we are all Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Sometimes, one of the middle-aged beurocrats in your life sends you a humorous forward and you actually open it and you are glad you did. This one was titled, "Things to do while your co-workers are on vacation" and I thought the photos were beautiful. And we can all appreciate the labor that went into making these installations. I guess, apart from the alfalfa keyboard, these aren't really much like the natural/unnatural earthworks of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. This site, though the official one for the artists, doesn't have the best photos. I think I was at the architecture museum in DC and saw a beautiful exhibit of images of their work.
I was also looking at that pesky Sept 5 food issue of the New Yorker and found Schjedahl's review of Robert Smithson, another earth works artist. For some reason, Schjedahl praises Smithson's essays, but doesn't quote them at length. Are we supposed to enjoy these literary "objects of art that will outlive much of what hangs in modern museums" only in modern museums? And frankly, he didn't do a great job of describing the landscape that Spiral Jetty is, and has become a part of.
And so I give you, in no particular order, photos of (1) Christo and Jeanne-Claude's large backyard umbrellas dotting a Japanese landscape (2) Rober Smithson's sepia toned Spiral Jetty in Utah's Great Salt Lake (3) a generic cubicle office in which every item is wrapped in aluminum foil (4) the same, wrapped in newspaper (5) a computer keyboard that appears to be sprouting delicate green alfalfa sprouts (6) a generic office cubicle filled with pink plastic peanuts. (7) Christo and Jeanne-Claude's surrounded islands in Biscayne Bay
Categories: outdoors, newyorker
posted by zoe p. at 11:58 AM
8 Comments:
Some cool images.
Box you need to stop posting your crap here.
R2000
I love it!!! How much time do you think it took? How readily can one pull this off say in a small office, with only two to three other employees? Thank you for having sharing the exhibit.
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Today's (2005.9.25) NY Times had great photo and article re performance artist who had a miniature Central Park being towed around Manhattan Island by a tugboat. Chasing it was a small motorboat with singe "gate" from Christon's installation in Central Park. The tug captain was not amused by the art pirates.
the cubicle art is fabulous, and, in its way, logical. cubicles are unnatural and uniformly unattractive, and tend to need a little help, aesthetically. i've wanted to have a room completely covered in tin foil since i saw some madman do it on the x-files however many years ago. in high school i was allowed to foil the ceiling of my bedroom, and after i got a couple of colored light bulbs it was so pretty it was almost impossible to leave it.
i've got no love for christo, though. as a few other readers said, why? there is so much inherent beauty in an untouched space, and so few untouched spaces left, that it strikes me as more blindly megalomaniacal than artistic to cover the remaining ones with man-made materials. how is an uninhabited island improved upon by the addition of a pink skirt? why do we need to accessorize land masses to convince people that they're attractive or worth paying attention to? it's incredibly depressing to me that someone would look at perfectly good hillside and think, "you know what would make this place really meaningful? an umbrella."
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So I've removed a lot of posts. I feel like a fascist, but I tried to remove blatant self-promotion, things that didn't seem to encourage serious discussion and comments that unproblematically considered US tourism there to be "peaceful."
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