Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1991

Wrapped vestibule and Retrospective Exhibition. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.

Installation of the work took place overnight, prior to the opening of the retrospective exhibition in September 1990. Christo and his team of assistants shrouded the columns, busts, seat and floor of the vestibule with recycled painters’ drop cloth and rope.

"The discussion of the Christos' art in Australia has centred around their monumental project Wrapped Coast - One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, 1969.1 This significant work coincided with the emergence of Conceptual Art in Sydney and the two events have been directly linked (by Daniel Thomas in An Australian Accent, 1984). While the major projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude are undoubtedly related to Conceptual Art in their manipulation of political and economic institutions, the Christos have never been allied to any specific movement or group. There have clearly been points of common interest with American Earth Art and Installation Art, yet the Christos' path has been a unique one whose roots are more European than American.

This exhibition includes sculpture dating from 1958. It thus provides an opportunity to see connections that have not previously been made available to Australian audiences. The early works were made in Paris, which was then still the centre of aesthetic debate. At that time investigations of perception and phenomenology were the predominant theoretical concerns for artists and writers alike. The responses to these ideas were very diverse in practice but they certainly influenced the future development of art in Europe and America. Although Christo and Jeanne-Claude have never been directly allied to any group of artists it is useful to consider some of the ideas that were current, particularly in Paris in the late fifties.

When Christo made the first works in this exhibition, one of the most radical movements in Europe was Nouveau Rčalisme. These artists used manufactured objects as the material for their art. Their only intervention in the "real" was the choice of objects and the manner of their presentation. In 1961 Dčcollage was also gaining attention. These artists collected the layered posters found on billboards throughout Paris and stripped back parts to reveal a rich, essentially random conjunction of images and textures. It was street-life recontextualized in the gallery and a preview of the media collage that was to dominate post-modern debate. All these strategies aim to break the boundaries between a conventionalized fine-art language and the experiences of modern man in daily life.

Earlier in the process manufactured objects were incorporated with a view to embracing the reality of modernity and technology. In time, the reference became ambivalent and in some cases predominantly critical. In later years this continuing concern led to an investigation of the nature of language as a code with a dynamic of its own completely independent of the reality it describes but also as an object or phenomenon within that reality. It is one of the Christos' great achievements to have been able to provide a concrete image that gives us access to such philosophical problems which are still valid today.

(Extract) ©1998, Anthony Bond