Christo and Goldsworthy

[abknight@zzzzzz]

Hi George has asked me for a piece on Christo so here goes:

Christo to to me is largely photos in Life magazine where
as a child I could see the playful and mighty reach of
man's hand into nature.  My father worked for a food color
and flavor manufacturer so we were all over how great it
was to have natural things be brightly colored.  One of
our favorites was to turn our stock tank swimming pool
bright blue and scramble around its circumference making a
purling and roping funnel of ultramarine.  Christo's
hanging curtain suggested that even cliff and rocks, and
the insects and lizards living on them could be the stuff
of an even grander outdoor interference. So it was out of
the back yard and into the vista of landscape we went. The
very view across a great deep valley and energy of its
light could be claimed as ours in this great sweep of
material possession by fabric.  It was a manifest destiny
of even the meaning of our American west. What had meaning
unknown to us now had our own meaning assigned to it.  All
nature was subject to our will to commit art. Every grand
vista and each dusty pebble.

I think the power of the curtain also perhaps engendered
in me a greater love of fabric.  As I can see Christo as a
child playing behind curtains, I too grew up with a love
for these woven  strands of manufacture now often the
product of an oil field and refinery.  Even today to go to
a fabric store is to get a little giddy thinking of the
spans of dark space piled in folds on shelves. As a young
wannabe artist I would visit discount fabric stores just
to feel rich with the its energ.  Not only was this stuff
that you could bunch up in your arms able to wrap
buildings it was already patterned and texured as well!
Wholesale dreams by the yard. You know, I believe
Cezanne's dad was a fabric dealer.

 Running Fence demonstrated that people of all stripes
could be persuaded to give their property and pastures
over to such play, so that we saw that not just nature
might give in to the use of our imagination but also that
people could be persuaded to do so. Human minds and
society itself might also be considered a raw material
into and through which we could savour the projection of
the light of our play.  Things were good!

So I will always remember Christo as a testament to the
power of dreaming and turning a complicated, unknowable
terrain of life,death,hope and dissappoinment into a
single hue for a day or two.  We could not know of all the
history and facts of the nature of being and place, nor
would we want to, but we could throw our spirits out
across the land in an unfurling fabric of simple colour
and sense the shape and feel of our presence by contrast.

In the discussion of Christo it some stated their distaste
for Christo's activities.  Then others stated their
distaste for statements of distaste.  The great thing
about statements declared to a forum is that they are
immediatly put up for consideration, not least and perhaps
mostly by the person who put the statement out there in
the first place.  If I want to try out a subject that I
wish to understand better the best first thing to do is to
make a provocative statement which will immediately beget
its own supplanting disproval.  It is most vivid and
exciting to do this activity in a forum where one has the
engagement of and interlocutor as well as the dramatic
spectacle of those watching or in this case reading but in
any case witnessing.

Jimmie Durham:
I would like to make work that you would say: "I don't
understand. I'm confused now". I not only wish that I am
confused, I want you to be confused. Because that is
engagement?.If we say a certain thing? that is a
statement, then we enter into something quite false,
theoretically false. And we enter into belief which, I
think, is ?sin.