For an historic note, when Christo was a teenager in Bulgaria - in the late
Forties - one of his summer jobs was to live and work on a collective farm
located beside the Orient Express. He and other workers took responsibility
for ordering mowed hay into bales that they neatly stacked and covered with
colored tarps.
The image of these well ordered and colorful stacks was to present a
persuasive, well organized and aesthetically attractive image of the
socialist Bulgarian Government to travelers on the Orient Express - many of
whom were from Europe and America, including countries that were in high
debate about whether or not to become entirely or partially Socialist. The
covered hay stacks were considered a highly effective form of socialist
advertising.
Every time I see a Christo project I marvel at how his career has taken off
from that first Bulgarian experience in making public art occur in such a
diversity of contexts with a diversity potential intentions, or what more
often happens, in a space of "non-intention" over which the artist waxes no
control. The materials are always only one half of the event; the other half
is what both individual and the public bring into the environment. It's in
this alchemy of the combination of materials and person(s) that something
transcends into another space - at least for a moment or a sustained moment.
In Hannad Arendt's terms, the site becomes a place of public disclosure - in
which the environment (including it's historical associations), objects and
persons become actors on a stage, one in which we partake both as our own
experience, and the witness to the enactments of those of others. One
might, for examplem juxtapose this kind of public experience with Fox
Network (as a site) - where space is entirely enclosed, claustrophobically
so, and "we" as individuals or a group are permitted no disclosure at all.
Ideally its one in which authority - in all senses - returns to the members
of the Polis.
The Christos in that sense are only responsible for creating a stage that
permits the event.
Stephen V
Blog: http://stephenvincent.durationpress.com
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