All Package

Contemporary artists have found all kinds of ways to express a caustic wit.

Onlookers are not always sure whether what they see is in fact either caustic or witty, and whether they ought to laugh or snarl. Claes Oldenburg dug a grave and refilled it, calling it "an underground sculpture." Paul Thek displayed a lifelike sculpture of himself as a cadaver. Christo Javacheff, 33, a be spectacled Bulgarian-born artist, expresses his wit by wrapping things--earth, hay, nudes, wheelbarrows and bottles.

He wraps these items in canvas or poly ethylene, then ropes them up into bulging, tantalizingly ambiguous parcels.

Christo--he never uses his surname--knows how to muffle a rampant motorcycle so that it acquires the petrified dynamism of a stuffed buffalo or a blind folded rhinoceros. He can embalm a slender sapling so that it lies with the mute pathos of Pearl White bound and gagged on the railroad track. His current winding sheet in Chicago enfolds a cadaver so Brobdingnagian that even the man in the street has been confronted by the undertaking.

Bulky Bundle. The man in Ontario Street in Chicago, that is. With the aid of half-a-dozen assistants, 10,000 sq. ft. of dark brown canvas and 4,000 ft. of manila rope, Christo has turned Chicago's chunky Museum of Contemporary Art into an imposing if somewhat minimal-looking bundle. It is part of a five-week-long display of his talents, with packaged furniture and pictures shown indoors.

"Where are you going to put the stamps?" guffawed a passing postal clerk. "When do they pick it up?" gibed a construction stiff. Museum Director Jan van der Marck was undismayed. Christo's wrapping, he explains, underlines the fact that "a museum is already a wrapping of sorts. You wrap into a museum all the arts worth preserving and presenting."

Christo's other wrappings are likewise intended to lay bare an abstract truth--or truths--about the object swathed. "We never think of things in abstract terms," he observes, "because we are living persons and we see everything before us." By everything, he means surfaces, and in seeking to separate surface appearance from abstract reality, Christo often produces a work that is literally all package.

His 280-ft.-high sausage-shaped balloon enfolding plain air, for instance, was the dominant feature of the landscape at West Germany's Kassel Documenta last summer. He has constructed dozens of storefronts with empty display windows. They leave the viewer with his nose pressed against the glass--foolishly aware that he is observing the presence of pure nothingness.

Monumental Drums. "I think you'd call his work 'leftover existentialism,' " says Richard Tuttle, a fellow artist and an admirer. "There is so much despair about it, yet it's so beautiful to me." Christo comes by his concern with etre and neant legitimately enough. He lives today in downtown Manhattan, but he learned his trade painting heroic workers and buxom peasants at Sofia's Fine Arts Academy (he is still a supremely competent draftsman). Slipping westward during the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he migrated to Paris and became a member of the "New Realists," among them Yves Klein and Arman, who were challenging the critics with assemblages made of blue-dyed sponges and smashed violins. Christo made his mark by constructing a "temporary monument" out of 220 huge, rusty oil drums.

Sardonically called "Iron Curtain," it tied up traffic for three hours in the Rue Yisconti on June 27, 1962.

To some observers, the Iron Curtain seemed like a grande geste in the anarchistic spirit of Dada. But what attracted Christo was the burly, rhythmic beauty of those drums. To him, they seemed abandoned tributes to modern man's fixation with containment. That fixation leads retailers to wrap up things already wrapped and makes a soap manufacturer's future depend less on his newest detergent than on the looks of the box that holds it. Who knows?--future generations may well look back and conclude that the 20th century's packages were more memorable than their contents.

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