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| Christo: The Floating Piers |
This summer
Europeans by the hundreds of thousands headed over the Alps (or should I say
"under the Alps", creeping through the continent's longest traffic
jam, the Gotthard Tunnel) and down to Italy. Well, nothing strange about that -
pale but affluent North Europeans have been doing that on a regular basis since
British aristocrats invented tourism in the 18th century by
embarking on The Grand Tour. But this year was different. Many were heading to
a smallish lake in the north of Italy to experience a temporary work of art.
Yes, they weren't going to Italy simply to lie on the beach, or go shopping, or
immerse themselves in the Renaissance. They were going in order to walk on
water.
Christo's
last work of art was The Gates, in
Central Park, New York in 2005. Considering that he isn't getting any younger, (well,
none of us are really) and he is now 81 years old, any new installation of
Christo's might be his last, making it all the more imperative that if you want
to see a work of this iconic artist of the globalized art world, then you had better get down to northern Italy this summer. And I must say, I didn't
think twice.
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| Lining up for an hour in the heat in order to set foot on the Floating Piers |
Most
artists work on paper or canvas or delve their hands in clay or apply their
chisel to stone. For Christo, however, the sub-Alpine landscape of the north
Italian lakes, specifically lake Iseo, was his canvas, so to speak. Imagine
having a map of Lake Iseo and then, with a strong yellow pencil you draw a firm
line across the map, back and forth. That's what Christo did. Except it wasn't
a map of the Lake but Lake Iseo itself upon which he inscribed his shimmering yellow
line; a line that stretched for four and a half kilometers across the lake
to a mountainous island, that skirted the island and then darted across the
lake again, to completely encircle a smaller island and then, via another
route, return to the mountain and finally back to the mainland. His line
consisted of 220, 000 plastic cubes lashed together, secured to the lake floor,
and then covered with 100,000 square meters of dahlia-yellow nylon polymide
fabric. The costs, 15 million dollars, were, as always, entirely paid for by
the artist himself, without any subsidies. In late June
The Floating Piers was
unveiled and as with all of his works, the public were invited to experience it
free of charge. Local authorities were expecting 600,000 extra visitors.
Instead, 1.2 million came over a period of 16 days.
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| They came by the thousands |
Unlike a
drawing of a yellow penciled line across a landscape, in this work the viewer
becomes a participant, a performer. You step onto and into the work and by
walking across the piers, by sitting and sunbathing (swimming was forbidden),
by picnicking or by collapsing from dehydration and being whisked away by the
medical emergency service (something we witnessed three times on the scorching
hot day that we visited), you become a performer in a massive, communal artistic
event. Yet, despite the thousands of people who are involved in the construction
of such an installation - the divers, the seamstresses, the lawyers, the
cartographers, truck drivers, boat drivers, helicopter drivers, photographers, construction
workers, engineers, local politicians, notaries, computer scientists, police
authorities, volunteers, medical personnel, plastic factory workers, to name
just a few - despite all of them, this is the work of one man. And, although
all those who weren't collapsing from heat exhaustion or dehydration were
having the time of their lives, as far as I could see, he didn't do it for us.
No, this was the work of one selfish man who had a vision and whose motivation
was, he wanted to see what it looks like. The work was totally useless, with no
reason whatsoever to exist, except that Christo was curious to see what the
colour yellow would look like, at dawn, at sunset, under the blazing sun, drenched
by torrential cloud bursts, empty of all life, supporting tens of thousands of
joyful people engaged in the utterly useless activity of going for a stroll across
the water. Somehow, I suspect that hidden in here is a lesson for us all on how
to live our lives.
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| Christo viewing his work and receiving the applause of the crowd |
