packages confront us as almost ordinary objects of the real world. In one sense, there is nothing abstract in Christo's early works: materials are used in a completely materialistic way, retaining their normal identity and function. They are never used abstractly for formalist effects.
...Christo, however, does seem to conceive of wrapping as an act that falls just short of transformation. On the one hand, the packages are exactly like actual objects: they occupy their normal space, in contrast to the ideal, virtual space occupied by any figurative sculpture that is not the same size as it is in real life and that, in addition, may occupy a niche or be otherwise "distanced". On the other hand, Christo does aesthetically "distance" his objects by wrapping them and making them seem more remote and inaccessible. By obscuring their identity, he effects a partial transformation in which mundane materials retain the same identity while assuming a new meaning.
...Packaging is a particularly appropriate subject for twentieth century art. Although the technology of packaging benefited by many innovations in the nineteenth century (metal cans were patented in 1810, and folding cartons were invented in 1879), the packaging we take for granted today scarcely existed before 1900. It was not until this century that efficient storage and handling and informative labeling became important attributes of packaging. The three basic services that packaging performs for the consumer-preunitizing, protection, and communication-have attained such a level of sophistication that the wrapping, as we are so frequently reminded, is what makes us busy the contents. The package has become the product. According to a report issued by the industrial research firm of Arthur D. Little, Inc.: "No highly industrialized urban society can now exist effectively without sophisticated packages for all types of products".
Increasingly, all kinds of services and goods are presented to us in "package" form. Packaging has come to mean not only the containment and storage of consumer goods, but also the collective presentation and transfer of diverse services and information: there are "financial packages" in banking and all-inclusive "insurance packages". The term "package deal" has entered Webster's Third New International Dictionary, where it is defined as "1: an offer or agreement involving a number of related items or one making acceptance of one item dependent on the acceptance of another; 2: the items offered". (Still another kind of package was brought to my attention when signing the contract to write this book. Following a description of how authors must assemble and submit captions and photographs, the Harry N. Abrams, Inc. contract says: "We look for a complete 'package', ready in all respects for editing [and] layout".)
...Perhaps the chief mystery is why none of the Dadaists or Surrealists, including Man Ray, pursued the implications of packaging, a subject that lends itself to all sorts of formal and psychological twists. Man Ray himself never developed the idea of wrapping as a sculptural form and The Enigma remains unique in his œuvre. The Enigma was reconstructed as a sculptural object in 1967 at the request of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and exhibited there the following year in the huge show of Dada and Surrealist art. The somewhat lumpier reconstruction is now in the study collection of The Museum of Modern Art.
...Christo's lumpy bundles are, of course, the antithesis of streamlined industrial packaging, which is designed to be attractive, informative, and easily stored. Christo's "packages" and "wrapped objects" are improvised rather than designed, obscure rather than informative, and handmade rather than mass-produced. They bear a closer resemblance to the clumsy, makeshift bundles hurriedly packed by an impoverished homemaker or shopkeeper with whatever materials are at hand. The wrapping materials are usually of a homely nature (ordinary cloth or plastic) and the contents are, more often than not, on the cheap side (a common kitchen chair, rather than a costly Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Chair).
Christo seems to have hit upon the idea of wrapping not through any preconception about how his art should look, but rather through the more arduous process of making sculpture out of common found materials. He wrapped his first objects in Paris in 1958 as part of a sprawling, room-sized work that he called INVENTORY. As the title implies, this was a warehouse-like array of wrapped, painted, or unaltered glass bottles, tin cans, steel oil barrels, and wooden boxes, most of which were mixed and stacked in a random way. It is significant that the bottles, cans, boxes, and barrels have one thing in common: all are containers to begin with.
INVENTORY, which may be considered the first of Christo's transient environments, is no longer extant, but a fragment of it survives in the form of WRAPPED BOTTLES AND CANS. This modest work consists of a grouping of bottles of pigment and paint cans, about half of which are wrapped in canvas and cord and treated with lacquer and sand to provide a slightly pebbled surface. The wrapped cans and bottles are mixed and contrasted with unaltered containers-a couple of bottles half-filled with colored pigment and a few cans, the sides of which are overrun with lacquer. In wrapping conventional art materials, Christo may have intended an ironic comment on the future of painting. But the chief interest of this germinal work today is that it so clearly predicts almost all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's interests for future projects to be realized.
Christo seldom wraps an object as compactly and neatly as possible. More often, there are untidy folds and bulges that result in irregular contours, making the packages distinctly expressionistic around the edges. Like a couturier, Christo drapes the fabric directly upon the object, fashioning baroque swags and bulges, before snaring the object in obsessively knotted twine. The surface is richly articulated with many diagonal folds, so that even an essentially flat-surfaced object, such as a painting, becomes full of volumetric detail and acquires an angular, asymmetric silhouette. The wrapping material functions as a kind of skin, emphasizing the object's physical extremities by cloaking the crevices and depressions. The wrapping alters the contours of the contained object which, in turn, gives shape to the outer skin. No matter how thoroughly disguised, the physical reality of the contained object continues to make its presence felt from within, the indwelling form activating the constricting surface.
...Christo's packages give several indications of a strong, personal style. Anyone else would probably be more methodical in tying the cords, giving them a certain regularity. Christo's cords, which appear tied in haste, crisscross erratically in angular directions, as if the resisting object had become ensnared in its own noose. There are more knots than would seem absolutely necessary, while the cords are usually too lightweight in proportion to the mass they encompass, but they compensate for this by their superabundance. The eccentrically looped knots with short ends have an unmistakable autograph quality and are as recognizable as the artist's signature.
Excerpts from the book Christo by David Bourdon, Harry N.Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1970.
Edited by Jeanne-Claude in October 1998.
