IN FEBRUARY, unseasonably, Central Park in New York should be a riot of autumnal gold. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists who in the 1980s placed bright pink “skirts” around 11 Florida islets and in 1995 wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin in polypropylene, have a new surprise.
For The Gates the couple will install 7,500 rectangular coloured frames along the 23 miles (37 km) of pathway that loop through Central Park. Each 16ft (5 m) “gate” will have a panel of saffron fabric, attached at the top but otherwise free to shift in the breeze and catch the slanting rays of late-winter sunshine. With luck it will snow. “In February, when the sun is low in the sky, the light is incredibly beautiful,” says Christo. “The fabric is very responsive: in the sun it is golden yellow, but in the dark it’s deep and saturated, almost red.”
Weather permitting, The Gates will “go live” on Saturday, February 12, and remain in place for just 16 days.
The Gates has had a long gestation. If nothing untoward happens between now and February, the project will have taken 26 years to realise.
The Gates has long been mired in the process of securing permission. Back in 1979 Christo and Jeanne-Claude won over most of the community boards of the neighbourhoods adjoining the park, but the real decision-making power lay with the Central Park Conservancy, the Manhattan elite who fund everything in the park (from security guards to gardeners) with their private fortunes. And those people were vehemently opposed.
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When the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, last month denied anti-Bush campaigners the right to hold a rally in the park because they would damage the grass, he was echoing the words of the parks commissioner, Gordon Davis, who in 1981 refused to allow The Gates partly on the grounds that the park was too fragile. “The real reason,” Christo insists, “was that, to survive, the park needs those wealthy people and they were very critical of the project.”
Today, Bloomberg may not like protesters, but he has no qualms about The Gates. Indeed, for the artists, his election in 2002 proved “the miracle” that has made the project possible. “Within a few months, we were able to sign a 43-page contract, giving us the permits,” says Jeanne-Claude. And the Central Park Conservancy? “They are now our friends.”
Although the Reichstag project, conceived in 1971, took almost as long to realise as The Gates, Christo is philosophical. Every work of art has a “prime time”, he believes. His projects “happen when they should happen”.
“Probably, in 1979, Jeanne-Claude and I were not prepared as people,” he says. “For us it is a learning process.”
Christo was born in Bulgaria in 1935 and attended art school in Sofia before defecting to the West via Prague in 1957. He met Jeanne-Claude in Paris in 1958, while painting her mother’s portrait, and since the early 1960s the pair have collaborated on every project. Surrounded Islands, in Miami, was in fact Jeanne-Claude’s idea, but until 1994 they used only Christo’s name. In the early days “we had enough problems as ‘he’ ” is Jeanne-Claude’s explanation.
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Over more than 40 years, the couple have realised 18 projects, but still Christo worries that people don’t read him right: “Many people don’t understand the physical aspect of our projects. When we did The Umbrellas, in California and Japan, it took a year for the bureaucrats in Tokyo to decide how they should give us permission. In the end, the Ministry of Construction gave us permission to install 1,340 ‘houses’. They got it much better than most art critics — it was like building houses. Each umbrella was the size of a two-storey house. We were exploring the different ways people use space in the two countries.
“Nobody discusses a painting before it is painted or a sculpture before it is sculpted, but everyone discusses the building of a new airport or a bridge or a highway. Our projects are discussed before they exist physically, in the same way, because they have this element of architecture.”
The Gates will cost about $20 million, with every penny coming out of the artists’ pockets. They refuse all commissions or donations, instead raising the money for each project through the sale of Christo’s drawings, collages and other works, which range in price from $15,000 to $3 million. Do they now have budgeting down to a fine art?
“Not at all,” says Jeanne-Claude. “Each project is like a child of ours and, like a child, it costs what it will cost. We do not have a budget for any project. We have hopes, but that is completely different.”
Back in 1981, Davis — now a staunch supporter — gave more than one reason for refusing permission for The Gates. Besides doing damage to the park, the project would set a precedent for people who wanted to do strange things (such as motorcycle racing), he suggested. Ultimately, however, he simply couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to spend so much money ($8 million in those days) on something that would last only a few days.
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Without realising it, Davis had gone to the heart of what Christo and Jeanne-Claude are about: the impermanence of their work is the point. “We want to create something that nobody can own. Even we can’t own our projects,” says Christo.
“They’re like a scream of freedom, because they challenge possession. Possession is permanent, That’s why our works cannot stay. Jeanne-Claude and I borrow space and create a gentle disturbance in it for just a few days.”
What should Christo cover next?
E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk