Zilvinas Kempinas

Cornelia Parker- The Distance




"I decided to wrap the kiss up with this piece of string to veil it, so that you couldn't see the heads, to withhold this intimate gesture, a temporary installation called "The Distance", the opposite of an embrace. It's about emotional distance (a kiss with a string attached), disrupting idealised image of love."

Christo and Jeanne Claude

Store Fronts
Using salvaged building elements, Christo began to construct works in New York in 1964 that represented actual store fronts. This body of work emphasized two aspects that would remain central to many of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's projects: architecture and concealment. These "store" façades, many of them full scale and illuminated from within, reference consumer culture. The artist, however, teasingly denied access to the contents by applying cloth or paper to the inside of the windows. The Store Fronts, themselves receptacles of display, also reflect upon the museum and its exhibition practices. By the late 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had begun to wrap entire museums, thus obscuring those sites of display.

wrapped tree


wrapped coast



gates


The environmental works the pair creates span great distances in populated landscapes, both rural and urban. They are mostly made of fabric, created in the form of a large curtain, wrapped forms (buildings, coastline, a bridge), surrounded islands, large umbrellas, and other forms. They pay all expenses associated with the artworks, including planning, construction, and taking down, partly from the sale of Christo's preliminary drawings, early works from the 1950's and 1960's, and lithographs. They accept no contributions, grants or other financial assistance, preferring to make their aesthetic decisions apart from any influence financial backing might involve. A large group of paid workers is necessary to construct and take down these works, which can extend for great distances. Usually, there are years of planning, and meetings and hearings held by governments and communities, to gain approval for their projects. They wrapped the Reichstag, today the Parliament of Germany in Berlin, and the process of approval took 24 years. Their work is very expressive, of romanticism, whimsy, poetry, and like much contemporary art, is more experiential perhaps than viewing art in a museum (passively) can sometimes be.


Common Errors
Christo and Jeanne-Claude Respond


The most common error is the misunderstanding that the artist is Christo.

• The artist is not Christo.

• The artists are Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Most common errors which have been found in art books, magazines, newspapers and seen on television:

Christo was born in Bulgaria NOT IN SEVEN OTHER COUNTRIES

The Game of Errors: There are six errors in the following published short sentence:

"Christo wrapped some islands in Florida, off the coast of Miami in Key Biscayne with pink plastic."

1.-2. Christo and Jeanne-Claude never wrapped any Islands. They surrounded the islands. Most journalists do not understand the difference between wrapping and surrounding even though they should know that the United Kingdom is surrounded by water, it is not wrapped in water.

3. There were eleven islands surrounded, but because in two occasions 2 islands were surrounded together, there was a total of nine configurations on a span of seven miles.

4. Not off the coast. Off the coast would be in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Miami Beach.

5. It was in Biscayne Bay in the heart of the city of Miami, between Miami City and Miami Beach. Key Biscayne is miles away from there.

6. Not plastic - FABRIC, woven polypropylene is a man-made fiber, and is woven. Plastic usually refers to a film, not woven. For instance, women who wear nylon stockings are not wearing plastic stockings.

Error: "Running Fence, in Sonoma, made of parachute material."

1.Sonoma is a town in Northern California miles away from the Running Fence. The temporary work of art was located in Sonoma County and in Marin County (Sonoma and Marin Counties).

2.The nylon fabric of the Running Fence could never be used for parachutes. God forbid that anyone would ever jump with that type of fabric.

Error: "Volunteers"

NEVER on any project Except Jeanne-Claude's mother, everyone who works is paid: normal union wages for specialized professional workers, and just above minimum wage for non-skilled workers. One important exception: for the Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Australia, 1968-69 out of 125 paid workers, eleven architecture students refused to be paid. Three of them became artists after the project and are now well known.
Error: "Christo and Jeanne-Claude are mysterious about their work."

NO. Christo and Jeanne-Claude constantly lecture and answer questions from the audience, in museums, colleges, universities and schools all over the world. It is probable that no other artists lecture as much as they do.

Error: "Mr. Christo"

NO: Christo is his first name and the only one he uses. Jeanne-Claude also uses her first name .However, their son Cyril uses Christo's first name as his legal last name: Cyril Christo, born May 11, 1960, is a published poet.

Error: "Jean-Claude" We also get letters addressed to Mr.and Mrs. Claude

No: Jeanne-Claude. (in French Jean-Claude is a man's name.) Some people think that our Last name is Claude. (because of Christo and Jeanne-Claude)

Error: "Christo always sold his work at high price."

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are their own art dealers, they sell Christo's works to Art Collectors, Museums, Galleries and Art Dealers. In 1958, the price of Christo's works varied, according to size, between $40 and $100. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were happy with such prices, because their rent in Paris was $70 a month. To supplement the non-sales of his art, between 1956 and 1964 Christo, in addition to washing cars in garages and dishes in restaurants, had to paint portraits, oil on canvas, which he signed by his family name: Javacheff. Those were highly paid $200 to $300 each. That is how they could survive. That is also how he met Jeanne-Claude, in Paris in 1958, when he painted the portrait of Jeanne-Claude's mother. By the time Christo had done an impressionist portrait, a classical portrait and a cubist portrait of the mother, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were in love...

Error: "Conceptual Artists"

No – a conception on a paper is not Christo and Jeanne-Claude's idea of art. They want to build their projects – they could save a lot of money by not building them, by just keeping them on paper – as conceptual artists do. Christo and Jeanne-Claude want to SEE their project realized because they believe it will be a work of art of joy and beauty. The only way to see it is to build it.

Environmental Artist: Yes – because they created many works in Cities – in Urban environments – and also in Rural Environments but NEVER in deserted places, and always sites already prepared and used by people, managed by human beings for human beings. Therefore they are not "Land Art" either.

We believe that labels are important, but mostly for bottles of wine.

Error: "The easy life of an artist"

Not quite so. Until 2006 Christo was working an average of 17 hours a day – 7 days a week. These days, he works and average of 13 hours a day. Jeanne-Claude is a bit lazier, only 10 hours a day.

They do not take vacations.

So-Called Environmentalists, in the past, have claimed, before each project, that Christo and Jeanne-Claude will hurt the environment. They realized, after the completion that:

1. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are the cleanest artists in the world, all is removed, their large scale works of art are temporary.

2. The sites are restored to their original condition and most materials are recycled. Except in Florida, for the Surrounded Islands. That site was luckily not restored to its original condition. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's workers removed, before the project, at Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s expense, 40 tons of garbage from the eleven Islands (one of the islands was called "beer cans island" – of course the garbage was not restored to the Islands!

3. The Real Environmentalists such as "The Audubon Society" and "The Sierra Club" usually find themselves on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s side – because they are better informed. They know how much Christo and Jeanne-Claude spend to make the public aware of the environment, through the art work, much more than Environmentalists can afford to do.

Error: "See the art work best by flying."

No! None of their work is designed for the birds, all have a scale to be enjoyed by human beings who are on the ground.

Ann Hamilton

burning man white fabric sculpture

Artists : Dan Havel and Dean Ruck

Anish Kapoor



Short description of the project Fabric sculpture spans 135m between supports. Surface area of 3500m2 and was fabricated into a single piece. The surface curvatures required by the artist were much more extreme than conventional membrane constructions.
Misc. project details
References Techniques & Architecture février-mars 2003
Duration of use
Temporary or permanent structure Temporary
Material of the cover
Cable-net/Textile/Hybrid/Foil Fabric
Type (code) II
Material Fabric/Foil Polyester
Material coating PVC
Main dimensions and form
Covered surface (m2) 3500
Total length (m) 135
Total width (m) 28
Maximum height (m) 28
Maximum free span (m) 135
Form of entire structure Anticlastic

Venice Biennale 2008
Year of Completion: 2008
Architect/Designer: Gustafson Porter

When landscape architects Gustafson Porter conceived the idea for their Venice Biennale installation it was designed to “respond to the challenge of how to cultivate one’s garden, or how to tend to our affairs”. Exploring the themes of memory, nourishment and enlightenment, they wanted to introduce a fabric sculpture as the centre piece for the garden.

As fabric specialists and a company who loves to take on the more unusual projects Architen Landrell undertook the manufacture and installation of the fabric sculpture. Intended as an area of contemplation, the space has white cushions strewn around it as the swathes of fabric waft above.

While an idyllic vision, it was not an easy task to create the ephemeral fabric clouds. Using several helium weather balloons, the fabric was lifted into the air and the balloons tethered to the ground, the idea being that the sculpture could be seen from the gardens entrance and from various points within the city. According to one journalist the fabric feature formed ‘an exquisitely lovely floating white canopy of spinnaker fabric, supported by tethered white balloons’.

Installation of the structure was in a derelict garden area of post industrial military usage. The garden was reclaimed and landscaped with berms to produce a sculptured, lawned area over which the ethereal clouds were flown. Due to Venice’s archeological and historical rules only shallow ground anchors of the helical type could be used to anchor the balloons and sculpture. These had to be installed by hand within the existing vegetation in order to create as little disruption as possible. Additionally, in order to minimise the visual impact of the rigging for the balloons, 3mm dyneema line with a dark sheathing was used.

The fast track programme of this project made an exciting challenge for the team. Design approval to completion on site was achieved in just 7 days ready for the grand opening of the Biennale!

Declared by critics as ‘a triumph’, ‘enchanting’ and as the festival piece which blew everything else away, the installation was an undoubted success and one which we are extremely proud of.

'Tunnel' links New York to London (Friday, 23 May 2008)





By Matthew Price
BBC News, New York

People in New York see as far as London

It was possibly the most laborious and least informative interview ever conducted.

It took about five minutes, yielded a one-word answer, and gave little real flavour of the subject.

Still - it was conducted using two whiteboards, two marker pens, and it was done over a distance of 3,471 miles (5,585 km).

How? Well there are two answers to that.

If you believe artist and inventor Paul St George then his "Telectroscope" connects New York and London via a (very) long tunnel running through the earth's crust, with the images bouncing back and forth using mirrors.

The other explanation is that it is all done by optical fibres - take your pick.

One end of the "tunnel" emerges next to Tower Bridge on the banks of the Thames in London - the other is next to Brooklyn Bridge on the banks of New York's East River.

It looks like something HG Wells might have imagined.

Each end has a giant telescope-like construction which appears to punch its way out of the earth.

There are dials, and levers, and thermometer gauges on the side of the 20m long brass and wood construction.

Peer into it and you can see people on the other side of the Atlantic.

Wave at them, they wave back at you.

Write on the whiteboard, and ask a question, and they will write back.

Mesmerising

It is rather like using a giant web-cam, live streaming (though we are told the internet is not involved and there is no audio connection) between two of the world's biggest cities.

So now you know why the following interview took so long.

Once you have got the whiteboard, and written your message on it, you have to angle it correctly so they can read it over in Europe.

"What is your name?" I wrote.

The stranger at the other end, standing in front of Tower Bridge and surrounded by onlookers, picked up his marker and replied.

"Mik," came back the answer, once he had angled his board correctly.

"Where are you from?"


It is a piece of art, and it's also a sort of curiosity in a public space
Peter Coleman
New York organiser

"Bangladesh."

"What do you think of this?" I asked. (Top journalism, huh?)

"GREAT!" came the reply.

Told you it was informative.

Still it is kind of addictive and mesmerising, which strikes me as strange in a world in which we type, text, and Twitter every day, within seconds, to individuals on the other side of the planet without even thinking about it.

Peter Coleman is the producer for the New York end of the project.

"It is a piece of art, and it's also a sort of curiosity in a public space. London and New York are cities with millions of people.

"They can't believe that those are actually people in another city looking at them. That's what I find all these people are sort of amazed at. It pulls you right into it."

English sarcasm

A group of children from California now cluster round the "Telectroscope" - waving and writing messages to the London end.

"That's so cool - they can see us!" one says as they get a wave back from Tower Bridge.

"They're like way over there, and you're sort of talking to them. This is so much fun!"

A New York policeman stands in front with a message. A man at the other end writes something down.

"How's the band?"

"I'm with the NYPD, not the group The Police," the copper writes back.

English sarcasm clearly does not work down a tunnel.

A New York football fan who presumably supports the English club Chelsea steps up: "Man U. Suck!" he writes.

The view through the "Telectroscope"
Tunnel vision - the view of London from New York

The people in London look perplexed, and a little annoyed to be frank - until someone points out that perhaps to them it reads: "Man, you suck."

Then everyone gets very excited.

There are two women at the London end who are from New York City - they are writing where exactly they come from.

They hold up their sign.

"Bay Ridge Brooklyn, yer, go Bay Ridge!!" the New York crowd shout, and for a moment, two groups of strangers, in two cities thousands of miles apart, jump up and down and smile at one another.

Frieze Magazine

Tunnel Vision




Informant

A new exhibition about New York’s underground earth works reveals a quasi-mythological mirror image of the city
image

Workers are lowered into the Tunnel Boring Machine Launch Area, 26th Street and 11th Avenue, New York (2008)

‘Stocks Dive’, ‘Prices Plunge’, ‘Markets Plummet’. We’re in the midst of a declension, an Icarean moment in time when aspirations turn vertiginous and ladders become snakes. A new exhibition in New York suggests that perhaps there is some kind of life beneath the cold asphalt rushing up to meet us. ‘The Future Beneath Us’, currently on show at the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex, and at the Science, Business and Industry Library, speaks of a mirror city to New York, a benighted, unglamorous metropolis of dark shafts and damp thoroughfares in which air is hewn out of rock, rather than rock heaped into air. It paints this portrait quite accidentally while describing the eight massive subterranean construction projects currently taking place deep beneath the city’s surface.

The simultaneous creation of a thicket of tunnels, hubs and work plants has seemingly resulted in an alter-city being formed, a sunless empire hidden entirely from the view of most of the city’s denizens. Chief among the projects is the gargantuan Water Tunnel No. 3, one of the largest engineering projects in the world. It has a diameter of seven metres, stretches for almost 100 kilometres, and reaches depths beneath the city of over 250 metres, as deep as the Chrysler building is high. It is a work of monumental size and beauty, a gargantuan concrete tube laid down amidst a glistening backdrop of quartzofeldspathically-banded garnetiferous muscovite-biotite schist. The only shame is that it will never be seen. Its entombment is part of its creation. It is a true earth work.

Such colossal underground structures have traditionally been the domain of morlocks and mole people, both antitheses of civilization and its warped reflection. Here too in New York there is something of this. The tunnels are created by ravenous giant leech-like boring machines with ever-spinning circular jaws, which are, in turn, operated by thick-skinned workers known as sandhogs. Compounding the feeling of a subculture beneath the substrata is the fact that many of the sandhogs are second or third generation tunnel workers, their forefathers having worked, and sometimes died, on Water Tunnels Nos. 1 and 2. A popular sandhog saying, ‘If it’s deeper than the grave, the sandhogs dug it’, further stresses the quasi-mythological elements of this underworld: for what is deeper than the grave but Hades itself? It comes as little surprise that the robotic submarine used to explore the city’s existing water tunnels is known as Persephone.

Not that such a ghastly reading of the project is anywhere present in what is a strictly civic exhibition. With a beady eye on the vast stimulus packages set to be thrown at public works across the country, the show seemed more interested in attempting to instill its subjects with a whiff of New Deal human triumphalism. In this it appears a little misguided. The time-span allotted to these projects is less human than geological in nature. Work on Water Tunnel No. 3 began in 1969 and is not expected to finish until 2020. The Second Avenue Subway was first proposed in 1920, and has been under construction since 1972. The Croton Water Filtration Plant has been mooted since 1890. If any kind of memorial to the human spirit is being created beneath the city proper it is not a triumph of the common man over economic adversity but rather a fossil kingdom of public policy.

Indeed while the utility of these works is unquestionable, history would suggest that not even usefulness is a necessary feature for the creation of triumphant public works. Take the story of Joseph Williamson, a tobacco merchant from Liverpool, who, in the early 19th century, began employing hundreds of workers in the Edge Hill area of the city to build a series of secret subterranean passages and huge underground halls beneath the streets. In the words of Charles Hand, President of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, and a fairly early (1916) explorer of Williamson’s creation, the construction was: ‘a nightmare maze of constructed tunnels and caves. Nobody knows their extent. They are grotesque beyond description … dungeons carved out of the solid rock with no light and no ventilation … all apparently without the slightest objective or motive.’

The reasons for the creation of Williamson’s tunnels have been much debated. Some suggest that he was a member of an extremist religious sect and that the tunnels were built to provide refuge for himself and his friends come the Day of Judgment. Others propose they were used to smuggle contraband to and from Liverpool’s port. Yet amidst all the conspiratorial chatter, Williamson’s insistence that he had them built purely for ‘the employment of the poor’ rings truest. Over 130 years before the New Deal and its mass employment programmes sought to revivify a country, Williamson instigated a one-man philanthropic Works Progress Administration, making sure his workers ‘all received a weekly wage and were thus enabled to enjoy the blessing of charity without the attendant curse of stifled self-respect’. Unbounded by usefulness, created purely to relieve unemployment, his tunnels are the epitome of an economic stimulus, suggesting that during dark times, to seek the light at the end of the tunnel, you first need to build one.

George Pendle

George Pendle is an author and journalist living in New York.