In new York, before reaching two weeks before the 85th birthday, died Christo — the artist who the whole world is called by name as Leonardo or Rembrandt. He was one of the major artists of his frumentarius was not the cause of the death of Christ, but the pandemic has blighted his last months of life. He never saw his most important exhibitions — a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. However, it is often said that she hates the word “retrospective”, because the artist must move forward, no stops, and, like Orpheus, not look back. He walked forward to his magnum opus: “Emphasised” 410 thousand oil barrels in the desert near Abu Dhabi had become the world’s largest sculpture in the public space, the “Emphasised”, launched on the serpentine lake in Hyde Park in 2018, it can be considered a modest dress rehearsal — London’s floating sculpture was only 7.5 per thousand barrels. The exhibition at the Pompidou Center mounted a long time and is empty in the closed Museum — opening day will surely begin with a minute of silence. He did his last, most important, triumphant “packaging” — the opening of a retrospective in Paris, Christo had to pack the arc de Triomphe dreamed about back in the 1960s, but initially, the project was moved from spring to autumn 2020 at the request of the watchers, because the arch was chosen by Kestrels in the spring and view nest there, and then postponed until autumn 2021 of the virus — in General, animate and inanimate nature proved stronger than art. The arc de Triomphe promises to pack in the fall next year, according to the sketches of Christo — this will be his best monument.The last ten years, he was again just Christo — at the end of 2009 died, Jeanne-Claude, his wife, an associate and co-author. However, the brand of Christo And Jeanne-Claude emerged only in 1994, before their joint work was signed only his name. No, she, scholar and philosopher by education, of course, never painted. He drew, he studied in two of the most illustrious academies of fine arts — Sofia and Vienna. Her place was in the office and on the jobsite, budget, debit-credit, business plans, coordination of work, endless correspondence with the city committees beautification and environmental agencies, public hearings, and debate with activists, environmentalists, logistics, team management, sometimes growing to several thousand people — engineers, climbers, riggers, movers, drivers and many who do. She communicated with museums, gallery owners, curators, critics, press, local communities — he didn’t really defeated the French and did not speak English she, a girl from a good family and a professional philologist, could be explained in several languages, they interpret the meaning of their simple only at first glance — think of it, packaging building, monument or the whole island! — austere. But this does doesn’t mean he’s a genius-artist, doing clean work, and it, economic and enterprising woman, the wife of a great man — production and PR support of the projects.Although all of her boring office-accounting and was not present with his magical sketches, photomontages and layouts, these eternal bureaucratic obstacles (for each implemented idea has several unrealized) and lack of Finance (all their designs they paid for themselves, earning them the sale of sketches and documentation of past works or taking Bank loans on the security of their artistic archive) was part of the meaning of the work. One, the front side is a fantastic, dizzying, breathtaking image, estranei urban or natural space, for example, the line of trees on the Champs Elysees with crowns, wrapped with transparent polythene, or shrink-wrapped a skyscraper in times square (both ideas have not been implemented), the other — the paperwork, revealing the mechanisms of the functioning of art in public system. They were able to connect most poetical land art with scathing institutional critique, something seemingly completely incompatible, as if “Arhierejsky” “life is Everywhere” was written in the impressionistic spots “of the Garden at Montgeron”. And they very quickly won the attention of Leo Castelli and other dealers, administers the fate of the market, managed to deceive the market: the project and the cost of late intervention in the surrounding urban or natural environment were estimated in the tens of millions of dollars — they themselves are customers and sponsors, did for their money, enjoying complete independence, and the project was not sold. The viewer, admiring the views of Paris, a New bridge, wrapped in Golden polyamide veil, or Islands in Biscayne Bay near Miami, surrounded by the giant collars of pink polyurethane fabric received these temporary images at your disposal completely free of charge. Ephemeral art event was withdrawn from the commodity-money circulation — sold only before and after, sketches and documentation. In each interview, Christo asserted the values of freedom of the artist — he studied in the socialist Bulgaria, “the sixteenth Republic of the USSR” on the designer of an ideological order, knew what he was talking about.Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same day — June 13, 1935, but to die in one day wasn’t going: working on the “packages” worldwide, from America to Australia, flown on different flights — so, if anything, one could finish the job. The first of the works, their fame, went down in history under the name “Iron curtain”: on 27 June 1962 for a few hours, they blocked the street Visconti, almost the narrowest in Paris with a barricade of oil drums in protest against the construction of the Berlin wall and the war in Algeria. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on different sides of the “iron curtain”, in a geographical and social sense: he in Gabrovo, in a working class family, she is in French then Casablanca, in the family of the bourgeois and partly aristocratic. They met in Paris: he fled from the Communist East to the West for artistic freedom, she’s like a leftist philosopher knew that in the West freedom of creativity is limited to the capital. In Paris he had, as he called it, to engage in prostitution, that is, to paint portraits to order — one of the models was the mother of Jeanne-Claude Dan de Gibon, that’s how they met. If to put outside the brackets “prostitution”, his first Parisian work — broken canvas in streaks of enamel, sprinkled with sand and gravel— defiantly renounce socialist realism and swear allegiance to informal released as a symbol of artistic individuality.Meanwhile, informal wore last season is in the air again wafted the smell of Dada and pop art: he grabbed a tin can — the basic unit of information in the world of consumption, by what are unable to pass neither Andy Warhol nor Piero Manzoni, however, the latter filled her “Shit of the artist”. Banks will be the first packaged objects Christo — soon this form will grow in his street sculpture to the size of oil drums. Packed in opaque cloth and tied with string, these objects were in the literal sense of the word “informal”, shapeless, the same cat in a bag, the aforementioned “Shit”. He starts to pack everything — after all, any product needs good packaging, this generic interface, society of the spectacle, the interface for which we pay and which perhaps hides a complete blank. Remained an amusing photo series — Christ “Packed woman” in the house of Yves Klein: the owner rubbed his patented blue naked girls, leaving prints on canvas, guest preferred living hands living sculpture.If in 1964, Christo and Jeanne-Claude came to America, they could perfectly fit in with the “new realists” is, by the way, in their circle there was a fashion to be called by the names: Eve, césar, Arman. Each of the “new” waged a personal war with reality and consumer goods of wide consumer: Cesar have tapered them in the “compression”, Arman was one of them “accumulation” and Christo was Packed in a polyethylene newfangled magazines, cars, motorcycles, and even sculpture, directly pointing to the marketability of art. The next step suggests itself — to pack the Museum: pack something valuable, since the Museum is Packed, so modern art��about represents some value. The Bern Kunsthalle, where then Director Harald Seemann, and became the first packaged building Christo and Jeanne-Claude — it was a revolutionary 1968. In fact, they wanted to start with MoMA, but new York was not his Harald szeemann — there simply made an exhibition of their “packaging” sketches, believing that all of this, as often happened with the conceptualists, will remain at the level of ideas and declarations of intent.At first it seemed that they tend to withdraw from reality postcard or postcard sights, leaving a white spot area of 93 thousand sq m on the site of the coast to the South-East of Sydney, or turning “Packed Reichstag” in silver complex Ghost of the past Germany. But pretty quickly it became clear that to win the market easier, than to win the consumer society: any of their ambitious projects — “the Curtain” long 381 m and a height of 111 m, blocked the valley of the Colorado river, 7.5 thousand “Gate”, and released a demonstration in Central Park, or 3-mile “Floating pier”, connecting the shores and Islands of lake Iseo, a wide pedestrian street, immediately was made a place of tourist pilgrimage. In each of these studies were based on synthetic fibers, a marvelous saffron shade — I think it was the favorite color of Christ, here and Jeanne-Claude, he was forced to paint the hair the same fiery-red. But severe critic has no right to consider love an excuse for those who are fighting with the commercial world, increased his temptations.Unfortunately, the megalomania, which tended this most poetical land art, sometimes very bad was combined with pop-art irony to the consumerism. “Umbrella”, established in 1991 in Rancho Tejon in California in Ibaraki Prefecture in Japan, were a great number of (1760 1340 yellow and blue, respectively) and relatively small size (6 meters high and 8.6 meters in diameter), but they were opposites on a planetary scale. Of course, the product, taking into account all the Land immediately became subject to tourist hype — once on a windy day in California, one of the umbrellas fell, burying the tourist. Christo immediately ordered the dismantling of the Umbrellas is in the dismantling of structures in Japan killed a worker. Press down on land art-demiurge with the accusations of irresponsibility and artistic self — Hristo tormented conscience for the rest of his days in engineering projects now invested a lot of money. A harsh critic did not get tired to reproach the artist-capitalist expensive of his works, forgetting that the huge sums and enormous effort involved in these projects from the very beginning was ironic sabotage against the system of art: it will not be serious l��di to give up power and money, inflating the packing of the Museum of contemporary art in Chicago, like a sail. And of course, art Christo and Jeanne-Claude was very worried environmentalists: kilometers of polyethylene, nylon, polyurethane, erosion control fabrics and then went to processing, leaving no trace in nature or the urban landscape. But they sought and to the visual environment — in a sense, this monstrous megalomania insure against overproduction of images.For freedom to pay dearly. A quarter-century, fifteen million dollars and an incalculable amount of nerve it took to convince local residents, the authorities, the press, the Church, environmentalists, activists, the Federal court, as well as all the flora and fauna of the state of Colorado that the project “Over the river”, which is about ten kilometers of the Arkansas river was supposed to cover with a silver veil, is not harmed nature and adds to the beauty of the universe. Hristo left without Jeanne-Claude, was close to winning and suddenly abandoned the enterprise. Explained the refusal by that does not want to invest their symbolic capital in cultural policy trompowsky administration. This withdrawal from the reality of things that could obtain all the necessary permits, was no less radically than it first implemented the “package”. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have lived in happy marriage for fifty years, but much harder to remain true to myself — the one who built the barricade from the barrels on the street Visconti.
