Getting Christo & Jeanne-Claude

As part of its exhibit "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Würth Museum Collection," the Austin Museum of Art invited anyone who had experienced the artists'Êwork to share their feelings about it in a special Austin Responds program at the museum's Laguna Gloria site. Here are two local respondents with sentiments that help explain the appeal of the couple's works.

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Linda Ball

I had heard of Christo before 1995 but not paid much attention. We had purchased a poster of Surrounded Islands just because it worked with a color scheme in an office we were decorating! But in 1995, some of my friends were going to Berlin, and it happened to coincide with when the Wrapped Reichstag was finally going to be realized. I like Berlin and went along. When we arrived, the wrapping was not quite finished. There were still guys rappelling down, securing ropes. There were large crowds on the plaza lawn extending in front of the Reichstag. As soon as we started taking pictures, watching how the light changed the appearance as it reflected off the metallic fabric, we realized that they had created something akin to painting or drawing right on the icon of Berlin. We went back multiple times. We were thrilled to get little one-inch square swatches of test fabric from volunteers and to snap picture after picture. As we made our way around, doing things like taking a boat ride on the Spree or climbing up the Siegessäule (Victory Column) miles away, there would be the Reichstag … made into a pencil drawing on the landscape of the city by the wrapping. I sorted through postcards and posters and went to an exhibit of some of Christo's originals. I started to understand that I loved his work because I liked the mixed media and the maps and architectural drawings. And I started to see that he sketched something, then realized it on a grand scale on the face of the landscape.

I guess you could say I was a fan after that. Some of my friends had seen the Pont Neuf project earlier, and we all said we'd go to New York for The Gates if it ever was realized. We made the trip, too. My husband made this one as well. We got to see the park before it snowed and after and with the fabric still and with it whipping in the wind. We got to see the park from high up in the restaurant Asiate in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We walked far north on both sides of the park, too, dipping in for different views and photo ops. It was amazing. And one picture I shot, with light and shadow just so and bare limbs of trees in the background and the street through the park in the foreground, well, it looked to me like one of Christo's drawings, come to life.

I'll be at the lecture on March 30, listening to Christo and Jeanne-Claude talk about the Arkansas River project, and I'll be plotting about how to make sure I see it in person if and when it happens. I feel like fans planning to be "inside" the works and being there on site is a part of the projects as surely as the conceptional drawings, the wrangling with local authorities for permission, the volunteers, the planning, and all of that. I even think that all the pictures the fans take, pointing their cameras at the works as they morph and change in the light and wind with their friends and family in the foreground, are part of the finished product.

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Margie S. Alford

I guess (I first learned about Christo and Jeanne-Claude) when I read something about them in the paper. This was back in 1976. They showed the film Running Fence on the grounds of Laguna Gloria, and it was one of those magical evenings. I was just mesmerized. Because it showed Christo dealing with different ranchers and councilmen and trying to get access to these private lands, so the fence could run down to the Pacific Ocean, and his tenacity was just remarkable. I found myself getting caught up in it, as did the ranchers. It was so heartwarming to see people love something that they never thought they would.

Then I kept following Christo. I thought, "I've got to go see those islands [Surrounded Islands]," but I never did. But I did get to go see The Gates. To be there was wonderful, to stand under them and walk through them, to see lovers taking pictures of one another in front of them, to feel the enthusiasm of the other people. They dropped their usual necessary isolation, and suddenly there was this camaraderie. You'd find yourself turning to a stranger and saying, "Isn't it wonderful?" and they would say, "Yes, this is our third time."

I always am exhilarated by Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work. It's not the looking at it as much as the thought about what's behind their work: the thinking that led to the creation, the planning, the tenacity. Most of us might get an idea, and we fantasize our way through it, decide we can't [make it happen], and go to something familiar, like having someone over to dinner. The Javacheffs [Christo and Jeanne-Claude] are an inspiration for achieving what might seem impossible at first. Imagine! Fifty-some-odd miles of saffron in Central Park … and millions of us going to walk under, around, through … it's wonderful! I've never been crazy about Colorado, but I know I'll go one more time to see their covered Arkansas River.