Christo & Jeanne-Claude, 1969

Wool works was staged at the National Gallery of Victoria, 1-30 November 1969. Combined with a display at Central Street Gallery, Sydney 21 October - November 1969

The following extract is from Charles Green's " Disappearance and Photography in Post-Object Art: Christo and Jeanne-Claude", Afterimage, November/December 1999, pp 13-15.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude also made two lesser-known works during the Australian visit - the Wool Works (1969) at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. In the National Gallery's penitential, gray, rain-soaked Murdoch Court, museum staff wrapped two semi-trailer loads of wool bales in dark tarpaulins. Indoors, in the silver foil-walled temporary exhibition area, they arranged 75 partly opened wool bales separated by by steel barriers in two long rows across the floor. The wrapped bales in the courtyard were visible through the large windows in the temporary exhibition space, creating an ambiguous link between the two temporary artworks that suggested two staged in a n obscure, quasi industrial process [13]. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wool Works embodied the physical logic of process over minimal presence, for each work implied a narrative of movement and energy, and each used a natural insulating material - wool- to do this. The monolithic dark forms of the wrapped bales outdoors were an ominous backdrop to the overflowing wool bales inside that looked as though the process of being emptied onto the floor had been interrupted. The result was uncanny, as Ross Lansell observed in his review in Nation"

"Although Christo denies he is an environmental artist, one of the [Allan] Kaprow species, the bluntness, the primality, the rudeness of this particular "Wool Work", dominates its setting, primarily because of its very strangeness, and shows up the fine artiness of the building... Christo, that Buster Keaton-like figure in an absurd world of his own making, is upon us." [14]

Christo and Jeanne-Claude had chosen to wrap a product of immense economic importance to Australia and in particular to Victoria, which had historically been the wool industry's national centre. Wool traditionally represented financial powers for Melbourne, and the contrast of opened and wrapped bales connoted transactions and the transference of both kinetic and economic energy. The energy transfers mapped in these temporary artworks were unseen; the sense of sight was an inadequate mechanism to trace the implied movement of capital indicated by bales of wool. Capital is resistant to visual representation for although it can be visually symbolised, it has no fixed shape. Christo and Jeanne-Claude covered their objects so that they could not be seen..."

Footnote 13: For a hostile review of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation, see Alan Warren, "Not Wrapped in Christo", The Sun (November 5, 1969), p.36. Warren observed, "Scale and ambiguity were important ingredients of the action at Sydney's Little Bay... But they were forgotten when Christo wrapped up some wool bales in the Keith Murdoch Court. The result can only be described as obvious, the type of job one would expect from any truck driver." The review appeared the exact day Joseph Kosuth's Art as Idea as Idea (1969) was published in the same newspaper and others across Australia.

Footnote 14: G.R. Lansell, "Baleful Christo", Nation (November 15 1969), p.15; although Lansell was incorrect in his assertion that Christo had denied he was an environmental artist.