The Brooklyn Rail

When we think of art and politics, we naturally turn first to artists who deliberately set out an overt political agenda, as in the famous fresco of 1933 Man at the Crossroads, painted by Diego Rivera for the lobby of Rockefeller Center in New York City. When John D. Rockefeller saw the portraits of Lenin and Trotsky, just to the right of the center, and the red flag saying “workers of the world unite,” he had Rivera removed from the scaffolding and the painting destroyed. Rockefeller’s reaction is a testament to Rivera’s effectiveness in communicating his meaning. Rivera’s mural, however, like all genuinely great works of art, relies on more than sloganeering and illustration. It also engages the viewer on a visceral level as abstract form and gesture; it is Rivera’s masterful execution that opens us up to the content in less obvious but more profound ways.

The installations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude also elicit a powerful, emotionally bewildering and yet exhilarating effect. The documentation exhibition of their project Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City was on display at The Shed in New York in March and Christo and Jeanne-Claude Surrounded Islands Documentation Exhibition is up now and will remain on view until December 2025 at the NSU Art Museum, Ft. Lauderdale. In a work like Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida of 1980-83 we find ourselves at a loss, in emotional disarray and at the same time excited. I have made the case in my book Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain¹ that abstract form can have a highly specific meaning even though we cannot put it into words—it has an iconography and a grammar. There is a return of repressed content in abstraction that lends it a special, if ineffable, power. The formal properties of Surrounded Islands and its literal insertion into reality on an immersive scale, “deranges all the senses,” as the symbolist writer Arthur Rimbaud wrote of modern poetry.²

Most neuroscientists accept the theory of “constructed emotion” asserting that the brain selects input from the world—accepting some information and ignoring the rest as noise—and that words help organize that information, aggregating the actions of many dynamic neural networks in the brain to function, like a computer shortcut, into what the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett calls “concepts.” Images may also function in this way. Barrett’s colleague, Antonio Damasio, uses the term “dispositional representations.³ He, more than anyone, has elevated the importance of “feelings” in this process, describing them as “...just as cognitive as other percepts.” Damasio points out that, “A feeling is the momentary ‘view’ of a part of [the] body landscape,” a continuous monitoring of the body’s internal state. “The sense of that body landscape is juxtaposed in time to the perception or recollection of something else that is not part of the body—a face, a melody, an aroma—feelings end up being ‘qualifiers’ to that something else....”⁴

The great achievements in modern art are triumphs of disruption. They break up our perceptual habits and open a fresh perspective on events and on the language in which we frame them. The projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude were physically impossible to apprehend in their totality, except over time, both because of their scale and because of the complex history of their genesis. Yet the perplexing multiplicity of perspectives colliding with one another among the viewers of these projects is intrinsic to their conception. “There’s not one vantage point which should be seen…,” Christo said. Every individual has their own account of experience. “They’re all slices of different types of interpretations. I think this is how the work is.”⁵

Christo and Jeanne-Claude never talked about “the meaning” of their projects. “Our art has absolutely no purpose except to be a work of art,” Jeanne-Claude told a reporter. “We do not give messages.”⁶ Yet their large public projects disrupt the ordinary flow of interpretation of the world; they fundamentally alter the reality of everyday life for entire communities. The psychological disarray they provoke is appealing, even thrilling, like the terror of a frightening movie or a gory painting like Saturn Devouring His Son by Goya.

“I don’t think any of the museum exhibitions,” Christo told me in 1977, “have touched so profoundly three hundred people (as our ranchers), or three hundred thousand cars who visited Running Fence, …half a million people in Sonoma and Marin counties were engaged in the making of the work of art for three and a half years.”⁷ The California artist Robert Arneson, who lived near the project, quipped, “When the Fence was up it was great! The checkout ladies in the supermarket were arguing about the definition of art!”⁸

The 18-foot-high, 24½-mile-long Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California was completed in September 1976 but also removed after two weeks. It traversed private ranches, intersected fourteen roads and a major highway, passed through the middle of the town of Valley Ford, and descended into the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay, just north of San Francisco. It was too large to be seen in its entirety even from an airplane. The permissions required four years of negotiations with fifty-nine ranchers, a 450-page environmental impact report, detailed engineering, eighteen public hearings (including three sessions of the Superior Courts of California), and it cost $3.2 million (about $16.5 million in today’s dollars), which—as in all the projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude—the artists paid for entirely by themselves from the sale of Christo’s collages, drawings, sculptures, and models. They never accepted grants nor sold souvenirs, posters, movie rights, or even photo rights for their projects (they gave all of these away).

Christo and Jeanne-Claude not only formed a collaborative practice with one another; they collaborated with engineers, workers, and also the people who lived around the projects. Like Franz Kafka’s imagined land of opportunity in his unfinished novel Amerika—a utopia where one could reinvent oneself and escape from the traditional hierarchies of class and morality—Christo and Jeanne-Claude stood ready to sign up one and all for their version of what Kafka called “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma,” an “almost limitless” theater where everyone finds a place.⁹

In the 1960s Christo began to imagine packaging buildings and erecting walls of oil barrels. In 1962 they stacked oil barrels across a tiny street in Paris; in 1968 and 1969 he and Jeanne-Claude created giant air packages, wrapped public monuments and art museums, and they covered a mile-long stretch of rocky coastline in Australia with fabric and ropes. Then, in 1972, they hung a 1,250-foot-wide, bright-orange curtain across a mountain valley in Colorado. They barely managed to install it before a sixty-mile-an-hour gale tore through the valley and forced them to take it down. But it was up for twenty-eight hours and that was long enough for it to appear on the nightly television news all across America.

Six years later they “wrapped” the walkways in a park in Kansas City and five years after that, in May 1983, they encircled eleven of the fourteen islands in the northern section of Miami’s Biscayne Bay with their Surrounded Islands project. The Army Corps of Engineers had created the islands in 1936 when it dredged the shallow bay for a navigational channel and dumped the dirt in fourteen piles off to one side. The artists had to solve a myriad of problems, from engineering a fabric that the bright Miami sun would not bleach white in a matter of hours to figuring out how to install the work without touching the endangered sea grasses that had grown up around these man-made islands which nobody cared about until Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed their project. There were protracted battles in the courts and the payoffs that came standard in Miami politics. The ubiquitous media attention made all aspects of the project extraordinarily public. Over the two years of planning, Surrounded Islands gradually engaged more and more people in the process of making the work of art.

The engineering specifications penciled into the margins of Christo’s drawings and collages, the fabric samples collaged into some of the studies, the photographs of the site, and the realistic renderings of the envisioned finished project, all conveyed a sense of reality that persuaded viewers of the artists’ serious intention to build this quite unbelievable construction. At a point when these projects still existed only as concepts in people’s minds, the drawings and collages built a momentum that would eventually lead to the realization of the work.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects complicate the boundary between art and life. They prompt people to do a double-take in the space of the everyday by fitting seamlessly into the real environment. As early as the Dockside Packages of 1961, constructed on the functioning river docks in Cologne, this has always been a central premise of their work. One wouldn’t, at first, distinguish the Dockside Packages from the normal stacks of cargo unloaded on the quays every day; then on second glance, something looks not quite right.

Confronted by something so incredible as the Surrounded Islands in the midst of a busy city makes reality itself seem like theater. And like theater, it brings us together, as in those strange times like in a giant but beautiful snowstorm or when we’re stuck in an elevator during a power outage. The projects disrupt our normal activities, break down the social hierarchies that separate us, and causes us to open up to strangers. They are simply so beautiful that we find our emotions somehow more accessible and we look at the everyday people and things around us as if we are seeing them for the first time.

“I think the project has some kind of subversive dimension,” Christo pointed out, speaking about Surrounded Islands, “and this is why we have so many problems. Probably all the opposition, all the criticism of the project is basically that issue. If we spend $3 million for a movie set there would be no opposition. They can even burn the islands to be filmed and there would be no problem. The great power of the project is because it is absolutely irrational. This is the idea of the project, that the project put in doubt all the values.”¹⁰

When I turned in my car at the airport the day after Surrounded Islands came down, the young man at the rental agency told me he had heard that Christo had made $4 million on the project already. I pointed out that nobody paid admission, that the project was destroyed after two weeks so nobody could even buy the materials, and that the artists didn’t accept grants or sponsorships or take any income from the films and souvenirs. Christo, I explained, even stopped making drawings and collages for his projects once they were realized. Meanwhile, it cost the artists $3.5 million to build Surrounded Islands. So how, I asked him, did he think they might be making money on this? That gave him pause.

Part of what makes these projects subversive is that they engaged the common practices of capitalism—marketing, encouraging collectors to invest by buying the studies, contracting engineers and manufacturers, managing public relations. The artists even simplified their names to “Christo” and “Jeanne-Claude” in order to market their “brand.” Then they negated capitalism’s most distinctive feature: the accumulation of capital. The artists spent everything they had and even borrowed money to do each of their projects.

Millions of people came out to see each of these projects, in Paris, The Pont Neuf Wrapped of 1985; in 1991 The Umbrellas, Japan-USA in two inland valleys, one north of Los Angeles and the other north of Tokyo. That cost of $26 million. In 1994 they spent more than $15 million wrapping the German parliament building (the Reichstag) in Berlin. Then in 2005 they opened The Gates, Project for Central Park, New York City with 7,503, sixteen-foot tall gates set along twenty-three miles of walkways. Each project remained up no more than 16 days and exposed the political machinations behind public decisions in the location where they took place. No one ever saw the place the same way again after that, even long after the physical work disappeared. Four years after The Gates, on November 18, 2009, Jeanne-Claude died from a ruptured aneurism in the brain. She was just 74. They had planned for the eventuality of one them dying, and Christo continued on with the two unfinished projects in process at that time: Over the River (Project for the Arkansas River, State of Colorado) and The Mastaba of Abu Dhabi (Project for the United Arab Emirates). In January 2017, after pursuing Over The River for twenty years and going through five years of legal arguments, Christo decided to abandon the project and devote all of his energy, time and resources to the realization of The Mastaba, and he began to think about Saudi Arabia as an alternative site.

At 492 feet high, The Mastaba would be higher than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Made from 410,000 multicolored oil barrels, it would be at once the largest sculpture in the world, a spectacular feat of engineering, and a global tourist attraction, by perhaps the world’s most widely celebrated contemporary artists. It would likely cost $400 million, it would be Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s only permanent large-scale work, with all the complexity of building a skyscraper.

The artists first proposed The Mastaba in 1978, forty-seven years ago, and persevered, as it happens, past their life times, since their foundation continues to pursue it. Meanwhile, as early as 1970 Christo had also made drawings that would ultimately lead, in 2016, to The Floating Piers, on Lake Iseo, one of the lakes to the east of Milan, Italy. On a modular dock system of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes floating on the surface of the water. People “felt like they were walking on water—or perhaps the back of a whale," Christo said. The Floating Piers extended 1.9-miles across the water from the small town of Sulzano to the island of Monte Isola and from there to the private island of San Paolo, both normally accessible only by boat. The fabric also continued along 1.6 miles of pedestrian streets in Sulzano and Peschiera Maraglio. Moving gently with the waves, The Floating Piers created a magical body experience, as well as a poetic visual experience.

The London Mastaba, a sketch for the Mastaba of Abu Dhabi, floated atop Hyde Park's Serpentine Lake in the center of London for over five weeks in June and July of 2018. It coincided with an exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's sixty-year history of working with oil barrels. The massive sculpture on a floating platform of the same interlocking high-density polyethylene cubes, weighed 660 tons. In 2020, Christo was ready to realize yet another long-term project L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, project for Paris, which he first conceived in 1961. The global pandemic forced him to postpone the installation, then in the spring of that year, Christo passed away at the age of 85. His nephew Vladimir and the studio team finished the project in the fall of 2021. Six million people came to see it over its sixteen day display.

We began this essay with the question of how a work of art prompts mobility of relations in the minds of its viewers and how such creative openness can prompt political action. In the first instance, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects materially affected the places in which they happened. The Gates in New York brought an estimated $254 million in economic activity to the city in 2005, reviving tourism and public life after the post 9/11 slump. Similarly, in 1980, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived in Miami to work on Surrounded Islands, South Beach was not an upscale art district; it was a run-down string of partially boarded up Art Deco buildings, housing elderly widows cooking on hot plates. The beach in front of the hotels was completely undeveloped—no fancy pedestrian walkways, no manicured landscaping, no expensive restaurants lining the west side of Ocean Drive. Christo and Jeanne-Claude rented the empty rooms in those hotels and in them they billeted the army of 430 workers who built Surrounded Islands in the spring of 1983. Only the old Carlyle hotel had a functioning bar and the workers congregated there in the evenings after their long days working on the islands. This attracted a local art crowd and the developers followed, buying and renovating those hotels into the glamorous international art scene that it is today.

An equally profound transformation also took place in the psyche and the political consciousness of the individual viewer and collectively in the local population. In the moment people first encountered Surrounded Islands—this vast, breathtakingly beautiful installation—even local people, in a place they lived in and knew well, doubted their own eyes. This, in turn, seeded a sense of disbelief that conditioned their response to everything else around them. They even began to look at everyday things differently, as if they were seeing the world for the first time. “You cannot separate that object formally like it exists in a pristine situation,” Christo explained. “It’s on the real site….By being involved with so many natural elements [the changing light, the weather, the wildlife, and the sea] like a garden, the project is so varied, so complex, the perception of the object itself… becomes much broader.”¹¹

Powerful ideas change people. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on August 28, 1963, put an image in people’s minds of a different America to which they could aspire. Over time that image matured into a conscious and active striving for a new reality. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote in his books Young Man Luther and Gandhi’s Truth of how a charismatic individual, in seeking to resolve his or her own psychic conflicts in public, marshals common pressures that are widely felt by many other individuals as well, at a given moment, in a particular place. In reorganizing his or her own encounter with the world, such individuals create a contagious reformulation of identity for enough people to constitute a mass ideology.¹²

Mahatma Gandhi wrote that “the Indian movement satyagraha,” is a kind of “truth force”¹³ which compels people’s minds. This idea of a “truth force” also applies to the public experience of charismatic works of art—a remarkable painting, but even more a work done on a startling scale in a public space like the Christo and Jeanne-Claude projects. These projects insert themselves into everyday experience, complicating the boundaries of the viewer’s reality. From a marine patrol officer monitoring boat traffic, to the lawyers in court arguing both for and against the project, even to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s workers, I found everyone I spoke with reflecting in a fresh way about themselves and what they did every day, because they found themselves living their everyday lives in a context defined by the presence of this literally unbelievable work of art. All of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude projects have had this effect on people, making them do a double-take in a real, otherwise familiar setting. The surprise and the beauty of the projects, set in the ordinary space of daily life, opened people up, putting them into a frame of mind of openness that carried over to everything.

The anthropologist Joseph Henrich noted that ”culture can and does alter our brains,”¹⁴ and that we pass on these changes. New patterns instilled by culture dramatically change large social outcomes over time. In "the spread of literacy between 1550 and 1900…”, he wrote, “psychological and neurological changes in people's brains”¹⁵ took place." Embedded deep in Protestantism is the notion that individuals should develop a personal relationship with God and… both men and women needed to read and interpret the sacred scriptures—the Bible—for themselves.” By the nineteenth century, this greater literacy caused Protestant populations to outperform Catholics “…in math, history, and writing."¹⁶ 

The abstract form of a Christo and Jeanne-Claude project, inserted into the reality of daily life, communicates with viewers on a preconscious level. Over and over in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud shows how dreams involve thinking in images and that images possess a remarkable capacity to reorganize the unconscious. “And Only in art,” he wrote, “does it still happen that a man who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional effects…just as though it were something real."¹⁷

Meanwhile, Henrich notes that: “When moving in step with others, the neurological mechanisms used to represent our own actions and those used for others’ actions overlap in our brains….The convergence in these representations blurs the distinction between ourselves and others, which leads us to perceive others as more like us and possibly even as extensions of ourselves…. This illusion draws people closer together and creates a feeling of interdependence.”¹⁸ Humans have a superior mentalizing ability (empathy) and he writes “the ability to imagine the thoughts of another but also an imagined other, accounts for our species’ tendency toward dualism—thinking of minds and bodies as separable and potentially independent. Dualistic inclinations leave us susceptible to beliefs in ghosts, spirits, and an afterlife.”¹⁹

The power of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Surrounded Islands, like all great works of art, relies on the access to unconscious emotions embodied in the ineffable of abstract forms. “Art offers substitutive satisfactions for the oldest and still most deeply felt cultural renunciations,” Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion, “and for that reason it serves as nothing else does to reconcile a man to the sacrifices he has made on behalf of civilization.”²⁰ Works like Surrounded Islands and L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped catalyze a symbolic reordering of our experience. The works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude are political works of art in this most profound sense of opening us up to a change in the way we meet the world.