By Steffi Liu
Have you ever thought of the possibility that the environment around you can look very differently from the way it does right now? Javacheff Cristo, who defines himself as an environmental artist, has been making this idea come true. He creates a special form of art by wrapping buildings and objects so that they don’t look familiar anymore. What he has worked on includes fountains, towers, bridges, and even a piece of the Australian coastline. Cristo was born into an industrialist family in Bulgaria; he studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia and escaped from Prague to the West. He met his wife, Jeanne-Claude, in Paris when he was commissioned to do a portrait of her mother. They have been working together since his first outdoor work, although they declared that Cristo was the artist and Jeanne-Claude was the manager and organizer. Wrapped Coast, Little Bay is located 9 miles, southeast of the center of Sydney. The cliff-lined shore area that was wrapped is approximately 1.5 miles long, 150 to 800 feet wide, and 85 feet high. One million square feet of erosion control fabric (synthetic woven fiber usually manufactured for agricultural purposes), were used for the wrapping. 17,000 manpower hours, over a period of four weeks, were expended by 15 professional mountain climbers, 110 laborers, architecture and art students from the University of Sydney and East Sydney Technical College, as well as a number of Australian artists and teachers. The coast remained wrapped for a period of 7 weeks from October 28, 1969. Because of the subjects he chooses, works of Cristo’s tend to be monumental and temporary. He usually spends a lot of time waiting to get permission to work on chosen buildings, and has to undo his work in the end so that everything returns to original state. Since he believes that nothing exists forever, the fact that his artworks may not last long doesn’t bother him. As for the size of his works, he never considers them huge, “It appears to be monumental only because it’s art; human beings do much bigger things: they build giant airports, highways for thousands of miles, much, much bigger than what we create.” Cristo does not classify his work as just painting or sculpture, although it has elements of both. He thinks it’s more like environmental planning, or architecture, though he believes that it’s really not necessary to label it. “We believe that labels are very important, but for bottles of wine, not for art, so we usually don’t like to put a label on our art.” The ideas they want to convey count more – by temporarily disrupting one part of the environment, both rural and urban areas around the world, the couple believe that people will be able to perceive our human environment with new eyes and new consciousness. a
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
|