EARTH SENSITIVE, John Grande

(2000)

In developing a nature-specific dialogue that is interactive, rooted in actual experience in a given place and time, with nature the essential material and ingredient of the process, artists are ultimately developing a new language of expression. The emphasis is holistic, bio-regional and mutualist. Above all, it displays a respect for our integral connectedness to the environment. The earth is a living breathing organism whose elements - climate, geography, geology, other life forms - are an inviolable part of the human creative process. The inflexible stereotypes of art history, outmoded notions of avant-gardism and modernist aesthetics in general are the legacy of an era where progress was defined in purely economic terms. The land is no longer just a subject we represent through art. An essential freedom comes from identifying with the life process itself as art. It is one chance we have to ensure a viable art of the future. The imperial stereotypes of an art based in formal language, the segregation of humanity from nature, the platitudes that accompany the art object and nature subject have now passed into the catacombs of our museums and art galleries. Let us leave that labyrinth behind and celebrate nature whose presence is very much there, very much here. Essential for our psychological and physical sustenance, nature is here in your garden, there in your forest, can be found in a city park. A resurgence of ritual and respect for the cyclical process of life, an earth sensitive vision reaffirms nature is the art of which we are a part. The challenge is to break out of the limited conception that humanity is the centre of earth-based activity, to broaden our perspective, realize that other species, organisms, animals and plants are equally earth sensitive, the biogenitors of ecological diversity. They may even perceive the earth and us in ways we could never conceive.

From a native point of view, landscape cannot be characterized as either wilderness (i.e. a place in which human activity is not naturally present) or a scene (i.,e. a representation of a site) or a framed subject that embodies an idea of nature. The line between human culture and the culture of nature are indivisible. The M�tabetchouane Centre for History and Archaeology on the south shore of Lac St.-Jean in northern Quebec, with its replica of a Hudson's Bay trading post, is a place where on July 16th, 1647, the Jesuit founder Jean Dequen, a native of Amiens in France, arrived by boat from Tadoussac. Mike MacDonald, a self taught artist of mixed descent (Micmac, Beothuk, Irish, Portuguese, Scottish) whose nature works explore ways of healing cultural and biospecific differences, found a variety of introduced and indigenous species of plants growing in the surrounds of this historic site, a traditional native meeting place for centuries in pre-contact times. During the summer of 1996, he gathered and transplanted species of Native medicinal plants that included sweetgrass, northern sage, native onions, Iroquois ceremonial tobacco, Virginia tobacco, evening primrose, milkweed, Joe-Pyeweed, and Dyers camomile. These indigenous plants with medicinal properties were planted directly around the museum's walls to create a butterfly garden. Naturally growing varieties of viperine, wood strawberry, and hawthorn trees introduced by European settlers centuries ago, plants that have outlasted the early settlement buildings and continued to flourish in the wild were likewise "discovered" by MacDonald whose role was more that of an ethnobotanist than artist. Rock assemblages shaped to form footprints (an allusion to Jean Dequen's original "discovery" of this site in 1647) placed in the garden enabled visitors to move through the site without damaging the plants.

MacDonald's thesis that most plants that attract butterflies have medicinal, healing properties has resulted in subsequent reconfigurations of the butterfly garden that are a source of inspiration and healing, and painlessly beautiful. MacDonald's latest butterfly garden installed amid the ruins of Our Lady of the Prairie Church at the St. Norbert Arts Centre this summer, brought living colour to this site of a former Trappist Monastery, south of Winnipeg, in Manitoba. This heart-shaped garden was replanted with blue and white flowers, the colours used in the Catholic Marian Garden tradition. The place became a work of contemplation and healing, where past Judeo-Christian traditions brought over from the Old world were brought into perspective by a native intervention. An empty plinth overlooking the garden marks the spot where a statue once stood. The 10th in a cycle of 12 related works Patria (Homeland) by the world renowned environmental writer, educator and composer R. Murray Shafer will be performed there. The cycle relates the journey of two principal characters through the labyrinth of different cultures and social situations.

Located on the Pacific Flyway and the Fraser River Basin, the City of Vancouver has a particular environmental legacy and opportunity. To raise consciousness of songbird populations in city and country, and provide positive enhancement programs for songbird habitats in urban centres, artists Beth Carruthers and Nelson Gray, conceived of Vancouver's SongBird project after hearing the clear song of a robin rising above the background cacophony of industrial noise. Biologists, landscape architects, musicians, artists, planners, sustainability consultants and community groups assisted with the project, as did the Douglas College Institute of Urban Ecology and the Roundhouse Community Centre. Environmental concerns were expressed by specialists and city dwellers in the Living City Forum (1998 & 1999), and nature walks encouraged an awareness of urban bird habitats. FLAP (the Fatal Light Awareness Program) likewise made citizens aware of how millions of birds are killed annually in North America by collisions with office and home buildings that are unnecessarily lit up at night.

A broader than usual spectrum of the public has thus become involved in re-imagining the Georgia Basin's place in the world environmental spectrum and Vancouver has become a "songbird friendly" model for other North American cities. The core annual event of the SongBird project is the Spring Dawn Chorus Festival held in May. Begun in England 13 years ago these gatherings of people who await the songbird's dawn chorus are now celebrated around the world. The Babylon Gardens Initiative presented at the Roundhouse Community Centre, aimed at introducing to the public ways of encouraging bird populations in the city. Citizens were taught how to build feeders, nesting boxes, introduce ivy, trellises and bird baths into their home environments thus providing temporary food, habitat and water supplies for birds on balconies, rooftops, in window boxes and gardens. The Gardens of Babylon Balcony Challenge has now run for 3 years and winners are recognized for their positive bird friendly environmental interventions. The Nest, a structure woven out of willows and dried grasses by French artist and landscape architecture student Claire Bedat with assistance from public volunteers was installed outside the Roundhouse Community Centre in the fall of 1998 to celebrate humanity's connection to home, community and songbirds. As Claire Bedat says: "The making was in its essence a very intuitive rendering, as dedicated as a bird, I used each part of my body to shape and build the Nest. A nest is supposedly round, round like life, round like the body of a bird. Unconsciously I was participating in the making of a shelter, a refuge, the house of my body (...) Growth is often assimilated to change, I changed during the making of this project and feel emotionally empowered and bounded to a greater cause: preserving biodiversity on Earth."

Alan Sonfist, a pioneer of eco-sensitive projects in the 1960s and 1970s, for which his Time Landscape (1965) in Soho New York is perhaps the best known. For this project Sonfist introduced pre-contact plants, trees and vegetation to a site in New York. As Sonfist states: "One would observe, within each of the environmental sculptures, the struggle of life and death, as well as the human interaction in a historical forest. That's what the 19th century concepts were about. That is really what I am involved in, and what my thought process is trying to create. The natural cycles as opposed to doing an ecological model from a scientific point of view, or using pure history."

In the Mojave Desert at the main park in La Quinta, California, Sonfist completed a seven mile nature trail (1998) in a region of California otherwise encumbered by the introduction of non-native, northern species of trees and plants that consume unnecessary amounts of water. California bio-history is like bio-history anywhere, involves a layering of living species in the cyclical theatre of nature in time. ghost flower, bee balm, blazing star, desert star, cream cup, woolly daisy, Indian paintbrush, yellow cup, desert sienna, Devil's claw. The flux and flow of elements causes nature to reinvent itself in a myriad of ways. Sonfist's project involves reassessing each fragment of time, realize this nature layering takes place in a continuum, not one fixed moment. The locals who live near the site, seemed to favour non-natural nordic landscapes with maple trees, and grass lawns. Foreign plant and tree species are planted, landscaped into our cities and suburbs because they bring an "exotic flavour" to a place. How different is this from changing the channel on your TV in an endless search for "novelty"? Artificial environments, in this case in a desert region, require heavy watering, and are a desperate attempt to reduce biocultural diversity. Since the local indigenous plant species have been introduced to the region, the initially negative response, has been replaced by an enthusiasm about how beautiful and diverse the spectrum of flower arrangements Sonfist has brought to the place actually are. Sonfist's nature trail has become a visual laboratory of environmental understanding. The work has stimulated thought and controversy as well as providing a cathartic living environment for the people who live there. Plans are on for sculptors to introduce artworks along the trail at a later date.

For the Coast Salish Squamish nation on the West Coast of British Columbia whose numbers dwindled from 60,000 to a low of 150 after intitial contact with the white man, the world is conceived as a forest. The community of trees that grow in a forest is like a community of peoples whose health and history are inextricably linked together. Artist and activist Nancy Bleck and carver Aaron Nelson-Moody (Tawx'sin Yexwulla) have embarked on an intriguing project called Cedar People. The first stage of the project involves Nelson-Moody's carved rendition of the Society of Women in Stewardship of the Land, a "society within a society", raised from birth to act as leaders who look after the land. As Nelson-Moody states "There is no equivalent in non-Native society, as the women were as much medicinal doctors as they were environmental lawyers, as much libraries as they were land managers." A traditional ceremony has already been held to bless the log, and invitees witnessed the first stage of the transformation of this cedar wood into Slyn'i (cedar woman). Being the first of many such Welcome Figure carvings, it will be raised in a sacred site in the upper Squamish wilderness region this August. Culturally modified markings on the outside bark of ancient cedar trees can be found in such sites that indicate these places have been visited for thousands of years. Using traditional native tools, Nelson-Moody has created a twelve by three foot carving whose installation will be witnessed by the Coast Salish Squamish people and non-natives. The traditional society of women this work is dedicated to, are likewise "witnesses" who have participated through ceremony as "keepers of history". Other welcome figures will be made elsewhere, in collaboration with local carvers and participants - on site in Quebec, Germany, and Australia - locals carving traditions and motifs will be part of these initiatives.

In 1992 at M�ru in the Oise region of France, Jean-Paul Ganem created his first "agricultural composition" and this was soon followed by others in the Vend�e, Champagne, and Midi-Pyr�n�es of France and the 150 hectare Mirabel airport project in Montreal, Canada (1996). This summer, Jean-Paul Ganem has been involved in a large scale environmental sensibilization and community participation project titled Le Jardin des Capteurs. Created in collaboration with the Cirque du Soleil and Jour-Terre Quebec Le Jardin des Capteurs occupies a 2.5 hectare waste area adjacent to the Cirque du Soleil's permanent headquarters in the north of Montreal. The site referred to as the Miron Quarry, contains human waste excrement up to 100 feet in depth. Gas emission pipes (up to 400 feet below the surface), sporadically dot the surface of the land like periscopes. Operated by Gazmont Plant nearby, the gas pipe emissions provide natural gas/methane power for 10,000 homes. Ganem's art project involves youth from the St. Michel region of Montreal and volunteers from Montreal's Botanical Gardens. Thus beautified, Ganem's site intervention changes public perception of garbage and waste dumps, not only for the volunteers, but equally for those who visit the place or see it from the air. An end of the world wasteland becomes a beautiful rendition of the circus Big Top with colourful wedge-like land marks and overlapping circular motifs in varying dimensions. All this is made of living plant and flower species: red and yellow Cosmos, pink and red petunias, colza, beard-grass, wild heliotrope and buckwheat.. The colourful land markings and motifs overlap, with varying circular dimensions and shapes. An undulating path makes its way through the planting... Directional markers point to the more formidable areas of the Miron Quarry/Dump that will, over the coming years, be landscaped and transformed into a more substantial city park with a hill at its centre. Next year perennials will replace the present planting. Le Jardin des Capteurs introduces the notion that sites for human waste, the detritus of our urban consumer society can be recycled and beautified as sites, just as the goods and waste that end up there can be.

Approaching such initiatives from the aesthetic and design perspective Belgian artist Bob Verschueren is an artist who specializes in making vegetal art out of vegetal matter. His most impressive works include the Wind Paintings which are nothing less than spectacular. The Wind Paintings comprise lines of natural pigment that are dispersed by wind action. It was the unpredictability of the result that initially attracted Verschueren to this kind of art making. The experience came about after Verschueren quit traditional painting and found himself "no longer confronted by the limits of this horrible rectangle. The subject extended beyond any traditional aesthetic framework. A battle lost before you start one could say! One could not measure a work, one does not know what comprises the last grain of pigment, where it will go..." Vershueren lays variously coloured pigments in lines along stretches of sand for his Wind Paintings. Nature does the rest. The action of wind on the pigment turns the land surface into the canvas for these artworks.

German artist Mario Reis makes "nature watercolours" by placing a base material in flowing water and allowing the mineral and vegetal sediment transported in the water to accumulate on its surface. Water is the paintbrush that moves and dispaces the sediment and colour on these square canvases. Reis finds these configurations of silt, sand and sediment drawn from rivers all over North America in places as varied as the Yukon, British Columbia, Idaho, Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan, Alaska, Wyoming and Kansas to be as confounding in their variety of hues, shades, textures as any old fashioned artwork and much more challenging. Reis' likewise enacts such works in Mexico, Europe, Africa, and Japan. They are a powerful reflection on natural diversity. His approach is rigorous and truly global in scope.

The growth of an interactive approach to working with environment implies an acceptance of ourselves, as much as nature. These artists' actions carry a narrative on human history within their work, but circumvent artistic conventions of reproduction, containment and mimesis. Nature and art are less critically segregated, life takes precedence over the art. Links are established between human culture and the culture of nature. With each successive experimentation this new language of expression that involves understanding our place in nature become better understood. Elements from nature are the paint and nature is the canvas. Artists are the catalysts. There is no subject or object. This earth sensitive language of expression is tactile, physical and plays visually with various organic and inorganic elements in a given site. The creative growth experience is interactive. As we enhance our understanding of nature's place in our society, our civilization, our personal lives, so we better understand that our society's future will inevitably involve understanding and respecting nature's processes. Nature's endemic role as source and provider is what will enable us to achieve sustainability for all forms of life the earth in the future.

John K. Grande

- previously published in Public Art Review (Vol. 12, No. 1, Issue 23) Fall Winter 2000 issue

Writer and art critic John Grande's reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photography, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, The Globe & Mail, Circa & Canadian Forum. The author of Balance: Art and Nature (Black Rose Books, 1994), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998) and Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engag� (Montreal: Lanctot, 2001). John Grande has published numerous catalogue essays on selected artists and has taught art history at Bishops University. He co-authored Judy Garfin: Natural Disguise (Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1998) and Nils-Udo: Art with Nature (Wienand Verlag, Koln, Germany 2000) and his latest book is David Sorensen: Abstraction From Here to Now (Centre culturel Yvonne L. Bombardier, Valcourt, 2001) Mr. Grande's Art Nature Dialogues will be published by SUNY Press in 2003.

© 2009 greenmuseum.org

above from: http://greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=109

Alan Sonfist: a natural history, John K. Grande

Interview conducted by John Grande Montreal, Canada, October, 2008

Public nature: public art
Alan Sonfist is a visionary figure whose 40-year carrer in art has explored the relationship between natural history and human history. His works are driven by a sense of the past existing within the present. In the US, his most recognised piece of work is Time Landscape, situated on Houston Street in Manhattan. Here in the UK he's been working most recently with the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World in Devon. Curator and art writer John Grande caught up with Alan Sonfist recently in Montreal, Canada.

A pioneer of public art that celebrates our links to the land, Alan Sonfist is an artist who has sought to bridge the great gap between humanity and nature by making us aware of the ancient and contemporary nature - geology, landforms and living species - that are part of "living history". With a reawakening of public awareness of environmental issues and of a need to regenerate our living planet Sonfist brings a much needed awareness of nature's parallel and often unrecorded history and present in contemporary life and art.

As early as 1965 Sonfist advocated the building of monuments dedicated to the history of unpolluted air, and suggested the migration of animals should be reported as public events. In an essay published in 1968 titled Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments, Sonfist emancipated public art from focussing exclusively on human history stating: "As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs, and natural outcroppings need to be remembered. Public art can be a reminder that the city was once a forest or a marsh."

Alan Sonfist continues to advocate, in his urban and rural artworks, projects that heighten our awareness of the historical geology or terrain of a place, earth cores become a symbol of the deeper history or geology of the land. His art emphasizes the layered and complex intertwining of human and natural history. He has bequeathed his body as an artwork to the Museum of Modern Art. Its decay is seen as an ongoing part of the natural life cycle process.

Here we are in Montreal after a visit to the Laurentians and we have just heard of Barack Obama’s victory. How are you Alan?

Great. It’s a beautiful day and I am looking forward to the United States future president Barack Obama taking office. He is a visionary of change in our society and has addressed in numerous speeches that we are entering into global warming because of our complete dependence on fossil fuels. In Köln, Germany I am creating a sculpture about global warming and the rhythms of our planet. The sculpture will visualize, for the viewer, the fragility of our planet.

Water has also become a major environmental issue in our society. Are you working on any projects concerning water?

I proposed in New York City to create a park where the original water source of the city would be flowing. The sculpture would filter the ancient water and allow the public to engage in the historic streams of the city. I first proposed to expose the natural springs of New York in 1971 for Earth Day.

The early land artists there was nothing ecological at all about their situational events. It was basically after Minimalism, it was getting out of the galleries. Actual nature had not much to do with it… Landscape as real estate perhaps.

Exactly. The essence of my art began in my childhood when I witnessed the destruction of the forest, walking in the Bronx. I was and still am captivated by the magic of the ancient forest. People in the community set fires and destroyed the forest. I realized at that moment that my life would be dedicated to educating people about the value of natural areas within urban environments. My art is consistently about the environment and calling attention to natural events that occur in urban and suburban environments. I see my art as a social discourse within a community. All great public art creates conversation within the community. We have to make a decision about how we create public art. Is public art going to just be a decoration that has very little meaning for the community or will it engage in a dialogue with that community? That is the important difference between my projects and those of the early land artists… I have always interacted with city residents while other artists were involved in creating remote land interventions in places where there was no connection with the community. 

A flight of geese could be celebrated instead of a war as a public event, and hence a living monument…

We should celebrate natural events as opposed to wars. I propose to create within every community public art that celebrates its unique natural history. An early quote of mine stated, “We have landmark buildings, we should create landmark nature within urban and suburban areas.” Since we are actively destroying the world’s natural heritage, I propose that public art be created to celebrate the lost natural environments of our communities.

Public art need not only reference architecture and the urban site, but it can also reference nature. In that sense you were ahead of the landscape architects.
Yes, I was invited to MIT as an artist by the architectural program to set up a dialogue with the architects on how nature could be brought into architecture. Collaboration with the community, architects and landscape architects, is a crucial element of my work and it always has been.

And what evolved from the MIT experience?

I found at MIT an enthusiastic forum of scientists and architects who all wanted to work together with me to create large-scale civic projects. We all worked together on an ecological project for the Charles River.

So the crossover is very important especially in the realm of art at this stage isn’t it?

Over the years I have collaborated with experts throughout the world. I am currently working with scientists and architects in creating a new section for the city of Florence, Italy. We are creating a large environmental sculpture that will bring back the ancient vegetation of Tuscany. The park will be surrounded by the evolution of the city’s human history. Thus the collaboration will bridge the contemporary buildings with their ancient past,

The Time Landscape you created in New York City near Washington Square in New York… How did it all start? How did the project get going? 

I approached the community and said I had an idea to create a historical landscape within the historic boundaries of Greenwich Village which is one of the earlier settlements in New York City. Immediately I got a very strong endorsement from the local residents. Within that community there were two very strong advocates of creating green spaces - Jane Jacobs and Ruth Wittenborn. They had not thought about the idea of history but they wanted to create more green spaces. To me both were pioneers. They were the ones who literally stopped Robert Moses massive highway system from going through Greenwich Village, and they substituted my Time Landscape for what would have been the Moses Highway. The Time Landscape is a historical natural landscape showing the juxtaposition of the indigenous people, and the colonials – how they interacted in the land using the context of a natural flora. 

Is there some reference to the early Dutch settlers in your plantings? 

The Dutch and English colonial diaries provided me insight into the native vegetation on the island in the earliest European period of settlement.

In more recent projects such as the Florida Natural Cultural landscape in Tampa you literally create living landscapes that reference different geological and natural historical eras by planting the various living species from those eras. It all becomes a composite and multi-layered natural history that spans centuries and reflects changes from human intervention in a landscape.

The city of Tampa invited me to collaborate with a landscape architect and architect to develop a public waterfront area for the city. We had numerous meetings discussing with the community and the government about how the area could be made into a unique public space. My contribution was to create an environmental sculpture with a relief mural carved into the concrete sidewalk reflecting the historical evolution of the city. I juxtaposed the original natural landscape with the contemporary skyscrapers. It started with a traditional Spanish garden leading to an ice age landscape. The crucial element is that each one is self-sustaining.

Was that in the Spanish colonial historical area of the city? 

Yes it is connected to the Spanish colonial areas. I paid homage to the early settlers by using the traditional Spanish columns and then creating living versions of them. The sculptural columns were living systems with ancient and Spanish vegetation growing on them thereby becoming a living testament to natural history.
 
And the walkways are in the forms of leaf shapes… Is that right?

Everything echoes the historical evolution. Each leaf form represents a different forest, or type of vegetation that existed in Tampa. It starts with contemporary and then goes to a prehistoric waterfront landscape where I planted trees that would have grown there several thousand years ago. So each little niche in the leaf, creates another form of the historical landscape… The walkways themselves are not just walkways. They mimic the movement of the trains through the area. They mimic the footprints of the indigenous peoples of the area, the movements of the colonial people. It has multiple layers, and impressions on the land.

Is there a link to the shoreline with the walkways?

It connects directly to the shoreline so that people can walk from the street to the water.

And in at Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany you presented a natural history installation in the park area. 

I was paying homage to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor. I was inspired by the original fortification of Aachen, which I miniaturized and placed in the forest that would have existed during Charlemagne’s time. Thus the fortification becomes the protector of the forest. 

In the art gallery shows you often reference your natural historical approach as well. You did core samples under the city of Köln, I believe, for instance.

In Köln I was invited to do a commission for the opening of the new Ludwig Museum. I was commissioned by the museum to uncover the geological history of the city. It was a living history, covered by concrete. By drilling in different strategic locations of Köln, I was able to expose this living geological history. Then I laid the corings out like a tablet, revealing the geologic secrets of the city. 

Journey to the Centre of the Earth with apologies to Jules Verne… And your Circles of Time project in Italy, is one of your most innovative and fascinating. Very often in landscape architecture natural features or topography is referenced, but very seldom do they build a narrative out of the intertwining of natural and human history as you have there. Can you comment?

The Circles of Time was an echo of the rings of a tree. It became a metaphor to show the ages of the earth, each ring or circle represents a different time frame. It starts out at the central core with the original forest that existed in Tuscany, then moves to the Etruscan use of the land, where they would plant various herbs and forms of vegetation for their own food sources. The environmental sculpture then continues through the eras of the place. Each stone was laid into the site as if this were a geological history of the area, and the layout mimics the hills of Tuscany. The last ring was in an agricultural area, containing olive trees and wheat fields. The local farmers actually would collect the harvest, thus it became a truly public sculpture.

So these last elements have a function. The olive trees and wheat fields establish a significant role, by linking with the agriculture and the local community.

Exactly. So that is the crucial element for all my projects, that they do not disconnect from or impose on the community. The public art integrates with the city. I was pleased that the workers and community on the Italian project had a picnic party afterwards to celebrate the public art, as they did after my project in Denmark.

Yes, Let's get to Denmark, At Tickon on the island of Langeland in Denmark which has a number of major works by Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash and many others artist who work with nature, you made a work that reference that bio-region of the world. Tell me about that…

I spent several months observing the topography of Denmark. I observed ancient burial grounds that contained stone ships. I thought “Why don’t I create a stone ship and instead of paying homage to the humans again, pay homage to the oaks that created the ships.” Again, as with so many human events, the Danes overcut the timber for the ships, so this particular oak used for the Viking ships was almost extinct. The lands became deforested. So here I am, again, within this stone ship planting over one thousand oaks of this endangered species, so now the stone ship instead of protecting a burial ground, becomes a life force, and a protector of the forest of the future of Denmark.

And Alan, did Joseph Beuys influence your work?

I was always a great admirer of his work. I will never forget, we were in Documenta 7 together. I shared a space next to him. Beuys was exhibiting his classic, wonderful Fat Machine and I had my presentation of my Time Landscape that I had just completed construction of in New York. My space in Documenta was a series of cubist photographs representing the ancient forests of New York. He spent much time in my exhibit discussing the ancient trees of New York. I feel we had a very common bond in our understanding of the environment. We also talked about our childhoods and our connection to nature. I think if he had lived we would have had a collaboration.

As the landscape is becoming increasingly transformed, imposed upon, and so on, by human intervention, do you believe the role of the artist, and the public artist, in particular, could be to reinvigorate an idea of nature, as much as the nature itself, within the public art project? Nature is all around us, transformed, but often doesn’t look like nature. Do you think it should look like nature?

I agree with you. That is why I called my work a Time Landscape, because nature is constantly changing. We are going into global warming now, and we had various ice ages. Nature is not a fixed object, its in transformation, existing in a continuum. I select different elements of time in these natural cultural landscapes. I am now working with the City of Florence. The team and I are creating a Time Landscape, visualizing the ancient olive tree. 

What does the word “integration” mean to you?

It means that I am working with the community, the landscape architect, and the architect. Furthermore the art piece itself interacts with the people. 

I am very excited about the la Quinta, California nature trail you created in 1992. You are actually designing and creating the walking paths and routes in the landscape at la Quinta, as well as reintroducing indigenous species. 

The waterworks part of the government had built a one hundred year trench that was intended to prevent flooding on the community. The trench was simply dumped on the desert. The community was up in arms because they could see this dump area from their windows. So they demanded all this material be removed. I was invited to work with the Waterworks people and the community, so this is where the integration comes in. Immediately the Waterworks people said it would cost us over million to remove the rubble. They said, “We can’t do it. Can you come up with a solution?” I came up with using indigenous plants, which needed minimal care. It cost less to do my project and it created a beautiful nature walk. The public schools as well as nature groups are now utilizing the park.

I think of those early bronze tree forms you made that were assemblages of various trees species spliced to form one tree. 

Again it was about endangered trees. Similar to my original statements saying we have to create nature monuments, I thought who are the heroes of our society but trees. So trees are monuments we should pay homage to. The bronze sculptures were all relics of trees that I collaged together. They are exact replicas of fallen limbs, paying homage to the endangered trees of the earth. At an exhibition in the Ludwig Museum in Aachen, I created a series of natural and the bronzed copies or limbs. They were displayed together, the original natural limb or branch was worth 3,000 dollars and the bronze was worth 3 dollars. We must place more value on our natural heritage. 

How important is the visual in these assembled public art landscapes?

I am an artist first, so the visual is important but the message is equally important. It has to be beautiful. A review of my art at the Albright-Knox Museum said that my work is quite beautiful and people enjoy it. So I wrote to the critic who wrote that, and I said “Thank you”. He called me up and said that he meant that as a criticism. And I said, “To me it is not a criticism. Art should bring a sense of life and a positive force in the community.” 

And so a work made at Three Mile Island, Pool of Virgin Earth made at Lewiston, New York…

That was done in the early 1970s, before they understood the technology of how they could seal a toxic area. I worked with scientists on that project. They actually expanded it, and it became a whole landscape. They then grew a forest on the land…

The motor car seems to be part of the problem. There is no accounting for the transport and resource costs for these new developments and no future vision.

I think these are some of the causes that need to be addressed by artists. Walking and observing is one of the crucial elements that I use in my work. My original proposal for the city of New York in 1965 was to create a series of integrated historical landscapes in every community throughout the city, and the would be connected by a path represented by the ancient pathways of pre-European Manhattan. 

And I believe there was a forest that played a major role in your work.

I grew up in the south central Bronx where there was a hemlock forest, which has been totally destroyed. The city is actively trying to restore it.

The forest and nature influenced you positively. Nature can be something that can move us in a positive direction and pubic art projects using nature as well.

Swedish sociologists did a study on urban nature, and they asked the citizens what they liked. And an overwhelming percentage of respondents said, “We want more trees.” This became the essence of my planning projects for Sweden.

Your photo collage works exhibited in art galleries are so different from the works of Hamish Fulton or Richard Long. They aren’t concept-based but are like multiple moments in a walk through a landscape. These are not individual views of a forest interior, but multiple time sequenced views that exist together, like a metaphor for the continuum nature exists in.

That is what I am trying to do. Each one of these collages is not formulated. It is more my body movement in relation to the photograph, my body as it moves through the forest. The photographs are an active element, and present the way I observe the forest. The photographs become cubist photograph of time.

There is a strong link between performance art, with artists like Allan Kaprow, yourself and many others, and an art that embraces ecology. Performance art was very much was one of the keystones for an art working with nature and the pubic earth art that came in the future. 

I agree with you. Kaprow to me was a very important artist because he tried to integrate art back into the community in a performance manner. In some ways, you could say these photo collage landscapes, open the door for people to walk into them. 

So you believe in a social or cultural context for art.

There has to be a social commitment. People have lost the idea that public art means public and that is the crucial element. For my projects to be successful they have to involve the enjoyment of the public, not just the art community. One of the most important comments that was said of my first public project, was a local baker who came from across the street to see my Time Landscape. He said, “I don’t know if this is art, but I like it!”

A lot of your art moves us away from the idea of art as object, even from the idea of image as object in an electronic era of data communication. The image as object does not go much further than the physical object really. Integration in a living community of art and nature, and people in a society could be the real art.

I think for art to function in the 21st century it has to be involved in the community. I call it the markers of time, or markers of understanding one’s environment. The Time Landscape was not conceived as just one element. I wanted it to be integrated throughout the entire city. I wanted it to be a balance between historical nature and vegetation and contemporary architecture – a dialogue and this is what the function of public art is.

C.P. Snow talked about the links between science and art, and their creative connectivity. Do you agree with this?

Absolutely. One of the crucial elements of our society is trying to understand ourselves. Science, like art, is one of the measures of how we become aware of who we are. I utilize that in my work all the time.

I am thinking of the survival of civilizations as Jared Diamond describes in his book Collapse. Don’t we have to consider the relation between nature and society, in the way we build, invent, design our lives.

One of the classical examples, was Ephesus, a city and one of the eight wonders of the world. They had a choice, whether to build more sculptural and religious icons or to clean their harbour. They didn’t clean their harbour. All they did was build more and more religious icons and sculptures. And now historically the city is abandoned and its twenty miles away from the ocean. That is where you have to take time into consideration as you are creating your environmental public artworks. That is why is my recent landscape projects I have been taking into consideration global warming on how I create these landscapes.

With a view to where things will be in the future, and climate, and water.

Water becomes a crucial element in these landscapes as well as the climate change and how it affects the vegetation. I am currently working on a global warming sculpture for the city of Koln Germany. The sculpture captures the past present and future rhythms of our planet.

Can you tell me about your project in Devon at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World enacted this past summer?

The sculpture involves the head forester of the community as well as the cultural committee. The issue is that they now have a contemporary exotic forest and they want to bring back the ancient indigenous forest. Because my art is about integration I am currently collaborating with a local architect and historian to create an island connecting the ancient human population to the vegetation that exited in that time. I am creating a Celtic icon that will protect and provide space to regenerate the ancient indigenous forest of England. The chief forester is so enthusiastic about the proposal that he wants to integrate into other forest areas as well as into the community schools.

Do you think there is a cultural specificity to the way cultural landscapes are designed, as for instance with the Japanese Garden, which is severely orchestrated and has its own aesthetic. Do you think there is a particular aesthetic with North American land art and landscaping?

I admire the Japanese landscapers. It has a very absolute view of a landscape. I find it to be challenging and magical as it equally would be looking at the French or English landscape, which is very much what the American landscape is about. It is an offshoot of that. In that sense what I do is totally not referential to either Japanese or to the European landscape. What I am using is scientific knowledge to create these landscapes. Science is what dictates the actual landscape and not formal or aesthetic of landscape design. Formal design comes secondary to the actual scientific understanding of the land.

So you would recommend as a strategy for young land and earth artists involved in the public sphere, to try venues outside the art world, natural history museums, botanical gardens and so on and so forth?

All my art involves a clear understanding of environmental issues and their unique relationship with the local community. Within the 21st century we have to redefine the role of the artist as an individual who is actively seeking solutions to improve our world.
Sonfist's art has been exhibited internationally at Dokumenta VI (1977), Tickon in Denmark (1993), and in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1975), the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y. (1978), the Los Angeles County Museum (1985), the Osaka World's Fair (1988), Santa Fe Contemporary Art Center (1990), the Museum of Natural History in Dallas, Texas (1994). Best known for his Natural/Cultural Landscape Commissions which began in 1965 with Time Landscape in Greenwich Village, and include Pool of Virgin Earth, Lewiston, N.Y. (1973), Hemlock Forest, Bronx, N.Y. (1978), Ten Acre Project, Wave Hill, N.Y. (1979), Geological Timeline, Duisburg, Germany (1986), the Rising Earth Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. (1990), Natural/Cultural Landscape, Trento, Italy (1993), a 7-mile Sculpture Nature Trail in La Quinta, California (1998), as well as Natural/Cultural Landscapes created for the Curtis Hixon Park in Tampa in Florida (1995) and Aachen, Germany (1999). Sonfist is currently working on a three and a half-mile sculptural nature walk in LaQuinta, California, an Environmental Island outside of Berlin, and The Great Bay Fountain for architect Richard Meier in Islip N.Y..

The curator of Earth Artshows at the Royal Botanical Gardens (www.rbg.ca) this past summer and autumn, John Grande has contributed to many publications over the years including Artforum, Art Papers, Art on Paper, Vie des Arts, Canadian Art, Border Crossings, la Revue Espace, Arts Review (UK), British Journal of Photography and Photoicon (UK), John Grande’s recent publications include Art Nature Dialogues (SUNY Press, New York, 2004 www.sunypress.edu), Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream (Pari Publishing, Italy, 2007 www.paripublishing.com), and Art Allsorts: Writing on Art & Artists (2008 available at www.lulu.com). Visit his website www.grandescritique.com.

Original post: http://www.artsandecology.org.uk/magazine/features/alan-sonfist

Interview with Siân Ede, William Shaw

Use and beauty | Siân Ede unravels preconceptions about the purposes of art

Siân Ede is Director of Arts at the Gulbenkian Foundation in the UK. There she initiated a ground-breaking Arts and Science programme, encouraging artists from all art forms to engage with science and technology. With broad experience in fine arts, drama and literature, she frequently chairs and speaks on panels about science and art. She's also the author of Art and Science, and the co-author of Strange and Charmed: Science and the contemporary visual arts.
What, we wondered, did she think of the objectives of the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre? How "useful" is art when it comes to creating social change?
Siân Ede talks to RSA Arts & Ecology's William Shaw.


In Art & Science you write about how scientists talk about the elegance and beauty of a project, but also from the 20th century onwards, you say that artists never do. How has that come about?
I think it's because scientists have a vision of the world as something that is implicitly perfect, and it is their job to find out how it works. This would be particularly true of physicists and mathematicians because they're Platonists, and you can't underestimate the effect of classical thinking - Plato and Aristotle being, in a way, the two sides. This is my philosophical take on it, but I can talk it through as well.
Plato does have this idea of the perfect world that came with the ideal forms. And in mathematics you get people like Marcus du Sautoy, all the time saying he's looking for pattern, and the pattern is an indication that there is a mega-pattern to be found. And I think they go off with a spring in their step every morning because they find things that somehow confirm this and then sometimes don't. But even when they don't they're still finding it. I think that biologists are more Aristotlean and they are more about, "What do my senses tell me?" and "How do I find things out every step of the way?" But I still think there's an implicate way of thinking about things, even though evolution, as we know it, is what biology is based on, it is about the accidental. Physicists would say that it's only responding to the implicate universe.
In the arts we are rooted in the experience of being human. It's a subjective experience. And ultimately we know we die. That is at the heart of it. And so even a concept of beauty has a kind of sense of time passing in it. I did an event at the ICA the other week, Can Art Make Us Happy?, and I said, "Look, there are four latin phrases: tempus fugit, mememto mori, carpe diem and vanitas. And they are all about the poignancy of time passing."
Even though the Romantics were interested in science and enthusiastic about it, Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn is a central poem for me. It's absolutely central! The people frozen round, "For ever panting, and for ever young", on the point between one thing or another - yet in life we're full of grief. There's this terrible contrast between the ideal and a fantastic sadness.
Then you get the 20th century and there's an awareness that the world is full of grief and wars – I suppose there's always been an awareness of that – and then since Duchamp, a world full of irony. So if there is humour, if there is a lightness of heart, it's tinged with irony and misery.

People think there must be a use for art in issues around the environment – and we believe there is – but quite often they misconstrue what that use is.
Yes. Artists never use the word “use”. What Kant says about art is it's purposiveness without a purpose. And it is a response to the world in any number of interesting different ways because all the artists are looking at it slightly differently. So there is a fundamental problem for me, and I think for the RSA too, and for the Arts Council, about asking artists to make things that have a utility, that are issue-based, in the jargon. You'll get people like Cornelia Parker saying "as an individual I am very moved by the politics and the ethics of environmental issues, but I can't do that in my art." It's not how it works. Because the arts are much more complex and do not have a particular purpose.
Obviously there will be some artworks that have a particular purpose, and interestingly the attitude to nature that we hold enshrined because of Romanticism, means that we are now aware that nature is no longer the nature that it was. Romanticism came about in response to the industrialisation of the countryside. Now we know nature is no longer the sublime, the transcendent, the beautiful, the God-given. It is tainted. It is sad. It is ending.
You can't say, "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!" any more like Shelley did, without being aware that the lark is in decline. If you read the Shelley again you read it with this new awareness and you bring this awareness to it.

Is there a problem then with a project like Arts & Ecology - or is there only a problem if you think about it in terms of "use"?
Oh, subtle question. I mean, you could say, arts and sport, or arts and economics, couldn't you? And arts and anything? In fact my book Art and Science is part of a series of books that are art and anything... Art and Medicine, Art and Sex, and in a way you're just making an interpretive selection. "Ok, let's look towards all the art that looks at the environment, and look at environmental issues." Which is different from being an agenda given to artists. Of course, how can you not make art about the environment? Nobody's isolated.

So Arts & Ecology, or Art and Science, gives you a pair of critical glasses through which to look?
Yes. Yes it does.

I'm going to eat away at this some more because it's obviously of huge concern for us as a project. Matthew Taylor asks the question, "Given that artists are publicly funded and educated why should they not then be obliged to look directly at a social agenda?"
That is an enormously utilitarian question to ask. And it's not one that I could possibly ask because I think art just is. I don't think anybody said to Shakespeare, "What are you doing this for?" I don't think anyone said to Samuel Beckett, "Give us a list of your aims and objectives." Or, "What are the outcomes?" I would never expect artists to answer that even though I think every brush stroke or word is going to be influenced by the politics of their time.

Another argument in relation to social change is that artists are individualists. It's an individualist practice. And it's justified by art. You've got to let them do what they do because they're artists. But we're in a crisis of individualism right now; you could say it's individualism that has got us into this mess.
That's very interesting...yes.

So artists have to change at this point? Do they have to think more collectively? Is there a possibility of a different culture? If art is what it is at any time, can it change?
I think what you say is a profoundly interesting observation, because art came out of human development about 60,000 years ago at the same time as religion and it had a function - if you want to call metaphysics a function. It had a function in giving you a vision of the other world, side-by-side with religion and probably was shamanistic. And it was cohesive; it was there to keep the society together.
I think that one of the great turning points in English literature – we're talking about the beginning of modernism – is Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech, because I think that's as much to do with the individual as it is to do with the social responsibility, and the rise of the individual is something that happened in modernism.
Until then art was about the collective experience, even if Chaucer and others wrote about the individual. The rise of the individual went through to Freud, which is of course about the "me", and in the 20th and 21st centuries we have been in the centuries of the single person - the outsider. "What is my role?" was enshrined by Sartre and Camus and existentialism. "I have nothing to do with anyone else. I am not part of anyone else."
I am enormously interested in trying to see how far we really are collective and no longer individual and I think it's very interesting to look at neuroscience. That's why I love this question. I'm a bit sceptical about evolutionary psychology. I think we are far more about collective biology than we are willing to acknowledge.
Just before Christmas I did a symposium called Embodied Mind on the neuroscience of performance at RADA, and Antonio Damasio, who is one of the experts on neuroscience of emotion and feeling, was there, as was Raymond Tallis, who is again very interested in the phenomenology of the body, and the playwright Caryl Churchill. We were talking about what's going on in the mind and the fact that the body and the mind are as one. The body expresses the mind and the mind expresses the body. Somebody asked Antonio Damasio about collective behaviour and swarming in animals and he said, well actually that is what's going on in the brain. There is no ghost in the machine, it is all a mass of signalling. I think it's the most interesting idea - that there is not a me. There is an illusion of a me, but it is all swarming and it is better seen as the sum of its parts.

What a great metaphor, at least.
Isn't it? Now it's quite difficult to analyse a society that is complex. We're not living in a village any more. I think there's a lot of interest in the way in which we communicate and act as a body.
Now, your question had political undertones. You're saying it's the responsibility of artists as social creatures, in the global village if you like, to be the voice of conscience. I think that's a fair comment. They probably are. They wouldn't.... express themselves as such. (I'm worried about the word express because people think artists are "expressing themselves". They're not. They're making art.) But I think their interest is very often in collective issues. Very interestingly at the last Venice Biennale - two years ago - there was a huge amount of documentary work, photography, art about the Middle East's problems, the world in environmental crisis. This was shown as art. It's already becoming the collective responsibility as opposed to the old-fashioned idea of the artists communing with his muse.

When it comes to discussing the environment, a lot of art becomes naturally apocalyptic and dark. Is that problematic?
I think what artists like doing is setting up a scenario and then trying to work out what will happen. It's no accident that a lot of writers at the moment are writing books set in the near future, Doris Lessing, Paul Theroux, Margaret Atwood. Lots of writers are projecting into the future and it's almost like they are saying, "Ok, let's imagine what's going to happen?" Faye Weldon's wonderful at this.

Finally, with the economic crisis, do you see a change coming in art?
Well according to the Art Newspaper, which is my Bible in these things, of course there will be because a lot of people who buy art are very rich people. You could argue it's not all bad because some investors - caricatured as the Russian oligarchs - overinflated the price of art, and bought thoughtlessly. I tend to hope some idea of the idea of value and price would be separated off. Apparently the historical art marketplace is holding very strong and it's the more frivolous art pieces - fashion really - which are losing value.


Siân Ede is the Arts Director of the Gulbenkian Foundation and is author Art and Science, and editor and author of Strange and Charmed, Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts.
Above copied from: http://www.artsandecology.org.uk/magazine/features/interview--sin-ede

The rise of climate-change art, Madeleine Bunting

Artists are waking up to climate change. But what good can they do – and how green is their work? Cornelia Parker, Gary Hume and Keith Tyson reveal how they're dealing with the threat of catastrophe


Image - Biospheres - Tomás Saraceno's Biospheres at the Rethink exhibition in Copenhagen. Photograph: Anders Sune Berg

A floating plastic bubble, so hi-tech it is lighter than air, is attached by ropes to the walls of the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. As I step gingerly on to its see-through floor, I can peer down at the gallery 100ft below. When I'm joined by one of the museum staff, I become unsteady. We crawl around this airborne plastic yurt like babies and then, feeling giddy, stop to sit and talk about how our children might end up living in a city of such bubbles, sealed off from a contaminated earth; about who might be lucky enough to have such a refuge; how they might sing their children lullabies of a lost earth. It's an eerie conversation to have with a stranger, both of us imagining a deeply tragic future that seems highly plausible.

This installation, by Argentinian architect-artist Tomás Saraceno, is the biggest in Rethink, a series of contemporary art exhibitions taking place across Copenhagen ahead of next week's climate change summit. When I tell Saraceno of my experience in his bubble, he is delighted. "Perfect," he laughs. This, he says, is the role art has to play in tackling climate change. "Art is about trying to rethink the things you take for granted."

Saraceno is one of several artists appearing at Copenhagen and in the Royal Academy's Earth show, which opens in London this week. Some activists have wondered why the art world has been slow to grasp the significance of climate change, so you could argue that these exhibitions represent a dramatic awakening. Curators on both sides of the North sea say the response from artists has been so enthusiastic that they could have filled their spaces twice over. And both report unusually enthusiastic support from governments: the Department of Energy and Climate Change has paid for a free guide for every visitor to Earth. It's as if politicians, recognising the limits of their ability to engage the public on this issue, are turning in desperation to other means of communicating the enormity of what is at stake. "I didn't want penguins or icebergs," says Kathleen Soriano, one of Earth's curators. "There's nothing literal. We're not offering information – if visitors want that, we have a website. We wanted people to have an aesthetic response."

That emphasis is evident, but with the beauty comes a sinister undertow. In Copenhagen, Acid Rain, by Bright Ugochukwu Eke, consists of 6,000 hanging plastic bags. They sparkle, grey, clear and black, like Christmas decorations, but they contain carbon dust – currently choking the inhabitants of the delta region of Nigeria, an area of massive oil exploration. At first glance, the work of the Chinese artist Yao Lu appears to be an idealised landscape of mountains and clouds, but look more closely and you'll see that it's an urban waste dump.

A chilling lecture at Cern

Gary Hume's work, The Industrialist, is a lead tracing of a factory chimney billowing smoke. He calls it an epitaph for industrialists, but admits he finds the brief a challenge. "How do you depict global catastrophe?" he says. "I'm too selfish to describe the world's dilemma, so I describe my own paltry dilemma of what it's like to be alive."

Hume describes his involvement with Cape Farewell – an initiative to bring artists and scientists together, in Hume's case on a trip to the Arctic – as "completely beautiful, [but] hard to relate to my life". He recycles, grows vegetables, has made his house fuel-efficient, but acknowledges painful contradictions. "The people who do the most damage [environmentally] buy my work, and I'm not using ecologically sound paint. I feel like apologising – I can't help the world. Climate change is too big for my art. My painting is a small thing, like a child might do." Hume talks of the possibility of millions dying, but he is wary of visual art's long-held fascination with apocalypse. Nature's indifference to human survival has left him with no grand ambitions – only a modest, if deeply uncomfortable, determination to offer "solace".

Keith Tyson echoes this notion of humility. Nature Painting, an intense work on show in Earth, was made by mixing toxic chemicals with pigment, echoing natural forms such as cell formations. "Nature has an intelligence far greater than us," Tyson says. "We talk about saving the earth, but we're really talking about saving ourselves. The earth can look after itself." Tyson attended a lecture on climate change at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and home of the Hadron Collider: "It was a scientist talking to other scientists and it was horrific – far worse than people imagine. Terrifying."

The experience clarified his sense of the artist's role. "It is not to advocate solutions. It is something much deeper and more subtle – to make us reflect and rethink what it is to be a human being in the 21st century. We don't have that much power. It's nature that creates us. That's the kind of education too subtle to put on a syllabus: that's the important role of art."

Curator Soriano was aware of these competing perspectives when she put Earth together. "I didn't want to be preachy," she says, and is nervous of any suggestion that the exhibition is the most political the Royal Academy has mounted. In fact, says Anne Sophie Witzke, Rethink's project manager, the galleries involved in Copenhagen have been cautious: no one wants to be accused of propaganda.

This timidity is a source of frustration for the arts group Platform, which for over 20 years has worked to marry art and activism. "The arts stumble along the fault line between representation and transformation," says the organisation's James Marriott. "But, until 50 or so years ago, all art was about transformation and persuasion. Look at Goya: he wanted to persuade you of the horrors of war."

Art, Marriott thinks, is rediscovering a sense of purpose. In the last 50 days, Platform has curated 100 events at the Arnolfini Centre in Bristol; many of the featured artists will be joining activists in Copenhagen during the summit.

Huge carbon footprint

Marriott is delighted that climate change is finally attracting the attention it needs. "The more the merrier," he says, rejecting the criticism that artists are climbing on a green bandwagon. He is scathing, however, of the continuing blindness of artists, curators and institutions to their own enormous carbon footprints. "They lug lumps of wood around the world for exhibitions. Printing a catalogue on recycled paper is pathetic tokenism – no FTSE company would get away with that." Contemporary art is an expensive, global business. Artists, curators and the works all end up flying, while galleries themselves require expensive climactic conditions. Indeed, curators in London and Copenhagen admit they have no idea of the carbon cost of their exhibitions.

Charlie Kronick is the senior climate change adviser at Greenpeace. "The real role is not about using artists to leverage our message up the agenda," he says, "but for the artist to make this agenda their own. It is important they maintain their authenticity." Campaign initiatives have made a big impact on a number of artists (Ian McEwan and Antony Gormley have spoken enthusiastically about their Cape Farewell experiences), but many, such as Cornelia Parker, feel daunted by the need to respond to something so huge.

"I try to do my bit," says Parker, "as a citizen, an artist and in my everyday life." She has cut down on flying and offsets the flights she takes. But she confesses that her piece for the Earth show, Heart of Darkness, carbon frag-ments of a forest fire, was not originally about climate change; she was thinking of Al Gore's election loss and the hanging chads scandal. Now it is being co-opted into the climate change narrative. Similarly, Field, by Gormley, takes on a new meaning here: the frightened, gormless crowds of humans spill out of their room at the Royal Academy, not knowing where to go.

Parker's work has long had a preoccupation with the apocalyptic, but it was while listening to scientists recount their struggle to communicate the scale of climate change to politicians that she realised art had a vital role to play. She describes this as "a call to arms", but isn't keen to be associated with a single issue. She says she has done only one piece of work – a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky, showing in Copenhagen – that deals with climate change, and even then the interview covers a range of issues.

"It was intentionally propagandist," she says, adding hesitantly that perhaps this is what is required. "After all, the first world war artists were recruited to help fight the war – and this is the equivalent of war."

• Earth is at the Royal Academy, London W1, until 31 January 2010. Details: 0207 300 8000. The Guardian is a media partner for the exhibition. Rethink runs until 5 April and will tour next year. Details are at rethinkclimate.org.


the above copied from:http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/dec/02/climate-change-art-earth-rethink

Interview with Christo

Conducted by Paul Cummings at the artist's apartment August 28 and 30, 1973

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Christo on August 28 and 20, 1973. The interview was conducted in the artist's apartment by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

PAUL CUMMINGS: It is the 28th of August, 1973; Paul Cummings talking to Christo in his apartment on Harvard Street. You were born in - - - start from the beginning - - - 1935?

CHRISTO: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. In what town., actually?

CHRISTO: Gabravo. It is a small town in the Balkan, in the mountains in the north part of Bulgaria.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, it's a mountain town?

CHRISTO: Yes. You know the Balkan? The name of the Balkanic States came from the range of mountains called Balkan.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I see. So it's not a little valley, it's a ....

CHRISTO: Yes, it's the mountain. It's about two thousand meters high. It's quite high up.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you have brothers and sisters?

CHRISTO: Two brothers.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Two brothers, who are not in the arts?

CHRISTO: No. I come from a Bulgarian family who had emigrated to Russia and came back to Bulgaria. One of my grandmothers came from Czechoslovakia. One of my brothers is a movie actor, and the other is a scientist.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Which is which?

CHRISTO: The eldest, Anani, is a movie actor and I am the middle one, and the youngest one is Stephan. My first name is Christo, my family name of Ukraine origin is Javacheff. Anani is the actor and Stephan is the scientist.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Where does he act?

CHRISTO: I lived in all these countries until 1957. I lived in Bulgaria, then Czechoslovakia. I left Bulgaria in early 1956, and lived between 1956 and early 1957 in Czechoslovakia because I have parents, family there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did your parents leave too, or did you just...?

CHRISTO: No. They live in Bulgaria actually now.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh, they still live there.

CHRISTO: Yes. Everybody lived there in Bulgaria.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But you're the one that traveled around?

CHRISTO: Yes, I escaped during the Hungarian Revolution in early 1957 from Praha. (Prague.)

PAUL CUMMINGS: But you had been going to school there.

CHRISTO: Yes, I studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Sophia. The studies there included many disciplines which are not part of the art schools here, such as political economy, history, cadaver dissection and also architecture aril movie sets. I was hanging around a theater in Prague in 1956, in the E.F.Burian Theater. Burian was in Leipzig in 1930 and he did a remarkable play, a Brecht play in 1930. He was a very strong Communist. When the Communists came to power, they gave him his own theater, in Prague, and I hung around at his theater in 1956, early 1957.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Before one gets into all of that activity, did you start drawing as a child? How did you get interested in making things in visual art?

CHRISTO: Yes. My father is a scientist, my grandfather is a very well-known archaeologist, my grandmother was a musician, there was always very much art at our place. We lived with very many people of the science and art. I started to study art at age six, the first year I went to school. Six we go to school. Yes, I was permitted to choose. Generally children study music, piano or violin, I chose art.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Had you made drawings?

CHRISTO: Yes, I drew as a child and my mother gave me a private tutor, an art professor who gave me lessons of art and art history at the age of five. At the regular age we start school. After that I always studied art in different ways, and also architecture and related disciplines.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It was rather natural for you to take up this activity and your family wasn't a problem? They didn't say, "You want to be an artist?" which happens so often.

CHRISTO: No.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What did your first teacher have you do?

CHRISTO: That was very academic studies. Most Bulgarian art professors were trained in the schools of Munich and Berlin and some of them in St. Petersburg and Leningrad, before the time of the Bolshevik. But of course, I was very young in 1945 and Bulgaria became a Communist country. I relate very much to the new system of thinking; I was very young and I was impressed by it. My family was very progressive - they had links with the Bolsheviks in the early twenties and thirties in Russia. And through many of these people, I started to know about Russian art, movies, and theater, they also have influenced my moral growth. When I was fifteen, I was very enthusiastic. Of course, at that time, it was already on the pre-academic courses and we were leading same type of small cultural revolution, like China was in 1968. The government used many of the art students in some kind of art called "agit-propagand" - "agits" is agitation. Of course, that is art done and practiced in the streets, in the spirit of co-operative farms, and the factories through a gift spirit of the workers and the people to give a better production, all kinds of...

PAUL CUMMINGS: What was it? Was it very realistic paintings?

CHRISTO: No, they are all some kind of very amusing, but very pragmatic utilization of art services, like very small things we did. Remember, this is the early fifties when Stalin is in power and there was the Cold War and we had the hardest time of the Russian influence. They tried to make everything different from the West, and anything Western was degraded. The only thing passing into Bulgaria, still passing into Bulgaria at this time from the West was the Orient Express. The Orient Express is a big polished train to Istanbul. Of course, this train passed through Bulgarian landscape. I remember the government was very involved to create a landscape that looks very stimulating, like the gravel around the train must be very proper, the stacked hay the farmers place in their fields must be very impressively arranged, the combines and other farm machinery should be well in view, not hidden behind hills, after the work. It was completely different from the Potemkin villages which were only a facade built in about twelve hours, eighteen hours to create a landscape so the little city would look good. With us, advising the farmers, that was done by sending young students and artists to the cooperative farms, helping and showing the farmers. That is one of the things I worked on and all these big decorations for the great parade of May 1, Celebration of October Revolution. All these things, I liked it very much. I was very young, and I was thinking that all art was degraded and that was very good because there was not value consideration. The young people were involved in making something. So they did not question the value, because the revolution thing is more important than art. Art is only something for thought.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you have any material about what was going on at that time, I mean as far as France and Germany went?

CHRISTO: It was very hard. I did not speak any Western language, nor was it permitted at that time because Stalin was only able to speak Russian - his mother language but not French or English, nor any other language.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So there were no magazines?

CHRISTO: No, no. It was very severe then, I don't know how it is now, but until the death of Stalin in 1952 or '53, foreign literature and newspapers were absolutely forbidden. After the Stalin period, things improved slightly, but it was very slow, especially in Bulgaria where the Communist party is very powerful. I grew up and my interest became more and more individualistic.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What prompted that, or how could you do that, given the circumstances? I mean, become more individual.

CHRISTO: I wanted to do more on my own, to see more, to know new things, to take some chances. And of course, the only chance I had to go out of Bulgaria was to go to Czechoslovakia -- which was also a Communist country, but more liberal. I was on my way. Czechoslovakia owns a good number of original works of art by western artists, but mostly in secret, in private homes. Through E.F. Burian's friends, I was given the opportunity to see original works for the first time. I had seen reproductions before, but never the originals. There in Prague I saw works by Picasso, Klee, Miro and Kandinsky. Burian knew very many old curators and things like that and through him I could see the first originals of western art.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I think it's interesting that you studied not only painting, but theater and architecture, and all of these different things, theater design. Did you have an interest in theater? Did this develop later?

CHRISTO: Well, for the theater and the movies, I will tell you how it happened. In Russia, and all the Soviet-subject countries, they did not usually use the western way of super-production, it is quite different there. I was very interested in the movies and they had an influence on me then. I never met myself people like the film makers and improvisational directors Evgueni Vakhtangov, Vsevold Meyerhold or Aleksandr Tairov, but I knew of their works made in the twenties and thirties, through the Russian film maker Sergei Vasiliev who was teaching at the Bulgarian Film Studios. Through Vasiliev I became very impressed by movies.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In what way?

CHRISTO: Because, while I was studying at the Art Academy in Sofia, I was making extra money working on song movie productions. In Bulgaria, when they did a movie, they would use mostly locations, instead of movie sets. The young artists and the art students could have a job at finding the precise locations requested by the script, choosing the adequate street corner, hills, landscape, etc. Because almost everything in Bulgaria belongs to the state, the movie production had to give those jobs to artists, it was obligatory, and I enjoyed this kind of work. For me it was a change from the Academy's activity. I mostly dealt with the city and urban things, placing a car there, using that street corner for that shot. This is the system of Soviet movie production. They built very few sets. I really enjoyed doing that kind of work, and my brother, who was an actor, was also working. I was interested in the theater too and I sometimes was hanging around while he was working. He is not a very well known actor but he was just starting when I was there.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But you could still talk about him.

CHRISTO: Yes, but no. At that time of the revolution, art was terribly official. Now they started to dig up more on the Russian heritage. Works which had been done in the twenties, during the Civil War, by many directors, one of them was the son of Anton Chekhov, he was a very different kind of theater or movie director - he was mostly interested in "total" spectacle. They had built stages at the front where the soldiers were, they asked poets to perform at the front, they improvised plays. One of those plays is very well known, they used the train station as a set, and part of the cast was the actual thousands of soldiers returning hone from the front, by train, and arriving home at the Leningrad station. The arrival of a group of Bolshevik soldiers was an extraordinary spectacle. It was also an effort to make them feel welcomed by the people. All those things I heard about, from the past, were very interesting to me. It was not entertainment because these soldiers actually arrived from the front. They must have people to welcome them. Everything was organized. I learned all about this in the early fifties. Those Russian people are dead now, but when I heard about their work, they were in their sixties and seventies.

PAUL CUMMINGS: During the time that you were studying painting at the Academy, what kind of things did you do there? Did you do drawings, draw from casts, still life, models, academic painting, what kind?

CHRISTO: All, everything. First we did drawings of still life, nudes. Of course, the very old-fashioned system. We do four semesters of anatomy -like dissection of the body- which very few academies are doing today. We did cutting up of the corpse, which I don't think was necessary, but it was interesting.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But do you think that you learned anything about drawing, or anatomy, or structure? (Tape turned off.)

CHRISTO: I don't know if I learned but it was something most important to me today, because I worked so much in plaster before doing all these models for architecture. It is because of my education there that I am able today to do my projects, since my projects are paid by the sale of my drawings. It is important to me that I lived in a very different kind of place until I was twenty-one. One thing, during that time, I love to work with people. That period, perhaps, cultivated my present work. I like to work with people, like with engineers and professional people in different fields. It is very exciting to me, and my early training from that period is most probably what gave me the flavor to work with all kinds of people.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What made you decide to go -- you went to Vienna first, right?

CHRISTO: No, I first went to Prague. In later 1956 was the Hungarian Revolution. It was a terrible time. My stay in Czechoslovakia completely put me off. I did not want to go back to Bulgaria, nor to Leningrad, which would have been my only other choice, if I had gone back to Bulgaria. The final way, and only way then, to the West, was to "buy your own head," This was done by thousands of people, who would give money to one of the train station employees. It was not only me escaping, it was thousands of people, at that time, a thousand a day. It was a gamble because some of those station employees had accepted the bribe money and then would call the police. I was lucky, he was a good person.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But how was this, through the country?

CHRISTO: No, it was in a train, a Red Cross train filled with medicine. There were whole families, almost twenty people hidden in that train, and I was with them. The trains were stopped in Vienna and I was not speaking at all German or French or English -- it was start from scratch. Fortunately, I was a good portraitist, I made my living doing portraits, and some landscapes. I signed with my family name, Javacheff. As soon as I arrived in Vienna, to avoid all these camps of refugees, I enrolled in the Fine Arts Academy with Professor Wotruba, in the class of Professor Anderson. Having papers which stated that I was a registered student made me avoid the refugee camp, and I was lucky because it was very difficult. That is how I was able, later, to leave Vienna, with my student papers. It would not have been possible if I had refugee papers. And it was like that, I'd find some portraits to do. An old Bulgarian professor who was teaching in Vienna, was helping by finding people who wanted portraits and landscapes. I made enough money to survive and even to save enough. And with that money, I went to Geneva, Switzerland.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How long did you spend in Vienna, then?

CHRISTO: Six months, no, five months. Between January 10th and June, 1957. In June 1957, I went to Geneva where I had some other friends and through them I was able to do more portraits around the United Nations people. When I had saved enough, I moved to Paris in 1958.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What other things did you do in Vienna? I mean, were you doing portraits in classes?

CHRISTO: Practically nothing. Oh, I started to do some portraits and paintings and same things, but really nothing important. The things you see behind us, "Packed Cans and Bottles, 1958", are some of the things I started to do in Paris in early 1958. I tried many different things, some abstract drawings. Most of my time was used to know people; it was so important for me to move through Europe and I had the feeling that it was much more necessary to know more people, and to have more professional relations so that it can be helpful for me.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Why did you not stay in Vienna? There was just nothing there?

CHRISTO: Nothing there, no. It was completely without interest to me. It was a little better, perhaps, but it was provincial. You know very well. Of course, I could have moved to Germany. During my "sejour" in Germany, in 1958, I could have decided to stay. I lived in Paris between 1958 and 1964, and I was going to Germany very often. My first one-man exhibition was in Germany.

PAUL CUMMINGS: In Cologne, right?

CHRISTO: Yes. I was showing mostly in Germany and we were living like two or three months in Germany, two months in Italy, some months in Paris and some months in Holland. It was almost constant traveling.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, it's easy there, it's not so far. It's kind of difficult in this country to go from two thousand miles, this way. (Laughter.) How was the sculptor you studied with in Vienna?

CHRISTO: Wotruba, he was a post-Cubist professor. There were many other artists, not at all exciting. The only man I met who was very nice, was Arnulf Rainer. I don't know if you're familiar, Arnulf Rainer was then an abstract painter, he later became involved with body art. And Arnulf was then doing works reminiscent of Franz Kline, but all in red. In 1958, in Paris, I met Pierre Restany, the French critic. In the summer of 1958, I met Dieter Rosenkranz. I went to his home in Wupperthal, West Germany. His father was a friend of my father's. Dieter was then married to Edith, you probably know her a cause she later became well known as Mrs. Clifford Irving. In their home I met a lot of interesting people.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was that when they were friendly with Mary Bauermeister?

CHRISTO: I met Mary in 1958, and her boyfriend was the owner of a small gallery, in Cologne, where I exhibited in 1961. I met Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1958, and Nam Jun Paik, Ben Patterson, William, Dick Higgins, and all that crowd from the Fluxes group. Of course, at this time, John Cage, and many other American artists were in Germany, 1958, 59, there had been the festival of Darmstadt and they stayed in Germany afterwards. So much was going on then in Germany. I also met Alfred Schmela, the great art dealer from Dusseldorf. I had exhibitions with him later. But the first art dealer I met in Germany was Mary Bauermeister's boyfriend, and I had an exhibition at his gallery in Cologne in 1961.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That was your first show then?

CHRISTO: No, that was my first personal exhibition. I had exhibited in group shows before, several in Paris and once at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal.The exhibition in Cologne was the first personal exhibition.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was that successful for you?

CHRISTO: Not at all. (Laughter). The show was destroyed, most of the smaller works were stolen by the dealer, he never gave them back. Now we find that same of the pieces were sold by him, later, here and there, we see them at collectors. The large ones were destroyed because I could not keep there. There was a wrapped 4 Chevaux Renault automobile, and many wrapped oil barrels, and other large works. Even through I lost my works I do not regret having had that exhibition because I did my first temporary work, on the harbor of the River Rhine, Dockside Passages. They were very large works and they were conceived to be temporary.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You know, one thing that intrigues me is, how did you live from having done portraits and everything?

CHRISTO: I still had to do portraits to support myself until 1963. I could not live from my work, nobody would buy them, but the portraits were well paid. I did portraits of many people in France, in Switzerland. I was going to Switzerland for two or three weeks doing any type of portraits, as the people preferred, any style they wanted, impressionist a la Monet, or Cubist, or very academic. My portraits were paid around $600.00 each, which was very cheap for a portrait, but a lot of fast money for me. I had washed cars in garages and dishes in restaurants, but that was very time consuming, while the portraits were very fast.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I was intrigued by how people find somebody who wants a portrait done.

CHRISTO: Oh, there are many people, I did many children. They love children, grandmothers, always, and I had to have fantastic patience. I have no patience with children usually, but I painted the portraits of hundreds of children. In Geneva, I did the portraits of a family that has fourteen children. It was a nightmare. (Laughter.)

PAUL CUMMINGS: Each one?

CHRISTO: Each one! They were signed, "Javacheff." Of course, I also wrapped some portraits too. But very few, of some friends, collectors, my wife's portrait. The oil on canvas was signed "Javacheff" and the wrapping was signed "Christo."

PAUL CUMMINGS: When did you start wrapping things? What was the impetus for that?

CHRISTO: It started in 1958. I think it was not just wrapping, it was more about manipulating the objects, three-dimensional things. I cannot answer why I wrapped. I don't only wrap, I don't always wrap. You can see it very well in the Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado, 1970-72. That is not a wrapping. Even in June, 1962, in Paris, when I closed the Rue Visconti with a wall of oil barrels, that was not a wrapping. But there was always an affinity of my interest in the movie set, theater, architecture. Working with an object, large or small, with a specific space, like the nomads, a kind of half-caste of people, making bundles, building fabric tents. But of course, the wrapping was only some---how would you say it in French---to make some "ecriture" and only that; to make some sign writing, to be writing with, draw something, color something. For instance, all the objects which I wrapped were very recognizable. I also wrapped completely scene things like bundles of packages, but when it was a definite object it was always recognizable.

PAUL CUMMINGS: That's hard to do, to assure what might be under there, but not necessarily.

CHRISTO: But still there are signs and indications of what is under the wrapping, you can easily recognize a wrapped bicycle, a wrapped canvas.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But what could be the top of a grand canvas, so there's kind of an ambiguity there.

CHRISTO: The title of the first group of works was "Inventory," a check list, perhaps like the movers that move the hardware and the inventory of chairs, tables and things you move.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was that an actual list you made up?

CHRISTO: Yes, the inventory of the works exhibited: five cases, one table, one chair, they are all together.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I couldn't figure out from what I read in the fall about it, if it really was...

CHRISTO: Well, of course, they were usual objects, sometimes oil drums, or boxes, cans, crates, bottles, chairs, tables, all sorts of things.

MRS. CHRISTO: Three bottles, five cans...etc...

PAUL CUMMINGS: Right. I see, I see. So really it was exactly what it said.

CHRISTO: Always the title of the work was the object that was there. Just literary not poetical.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What about all the very realist people that you got associated with?

CHRISTO: I had met Pierre Restany in 1958. He was the founder, the catalyzer, of the "Nouveaux Realistes" movement, with Yves Klein, Arman, Cesar, Tinguey, Raysse, Spoerri. I was not part of their group and did not exhibit with them except in the last two or three shows. The Nouveaux Realistes movement was a French movement, with mostly French artists. I was included in the exhibition "New Realists" that Sidney Janis organized in 1962. That was the title he gave to the exhibition which included the French "Nouveaux Realistes" and the American and British "Pop artists". Mr. Sidney Janis had chosen himself the two works of mine for his exhibition, even though I was not part of the "Nouveaux Realists." In late 1960 or early 1961, I met Leo Castelli in Paris. He was very encouraging and told me that I should go to the U.S.A. Leo Castelli was very helpful to me then, but even more later, with my legal papers for immigration.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So you had a show with him but not until 1964?

CHRISTO: In 1964, Leo Castelli included me in his group exhibition "Four at Castelli." And in 1966 he gave me my first personal exhibition in the U.S.A. Ileana Sonnabend too had been most helpful, we met a lot of people in her Paris gallery and she also gave us introductions to a lot of people in New York, so we would feel almost at home when we arrived here in 1964.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Did you meet Leo or Ileana first?

CHRISTO: I met Leo first. Leo was with Ivan Karp when he came back to Paris, for the Jasper Johns exhibition in 1962. We had no money to buy our fare to New York, it took us almost two years to save enough to buy our two tickets on the ship "Franc." We came here for the first time in 1964, in February.

PAUL CUMMINGS: And so Leo helped you with all the documents and papers?

CHRISTO: Yes, the papers for becoming residents. It was very difficult for me, I had no passport, I only had a traveling document stating that I was "stateless", and the quota for Bulgarian refugees was fourteen years of waiting, and waiting in France, not in New York. But meanwhile, between 1958 and 1963, I was staying in Germany, at the Galeria Schnela. I tell you this again because it was very benefactory for my art, much later. I had so many exhibitions in the early sixties, in Germany, Italy, in Holland, Belgium. Those exhibitions were never an economical success, but they were important for the future. It was very helpful for us, much later in the sixties and seventies. Many of these young galleries became important galleries, like Gian Enzo Sperone, Yvon Lambent, Alfred Scrmlela, all these gallery owners were our friends, our old friends, and we all grew in the same time. They had started, like us, with nothing and we have a very good understanding.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Why do you think that your work was so, kind of picked up and shown in Germany, more so than France? There seen to be so few exhibitions in France.

CHRISTO: Yes, I had very few exhibitions in France. I don't know. Still, I have many private collectors in France. I sell very much in France, enormously, but mostly directly, not through galleries. Recently I had an exhibition at the Galerie Catherine Issert because even though she is an old friend, she has a very young gallery. Then I came to the U.S.A. in 1964, I had had only one exhibition in France, in Paris in 1962.

PAUL CUMMINGS: But all through Germany and Switzerland?

CHRISTO: Yes.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you think that it's the fact of the economy? The fact that the Germans...

CHRISTO: They have money, we sell very well in Germany, they are interested.

MRS. CHRISTO: They come here, they buy here. The French collectors come and buy here.

CHRISTO: There are many private dealers. Of course, often my work became very difficult to be shown in private gallery. Mostly now I show where I have large exhibitions, in Universities, in museums and colleges. I had only two exhibitions in Museums in France.

PAUL CUMMINGS: They don't have the space.

CHRISTO: No, they have the space, but they are not fond of my work -- I don't know.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Were you interested in coming to this country?

CHRISTO: I wanted to come here, I needed to know more. When I escaped from Czechoslovakia, my only thought was to the west to see anything possible, to make my own judgment and choice. I came to the states like I came to Paris finding that it was very important for my work. It's only my own judgment, and really it is very important, even though I show very little in New York. I cannot show and my big projects are not in New York, for the moment, but it is very important -- a lot of communication. I find it very cheap in a way to live in New York, there is better communication. My projects involve many people around the world -- collectors, the people who buy my work, the engineers and all who work with us. But still, New York is a better place to coordinate efforts, and because I live here I can work in California or in Colorado. In a way, I talk about Manhattan, because once you go out of Manhattan, it is like to live in Paris. (Laughter.) Or any small village in France, because everything becomes difficult, complicated and expensive.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So really, this is really just a place to start from and go elsewhere.

CHRISTO: It's like our headquarters, it is very fast. Living here we met more French, more Swedish, more German people, as when we were living in Paris. All the time we have calls, people constantly coming.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Do you think that is because there is a tradition of being difficult to approach people in France? Or is there, everybody picks up the telephone?

CHRISTO: Perhaps, maybe.

MRS. CHRISTO: But Paris is not the center of the world anymore.

CHRISTO: For me now the only place where I could live is here, I can not imagine myself living anywhere else. You know I must sell a lot in order to finance my projects, and the irony is that we sell almost eighty per cent to Europe and Japan, only twenty per cent to the U.S.A.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Oh really? You live here, do it in Colorado, and sell it in Europe. (Laughter.)

CHRISTO: Yes, but this is not just me, it has been the same for most dealers. This is since 1968, I think New York art dealers and the galleries mostly sell in Europe. I don't think it is different from us.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, it's become a much more international market.

CHRISTO: I think so. I think there are many more new collectors, on the international market. There's Belgium...

MRS. CHRISTO: I sell a lot to private dealers who sell much more in Europe than in the States.

CHRISTO: I think Leo tells the same things. They say ninety-five per cent.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, he sells mostly to dealers anyway.

CHRISTO: We sell also very much to many dealers, who have no gallery, just from their home.

PAUL CUMMINGS: One thing that intrigues me, what was it like for you to come to New York in the early sixties, because you had became French by that time?

CHRISTO: No, I speak French -- Jean Claude Killy. (Laughter.) First, I am born Bulgarian. I have no complex about anything. I am amazed to see how any people can be full of complexes because they are Italian, or Puerto Rican, or Jew...

PAUL CUMMINGS: They use the language as...

CHRISTO: No, the background. And for me of course, it's hard. I am different, but I think I am like that. I don't want to pretend I am some other. Of course, I know it's not easy, but it was, not very easy for me in Paris. I was not speaking French, it was equally very hard. The French artists were still very arrogant with me. But of course here it was the same thing. I don't think it was worse, but is equally, it was not very difficult.

PAUL CUMMINGS: How did you find the artists in America as opposed to, say, France or Austria?

CHRISTO: I don't know, I have no artist friends, I must tell you, neither in Paris nor here. First, I don't think the artists have friends, except in very early youth when they are schoolboys. The life is so competitive. I don't know, perhaps many artists tell you they have very good friends.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Perhaps one or two.

MRS. CHRISTO: We are good friends with everybody.

CHRISTO: We have friends, engineers, like Mitzo Zagaroff, who designed my 5600 Cubicmeter Package for the Documenta IV, in 1968. A marvelous friend, engineer from Boston. We have some friends, journalists, writers, like our very good friend David Bourdon. I don't know if you know him, he's now at the Smithsonian. I have a friend I like very much, the art historian Leo Steinberg, and our builder contractor Ted Dougherty. I have friends, some business people, some who are in industry. For the last five or six years, so much time is taken by my projects. I don't have time. We see many people, friends for dinner, but they are always like a dealer or collector or the surveyor, or the geologist. Of course, they became some kind of very good friends to us because they are very vital for our work. Frankly I have very great time to work with them.

PAUL CUMMINGS: I'm curious about as your projects got larger and larger and larger, how did you go around and find engineers and people who manufacture the products and things you needed?

CHRISTO: It is not easy. First we have so much trouble, all the time we have problems and this is the exciting part. Like, if we know that everything for my next project will be very easy, I will never do it. (Laughter.) Of course, I tell you, we do a new project, it will be my worst headache. Not so much technically, technically it will probably be less tough than the Valley Curtain, but this project, I enjoy it already so much because the resources are so complex. It involves -- it is very big in size, it is about twenty-five miles. It involves many private properties and cities, it will pass through a small town. It involves a huge amount of contracts, permits, liability insurance and I think it will be one of the most exciting parts of the project. But of course, with these things, we create fantastic relations, me going to negotiate with farmers, cowboys, and people of the city.

PAUL CUMMINGS: This is one thing that really intrigued me in looking through the material I could find, was that you end up all the time with books and catalogs and photographs and charts and drawings and documents, and there is an enormous amount of material that is produced. I sometimes wonder if that's almost as much of what one does as producing the ultimate curtain?

CHRISTO: Yes, I consider the whole work of the curtain is from the formulating of the first idea up to the realization. Each step was equally important. Whenever I have failed to treat each step with the same importance, it has created big problems. And of course, the weather. The curtain stayed only twenty eight hours. After that we left, but we had so many problems, those twenty-eight hours, that was so marvelous. It is so complex, it is like life, real life experience. It is like an expedition to New Guinea, or to the Himalaya. It is perhaps, less thrilling, but for me it is very exciting because I learn new things each time. And this is why I enjoy it so much. I consider each step as an integral part of the work of art, our contractor, our permits, all part of the work of art. Our engineer is part of the art. Everything is part of the work. Each time a project is finished, we publish a book, and we make a real, complete file. It is not a pretty book, not an aesthetic book. It's just a completely accurate file containing the story of the project.

PAUL CUMMINGS: You mean the documents and the photographs.

CHRISTO: The "dossier", instead of being in a file it is in book form.

PAUL CUMMINGS: This is what, Abrams?

CHRISTO: Yes. It contains the whole file of the project. The documents are reproduced photographically, the letters are there, reduced in size but with their original appearance.

PAUL CUMMINGS: All the letters and documents.

CHRISTO: Yes. It has no interpretation by a historian. And of course, this will remain the only reference for the future.

PAUL CUMMINGS: What do you feel about that, when you spend months and thousands of hours, and all of these people and all of this and essentially what happens is that you build something that then becomes a book.

CHRISTO: No, it is not just a book, it will stay in the memories. Anyway, on our planet, nothing stays forever, everything is temporary, it is only a matter of a shorter or longer time. We could not own the land, not in Colorado, not in Australia, not in Germany, it would be too expensive to buy. Secondly, the project cannot have the maintenance to remain longer. All my projects have this tremendous amount of very specific, fragile elements. My projects are thought to be temporary. The temporary quality must be translated, by the fragility, and this causes a feeling of urgency. If people want to see my work, they must hurry, because it might not be there if they take their time. My projects are very precise things. I have complete power to decide that no engineer, no state money, no any kind of subsidizing will make my idea change. If I, personally need to have a curtain, a side curtain invade of fabric, or a wrapped coast, I will try to make that and no other thing. I fight for any inch of my idea to remain in its original state. I had been warned by my Valley Curtain engineers that the curtain should have air holes in it, or it would stay a very short time, and it did stay little. And it will be very dangerous to build, but we should go through that to do it. And of course, this is my privilege. I am happy that the Valley Curtain was exactly as I wanted it. I am not an architect or an engineer who has to work for his client and has to accept to adapt the idea according to the court, the government, the state or the client, and they can oblige him to build that and that and that. I feel very happy that I have absolute power to do it the way I think it should be.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Have you had many projects that haven't been talked about or written about, which you have not been able to do?

CHRISTO: Yes. Until now I have completed only three very large projects. There are a few small, total of perhaps ten or twelve projects -- large scale projects. And of course, we have undertaken almost twenty-five or thirty who are complete failures.

MRS. CHRISTO: For each successful project there are almost twice as many ''failures".

CHRISTO: They are really failures because we worked at those as hard as on the others, and even though we spend a lot of time, efforts and money, we failed mostly because we were not intelligent enough, we were not careful enough and again, we did not realize that each step is equally important. If we neglected something, and the project could not be done, it was a failure. I can not blame anybody else other than ourselves, we have the engineers but they can't be blamed. At the end we are the only people responsible to be blamed for the failure to obtain the permit for the project.

PAUL CUMMINGS: One thing that intrigues me, how do you go doing say, the Little Bay Coast in Australia? Where was the first inclination of that idea, doing the sea coast area and then finding one?

CHRISTO: At first it was not the coast, it was more about wrapping the ground. The ground or terrain was of vital importance for me, then. And at the time of the Museum of Modern Art where I had this little show in '68, I proposed to wrap, to cover the Sculpture Garden. There were a few drawings and a scale model, but that was not allowed because the fire department and the insurance company were afraid it would create a danger if people would trip on the fabric. There are some drawings in the Abrams book by David Bourdon. Of course, this was just before I went to Kassel, West Germany, in '68, for that air package. (Tape turned off.) I did some sketches of the wrapping of the long portion of coastline. I called it "Wrapped Coast, Project for the West Coast of the U.S.A." I was fascinated by the place where the ocean meets the land. I wanted a coast because that is where the land starts, zero altitude, and then goes up. The water too was important to me, to have at the same time the color of the water, the color of the part of the coast which is wrapped and then the color of the rest of the land, not wrapped.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Was there a big tide there?

CHRISTO: Yes, a very large, huge tide. The wrapping was started at the high tide line. My work is most of the time about making comparisons, even in my early "Packages," a caparison between some wrapped cans and some cans which are not wrapped. In the same way, I wanted to see a "Wrapped Coast" to compare it to the other parts of the coast which are not wrapped. But it was not so simple. I made some sketches for the West Coast, because I wanted to do a project in the United States. But at that time, it was very hard to find any local interest. My projects cannot be done by only one man, they always involve somebody's understanding, locally, some moral support and enthusiasm, so much has to be done and feelings generated. And of course, the West Coast, at that time, nobody was interested in it. I tried to interest the local museums. Not a question of money, but we need some kind of a moral, administrative support. In late 1968, I met John Kaldor, a young business man from Australia, of Hungarian origin. He came to the studio and he bought a work of mine, he already had quite a good collection. And he asked me if I could come to Australia to do a lecture. I told him that my English was not good enough for that, but I have a fantastic project we could do in Australia. It is very dialectic to see that the "Wrapped Coast" found its own place because Australia has one of the longest coastlines in the world. They have forty-four thousand miles of coastline. And they have a coastline culture, they live by the coast. Only fifty million people and half a million miles of land.

PAUL CUMMINGS: They all live right on the edge.

CHRISTO: They have most of their cities by the coast. There the coastline means something. It is very good that each time, the projects find their own locations. Like the "Valley Curtain" found the Rocky Mountains, not because they were the only mountains, but they were the only mountains within which, in a short diameter, you have an infinite variety of different landscapes. From Aspen, a Swiss Alps type, up to the complete desert type of mountains. While in California, they are always all one type, they are not as varied as the Rocky Mountains where you have a fantastic, very short, two hundred, three hundred miles of constantly changing landscapes. Of course, we worked to find out, like this Australia project. John Kaldor had quite a hard time to find a coast line he could rent for us, and we tried to locate the proper place. We spent a lot of time and researched many, many different places.

PAUL CUMMINGS: Considering the number of people involved, and the time and everything, how do you finance all of these things? I mean, each one is its own corporation?

CHRISTO: Well, we have a corporation, usually named after the project, this way of working here, now, is my reward for the years spent in Bulgaria. I do many drawings, sketches, scale models from the first little drawing on scratch paper to very elaborate drawings and collages. Very similar to what the architects do before building a skyscraper. All these I call preparation works. They are all done before -the project is realized. They are my vision of what I think the project will be. And you see all the time, through the evolution of the project, the vision becomes closer and closer to reality because I work closer and closer to the final work because I work at every detail. We devise the way to do it, the engineers and us, and I become more familiar with the way the project will be built. All of these preparation works, and I make between 180 and 300 of them, depending on the length of the time the preparation of the project will take, and that is not really many works when you knew that it took twenty-eight months for the Valley Curtain or nineteen months for the Wrapped Coast. All those drawings and collages we sell to cover the expenses of the projects. These preparation works are sold to three types of people, galleries, museums, and private collectors. We do not sell the works one by one because that would take too much time. We sell by groups of ten thousand dollars, as in the last project, and now by twenty thousand for the next project.

PAUL CUMMINGS: So they have a whole group...

CHRISTO: This is how we do it. We write a letter of agreement to those collectors, museums and dealers who have purchased in the past and we ask them to deposit their purchase money in advance in the bank account of the corporation. In return for having paid in advance they will get a very good discount when they will come to the studio to make their choice of the work they have purchased. They also will have the exclusivity on the drawings and collages for that specific project. Also they will be listed in the book that will be published about the project. For that they may choose anything they want in the studio about that project or any other past and future project which I have available in my studio, and they may also commission a lithograph or buy some of my early "Packages" which we have in our storage. Between 1958 and 1966 I made a large number or works which I could not sell. We had to keep them and they now are helping each project. Today I very seldom make small packages. Also some collectors ask me to make a special work for their home or their garden, and since they are my very good collectors I am happy to do that. I always keep some of the preparation works as we progress in the project so that they will be part of the documentation exhibition about the project. Each large project has its own traveling exhibition, which includes drawings, documents and photographs. Usually the preparation works for a project cover between seventy to seventy-five per cent of the cost of the project and another twenty-five per cent canes from early works and lithographs. I have many lithographs. But also in the same way I don't make the lithograph unless it is paid ten or twenty thousand dollars in advance. All money is paid to the corporation, never to myself. The money must be deposited in advance. This is the most unusual thing. The legal work is tremendous but we have a great attorney, Scott Hodes, in Chicago.

PAUL CUMMINGS: It's real patronage.

CHRISTO: No, it's business. They buy at discount and are happy to be given the opportunity, while it makes it possible for us to do a project. It is simply a purchase contract between me and the client.

END OF INTERVIEW

Above copied from: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/christ73.htm