christo and jeanne-claude in dublin : the production of beauty

Dr Hugh Campbell

It was the mask engaged your mind
And after set your heart to beat
Not what's behind.'
from W.B. Yeats, The Mask

Architects are uncomfortable with beauty. Of Vitruvius's famous triad .commmmare uncomfortable with beauty. Of Vitruvius's famous triad .commoditas, firmitas et venustas it is the last which causes us most difficulties. Compared to the solid, moral certainties of function and structure, beauty or delight as it sometimes translated seems indulgent, superficial and hence, morally suspect. Venustas is most often treated as a sort of by-product of the conscientious pursuit of commoditas and firmitas. As an end in itself, beauty is deemed unworthy of our attention. To a profession weaned on the puritanical pronouncements of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies it feels shallow and dishonest. Beauty is a surface condition it's only skin-deep, after all and surfaces are what we architects are supposed to get behind in order to reveal deeper, more lasting truths. And yet when Keats wrote that beauty is truth and truth beauty, wasn't he insisting that the equation works both ways ? Yes, the naked, unadorned truth is beautiful, but beauty in and of itself is also possessed of a kind of truth.

The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no hesitation in saying that their work is concerned with 'joy, beauty and no purpose whatsoever.' They're happy to disconnect beauty from function and treat it as an end in itself, so that in fact the provision of beauty becomes the primary function of the work. Projects such as Running Fence and Valley Curtain, Over the River and Wrapped Trees engage us simply and directly by making the world seem suddenly more beautiful. This is why 5 million people came to the wrapped Reichstag during its two-week existence. This is why, at the National Sculpture Factory's symposium on public art, 500 people collectively sighed in delight at the images of the wrapped trees at the Fondation Beyer and left the hall with broad grins on their faces.

Christo and Jeanne Claude's works have the same immediate yet enduring impact as great pop, and are as good for the soul. Coming shortly after Rafael Moneo's long, dutiful trudge through some dependably 'blue-chip' projects, their presentation at the RHA had everything which that lecture lacked. Following a slide show of recent work with a lengthy question, and, answer session, the couple performed throughout with great wit, theatricality and sheer joyfulness. Born on the same day 13 June 1935 .they form an inseparable and inimitable double act., theatricality and sheer joyfulness. Born on the same day 13 June 1935 .they form an inseparable and inimitable double act. But the fact that it feels like an act doesn't at all detract from its potency or seriousness. After all, the whole point of their work is to demonstrate the capacity of surfaces of masks and covers to reveal hidden depths.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap things. As they are at pains to point out, they do other things too things with oil barrels and umbrellas and so on .but mostly, they wrap things. For them, to wrap is actually to uncover by other means, to make visible what is hidden from our daily experience of the environment. During the Second World War, wandering the makeshift air-raid shelters of the London Underground, the sculptor Henry Moore was struck by the powerful expressiveness of the sleeping bodies swathed in sheets and blankets. Their coverings, he felt, revealed more about the human form than they concealed. Similarly the wrapping of the Pont-Neuf in Paris makes us more vividly aware of its elegant lines and structural strength ; the cladding of the trees in the Fondation Beyer shifting over the course of the day from a diaphanous filigree to an opaque sheen re.acquaints us with their form ; and stretching silk above a 40-mile course of river accentuates its dramatic curving path through the rocky landscape. In every case, the added la yers simply dramatise the nature of what's already there.

It's a strategy which finds obvious parallels in recent architectural discourse, where there has been countless investigations of the role and importance of the building's surface, drawing on everything from Semper's analogies between architecture and weaving to Venturi's insistence on the facade as sign or symbol. But cladding a building is not the same as wrapping a coastline or a bridge. What distinguishes Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work is its essential theatricality : their projects are one-off events, not permanent fixtures. This sense of transience is important to them. They seek to imbue their work with 'the quality of love and tenderness for what does not last'. Their point is, of course, that nothing lasts, but that this essential condition of existence is to be embraced rather than feared. They prefer to equate impermanence with freedom rather than entropy : 'freedom is the enemy of possessions, which equal permanence'. Thus their work confronts the seemingly stable and immutable rivers, mountains, buildings with the insubstantial and ephemeral, and makes it seem like a meeting of equals.

It is this same concern for freedom which leads them to finance all their projects themselves, with all the money passing through a mini-corporation of which he is the president and she the chief executive. The work is entirely funded through the sale of Christo's often exquisite preparatory drawings and collages (they didn't mention prices, but given that something as relatively straightforward as the umbrellas project cost $26 million to achieve, he's either making an awful lot of drawings or selling them for an awful lot of money). For them, any private or state funding is an unacceptable compromise. Christo's own respect for freedom derives largely from his early life in Bulgaria, where he lived through the rigidity and repression of the communist regime. He told of the regimented life in his art-school, where the students' duties included convincing farmers along the route of the Orient Express to arrange their haystacks and machinery more dynamically so as to impress on the passing passengers the healthy state of Bulgarian agriculture. It was here, Christo reckons, that he found a taste for the lengthy and intricate processes of consultation which precede their installations, whether soliciting individual approval from all 660 members of the German parliament for the wrapping of the Reichstag, or convincing hundreds of farmers of the merits of having a 22-foot high umbrella on their land for a fortnight. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always seen these exhaustive procedures as an integral part of their artistic practice, rather than an annoying distraction from it. They enjoy the facts and figures, the endless meetings in mid-western town-halls and anonymous municipal offices, in a way that may be hard for architects to imagine. Though their work has only a brief life, they seem to have more relish for the long haul of getting it done than do architects whose final works will last immeasurably longer.

Every project the artists discussed combined bravura imagery with painstaking logistics the former always a product of the latter. They seem to move very quickly from deciding what they want to do to thinking about precisely how to do it. It's a method quite different from the usual architectural design process, where a vaguely sketched 'idea' evolves slowly and steadily into a final design, and then, even more slowly, into a finished building (the artist Chuck Close likened this kind of procedure to the game of golf where each stroke marks an extension and gradual correction of the previous one, until that tiny hole is finally reached.) Of course the requirements of building are more various, sometimes more complex and often more mundane than those of a two-week installation, however grand in scale. Nonetheless, there is something to be learnt from Christo and Jeanne-Claude's directness and purposefulness. Beauty cannot be enough on its own Vitruvius certainly didn't think so but there is something hugely admirable in Christo and Jeanne-Claude's single (dual ?)- minded pursuit of it, and in their boundless capacity for delight along the way. The finished works, they say, are always '5 billion times more beshed works, they say, are always '5 billion times more beautiful than we expected.' Then they turn to the next project.

Dr Hugh Campbell is an architect and teaches at University College, Dublin.