Christo: Plain and Fency

"I predict that artworks of the future will be in size category of Chinese Wall, and may become one day just as beautiful. To me, Chinese Wall is greatest artwork ever created by mankind." Thus said Artist Christo Javacheff (professional name: Christo) in his dense Bulgarian accent, talking to a reporter in 1968. Last week this prediction was coming true--more or less--as Christo's latest project, Running Fence, moved toward completion on the coast of northern California. A shimmering construction of nylon slung between steel posts, Running Fence issues from the sea at Bodega Bay in Marin County, wending 24 1/2 miles up hill and down dale, over ten public roads (including Highway 101) and through dozens of farms, to finish inland near Petaluma, Calif. For an artwork, it has consumed staggering amounts of time, manpower and materials: 300 students, 2,050 posts, 165,000 yds. of material, miles of wire and hundreds of thousands of hooks.

Since 1972, when Christo conceived the project, it has cost him $2,250,000--raised by selling off his drawings and project studies to European collectors. A sixth of that sum went on fees to a battery of lawyers who, through 17 public hearings and three sessions of the California Supreme Court, won permission to construct the fence and defended it against suits brought by worried environmentalists, who derisively called it "a roll of toilet paper." There were bomb threats, and rigging trucks were vandalized. "If they tear it down immediately afterward, that's all right," declared the unfazed Christo. "That's all part of the function of a fence. That's process art in action, with a coastal commission and a supreme court as sculptures."

A small wiry man with an intense stare and a manic thirst for promotion, Christo, 41, is no stranger to large projects. He first came to the art world's attention in the late '50s and early '60s by swathing all manner of objects--chairs, trees, cars, women, motorcycles and, in 1968 at "Documenta" in Kassel, West Germany, a 280-ft. column of air--with rope, canvas and sheet plastic. If this all amounted to little more than a series of energetic variations on Man Ray's 1920 Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (a sewing machine wrapped and tied in sackcloth and rope), it gave Christo the base for more grandiose and original schemes. In 1969 he went to Australia and used 1 million sq. ft. of synthetic cloth to wrap a mile of rocky coastline. In 1972 he hung an orange curtain a quarter of a mile wide and 365 ft. deep across a scenic valley named Rifle Gap in Colorado.

Rosy Mist. Running Fence, however, is his largest work to date--and like the others, it is scheduled to be dismantled within two weeks. "It will make one hell of a revival tent when it comes down," mused Pop Artist Jim Rosenquist, one of the group of artists, museum curators and dealers who assembled to watch the installation. "It was a beautiful birth, all rosy mist and hidden sunlight," enthused the curator of Dartmouth's Hopkins Center Art Galleries, Jan van der Marck, a longtime collaborator of Christo's. "It can't be owned or rented or bought. The artist doesn't get any richer, but you do." But was it, a reporter asked, another Great Wall of China? Smiling, Christo revised his 1968 opinion. "No, it is not a Wall of China! China Great Wall built with purpose, therefore not a work of art. Work of art must be unusable! This fence unusable!"

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