the beauty of temporariness

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Umbrellas (Japan)

While I'll always prefer the small-scale, solitary, pastoral, whimsical approach of British earth artists - Andy Goldsworthy, Chris Drury, David Nash, Richard Long, and Hamish Fulton are my faves - to the megalomaniac American Earthworks, I very much enjoyed visiting the Christo & Jeanne-Claude retrospective LIFE=WORKS=PROJECTS in Tokyo this weekend. A most felicitous title indeed, for this identification runs through everything they lived & did together. No matter how much you dislike their self-importance and extravaganzas, you have to admit that they did manage to merge what most of us, mere mortals, are forced to keep separate: life and work, work and pleasure, love and work, life and love... And is there a nobler aspiration for an artist?

But besides this, their crazy, obsessive large-scale projects have an undeniable beauty of their own, which the artists perceptively attributed to their 'nomadic' temporariness (they always insisted that their projects be temporary and exist for a very limited number of days) - an ephemerality that has an awesome power to change forever your way of perceiving a certain landscape. Here are a couple of moving lines I copied - by hand! - from one of the captions at the exhibition:

'In the thousands of years of art history,' [Christo & J-C] explained, 'artists have introduced various elements of beauty into their works. There have been religious themes and abstract designs, colours and shapes, marble and wood used as materials. But there is one element of beauty that no one has used until now. That is temporariness. That is what we have in our works.'

[On the 'nomadic':] 'The nomads of Tibet and the Sahara desert pitch their tents in the desert,' [Christo] said, 'and instantly create a village. But the next day there is no trace of the village. We want to incorporate the quality of nomadic life into our projects.'


They did. And I, for one, shall never forget the image of Christo dashing between Ibaraki and California, shouting at everybody, throwing tantrums, between despair and exhilaration, childishly enjoying his 3,000 thousand blue and yellow umbrellas...