Christo and Jeane-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence
Smithsonian American Art Museum
April 2 – September 26, 2010
http://americanart.si.edu/runningfence
Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76
Aside from holding the dubious distinction of first artwork to warrant an
Environmental Impact Report,
Running Fence also happens to be an outrageously photogenic piece of overlooked California art history.
For two weeks in September 1976, Christo and Jean-Claude's
Running Fence -- 24 1/2 miles of 18 foot high white nylon -- flapped its way through the hills of Northern California. After four years of plottings, schemings, town-hearings, beaurocractic technicalities, totally valid community concerns, attorney fees, etc, the thing finally happened.
Smithsonian recently acquired the definitive archive of
Running Fence, the first and only major Christo project archive acquired by a museum. It apparently includes over 350 pieces of stuff -- drawings, photographs, scale models, hard evidence, miscellany.
Appears as if their acquisition is reason enough for them to look back, but over here at the house we've been having ourselves a bit of a renaissance, too.
Our waterfall coffee table was already Christoed when we heard about the show. Don't diss.
DO YOU currently lump their wraps with the tourist carpaccio of D. Chihuly blown jammers? Think again. Awesome dualities abound. Heroic and lame. Gay and straight. Accessible and inexplicable. Souveneir-ready and awfully strange. Bully and loner. Euro and American. Chic and deeply unhip.
Check out! the
1978 Maysles Brothers film documenting the tribulations and ultimate realization of the
Fence. Weirdly, they also made four other films about Christo and Jean-Claude. Valley Curtain is particularly French and particularly winning.
A sad wrap up:
Jean-Claude, RIP, 1999. Fire loss.
