When artists working outside gallery and museum walls in the 1960s and 1970s put down their tools, they often had only a handful of black-and-white photographs or a grainy video as evidence of their labor. Like postcards sent from a place that no longer exists, these images were meant to underscore the "purity" of the art—an ephemeral event or a construction not designed for the ages—and might also serve to attract funding for the next project or as the paltry things their dealers were supposed to sell.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose signature style became the wrapping or marking of a structure or area with fabrics, had a more ingenious approach. They funded their dreamy, supersize, transient creations—realized most recently in 2005's "The Gates" in Central Park—with the sale of preliminary drawings and models, leaving the documenting of the results to the acclaimed filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, and to the German photographer Wolfgang Volz. The Maysleses co-produced and co-directed five sumptuous color films about large-scale projects by the Bulgarian-born sculptor and his Moroccan-born artistic partner and wife, beginning with "Valley Curtain" in 1974 and ending with "Umbrellas" in 1990, while Mr. Volz has been their official photographer since 1972.
Christo And Jeanne-Claude: Remembering The Running Fence
Smithsonian American Art Museum Through Sept. 26
Smithsonian American Art Museum Through Sept. 26
A remarkable example of this long, fruitful relationship can be seen at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence" is devoted to one of the couple's most ambitious and evocative works of art: the 18-foot-high white nylon fence that ran for 24½ miles across two rolling northern California counties and into the Pacific Ocean. It stood for two weeks in September 1976.
Along with nearly 50 drawings, a 58-foot-long scale model, and 250 photographs by Mr. Volz that recall the planning of the work and the miraculous result, the show features continuous screenings of the 1978 film "Running Fence," directed by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin, as well as "The 'Running Fence' Revisited," a new film directed by Wolfram Hissen. Both documentaries convey, better than any set of objects could, the utopianism, nerve, luck, grass-roots organization, horse-trading and lawlessness that led to one of the few successful and popular works of American environment art.
Whether "Running Fence" would be impossible to accomplish in today's America is hard to gauge. Even in the mid-1970s, long before the age of terrorism, the odds were slim that a pair of New York artists with foreign accents could persuade 59 sheep ranchers and dairy farmers to allow an enormous fabric fence to snake across their property. As it was, convincing them and getting permits took four years. "You're a stranger here," one rancher tells Christo in the Maysles film. "You have to overcome that."
The intensity of the opposition is captured in an early scene in which a man shouts, "That's art? Some lousy curtain coming through here. Hell with it. I'm against it. I think it's stupid." And it wasn't only amateur art critics who initially hated the idea. Environmental groups also objected, especially to the component that called for the fence to spill down a cliff on the beach and disappear into the ocean. Some Sonoma and Marin county commissioners voted against its going up, too.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude never discuss on camera why they settled on this site. But the largely treeless contours of the golden hills are undeniably sensual. The mutations of the piece as it reacts to wind, fog, sun and ocean are captured beautifully in the Maysles film, which dwells more on the hour-by-hour construction—highlighted by the suspense of a last-minute injunction from the California Coastal Commission—than on the arduous process that eventually won over the doubters.
This is oddly modest of the Maysleses, who were instrumental in changing the minds of landowners. The artists had shown their honorable intentions by screening in local homes their previous collaborative film, "Valley Curtain," in which a 1,300-foot-long orange curtain was strung across a gap in the Colorado Rockies for 28 hours.
Mr. Hissen's film is better at revealing the uniquely American circumstances that allowed the project to succeed. As important as the $2,500 or $3,000 offered to each landowner was the promise by the artists to donate the construction materials when the piece was disassembled. Several recipients cut up the tall metal pipes that had supported the ad hoc fence, recycling them as permanent fence posts. "You give a farmer something free and they think they got the world by the tail," one local says.
County officials' disapproval also gave the project unexpected cachet. The government's telling the owners they couldn't do with their land as they wished angered a number of them, causing them to look more favorably on the outsiders. "Looking back, if the supervisors hadn't said no, Christo would have had a hard time getting this done," says another resident.
Most of all, the tenacity of the couple and their unshakable faith in their unusual ideas seem to have earned respect, trust and affection from people who had never heard of site-specific art. In a pivotal scene filmed by the Maysleses at one of 20 public meetings in which the project was argued about, Christo tells the crowd: "The art project is right now here. Everybody here is part of my work."
He wasn't kidding. Overcoming hostility and working within bureaucracies has been as integral to Christo's art as the structures he sketched and built. Early on, he and Jeanne-Claude (his invaluable and highly intelligible mediator) realized that the post office in Valley Ford was a hub for the sparsely populated area, and so they went about courting the support of the postmaster.
The lasting impact of "Running Fence" on this still-rural community is the focus of Mr. Hissen's documentary. He filmed a reunion last year between Christo and Jeanne-Claude (two months before she died) and the surviving participants and observers of the project. "There's no Rembrandts hanging in people's houses out here," says one man. And yet "Running Fence," then and now, ignited serious conversations about "what is art" among citizens who had never thought it was a question.
It is fitting that the Smithsonian American Art Museum bought the project archive for "Running Fence" in 2008. But to gain a deeper sense of its emotional scope, watch the Maysles-Zwerin film. The putting together of the artwork seems not unlike a barn-raising, demanding the same cooperation and, when the fence is secure and rippling in the breeze, evoking the same giddiness and pride. I can't be alone in feeling patriotic about a country that allowed such an unlikely and lovely thing to exist.
Mr. Woodward is an arts writer living in New York.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D9
* ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
* APRIL 6, 2010
A California Dream Come True. By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
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