Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 12, 1993 TAG: 9302110010
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: JUDY SCHWAB SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
WRAP STAR AT RU
Christo, the artist who surrounded 11 islands with pink fabric, draped a Paris bridge in silky cloth, and who strung more than 3,100 19-foot umbrellas across the landscape in California and Japan, is coming to Radford University to speak about his work tonight.No, he won't be wrapping the campus, but it's not a bad idea.
Christo's environmental sculptures are so famous and attract such vast numbers of viewers that the sites where he installs his work benefit financially from all the attention.
Making and installing all those umbrellas for the "The Umbrellas, Joint Project for Japan and USA," took seven years and cost the artist $26 million.
It took 11 factories in four countries to produce the hardware for the project. The dollars that fed those factories and workers in them came solely from the sale of Christo's drawings and models for the project.
Prices for his work range from $9,000 to $250,000. He creates no art from the completed installations.
The California county where the umbrellas stood for 18 days took in $32.5 million from the crowds who came to see the work, Christo said in a telephone interview last week.
Since it's in a public space, viewing Christo's work costs nothing. But people spend plenty of money on food and lodging and other incidentals. In addition to that, Christo fuels local economies by employing local people to help install a project.
The 57-year-old artist is coming to Radford University where he will talk about his work. An exhibit of some of his preparatory art work for his large projects goes on display at the Flossie Martin Art Gallery on the campus Sunday.
Christo's first wrapped work appeared in the late 1950s when he showed wrapped bottles, a wrapped car and other packages in galleries. He rapidly proceeded to wrap larger and larger pieces until he branched out into the environment.
Christo explained his fascination with wrapping. The use of "fabric is very old in art," he said. He talked of Greek sculpture that captured in stone the folds of fabric on the human.
Fabric "highlights the general proportions of objects," he said.
In 1985, Christo wrapped the Pont Neuf, a bridge in Paris with 440,000-square-feet of sandstone colored fabric.
The result revealed "the essence of the bridge," he said, as the fabric shrouded the details of its construction but showed the volume of the towers and major design. "The Pont Neuf was a sculpture and at the same time a bridge."
Christo described the public environment in which he creates his work as "very rich with wind and rain, and also regimented with walls and streets. The art borrows the dynamics of the space," he said.
By comparison, he described the space of the art studio as "very clean."
Christo tries to spend at least eight months a year in his studio and minimizes his travel time to potential sites until the year of the installation.
Because he works with so many people to prepare the projects, he has no assistants in his studio and was, in fact, working alone on an eight-foot drawing during the telephone interview.
The location and size of Christo's work makes it available to everyone who passes through it, not just dedicated art lovers who will go out of their way to see art in galleries and museums.
"You do not look at the work, you live with the work," he said. And this is what allows people to see the ordinary in a different way.
The 3 million people who walked across the Pont Neuf while it was wrapped or passed underneath it in boats were made more aware of what had been, for some of them, an ordinary part of their lives before the wrapping.
"People had to walk carefully because of the fabric [on the sidewalk]. The work became intimately related to their movement in that space," he explained.
Christo's projects require years of preparation, not only in the studio but in meeting rooms as well.
He has been trying to wrap the Reichstag in Germany for more than 20 years. He was turned down by the German government in 1977, 1981 and 1987.
"I am a very stubborn person," he said of his repeated efforts to wrap the pre-World War II German parliament building. By mid-April he'll know whether the project is a go. If it doesn't work this time, he'll abandon it.
The variety of sites for Christo's work dictates a mix of disciplines and media - sculpture, painting, architecture, and urban planning are all parts of his projects.
When he wrapped a coastline in Sydney, Australia, in 1969, he needed engineers as well as laborers. He used 1 million square feet of erosion-control mesh and 35 miles of rope in the project.
Special guns fired 25,000 charges of fasteners, threaded studs and clips to secure the rope to the rocks. He even had 15 professional mountain-climbers working on the installation.
All this for a temporary work of art. Yet that is part of what makes his work exciting.
"We're becoming blase with repetition - we're missing witnessing something unique," he said of today's culture.
LECTURE & EXHIBIT\ Artist Christo will speak tonight at 8 in Preston Auditorium at Radford University. Selected pieces of his work will be on display at Flossie Martin Gallery at the university beginning Sunday and running until March 5. The gallery's hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays, and noon-4 p.m. Sundays.