christo umbrellas

Christo's Umbrellas: Visual Art/Performance/Ritual/Real Life on a Grand ScaleAuthor(s): Robert Findlay and Ellen WalterscheidSource: TDR (1988-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 74-97Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146272Accessed: 08/10/2010 19:23

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Christo's Umbrellas

Visual Art/Performance/Ritual/Real Life on a Grand Scale

Robert Findlay and Ellen Walterscheid

Ellen Walterscheid and Robert Findlay have been colleagues and companions since I983. What follows is their multiple reading of Christo's umbrellas project. Walterscheid was a worker/monitor on the project; Findlay was a spectator/witness.

At dawn on 9 October 1991, the artist Christo saw his I,340 blue umbrellas unfurl over 12 miles in the lush green hills and rice paddies of Ibaraki, Japan. His enormous artwork, The Umbrellas, Joint Project for Japan and USA, planned over more than six years, had finally blossomed. Christo then jetted from Japan to southern California and, again at dawn on 9 Oc- tober 1991, he saw his 1,760 yellow umbrellas open over I8 miles of the burt-out umber hills and valleys of Tejon Pass between Los Angeles and Bakersfield.

After the opening, the project was officially retitled The Umbrellas, Japan- USA I984-9I. The project came to fruition on two continents with the help of more than 2,000 collaborators, and, before it closed on 27 October 1991, more than 3 million spectators viewed and interacted with it.

Though Christo is considered a leading figure of the international

avantgarde, his work is uncharacteristically popular with the public at large. Though few members of the "art world" would deny the enormous popularity of Christo's installations with the general public, some, according to William Grimes in the New York Times (1991), consider Christo "the Norman Rockwell of Conceptual Art":

His [Christo's] popularity is undeniable [. . .]. And like the late illus- trator, he has put his stamp on the public mind so successfully that a building wrapped for renovation often brings thoughts of the School of Christo.

The designation "conceptual artist" rankles Christo, who argues that he doesn't simply conceive his projects by making pretty and realistically accu- rate landscape drawings in his studio; he realizes his projects by building

The Drama Review 37, no. I (TI37), I993

74

Christo 75

them in reality. He prefers the label "environmental artist," as long as that term implies that he works in both urban and rural environments and that he never works in "deserted places" but rather those "already prepared and used by people" (Christo 1991).

Before the Umbrellas

Born Christo Javacheff on 13 June 1935 in Bulgaria, Christo came from a well-to-do family steeped in the arts. Before her marriage, his mother served as secretary of the Sofia Fine Arts Academy and, as a result, be- friended many exiled Russian artists. Early on Christo learned of the poetry and plays of futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, the constructivist theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the "fantastic realism" of director Yevgeny Vakhtangov, the mass spectacles of Nikolai Evreinov, the films of Sergei Eisenstein, the graphics of El Lissitzky, and works by many other Russian theatre/film/visual artists (see van der Marck I98I).

Later, as van der Marck suggests, Christo was influenced by the actors and filmmakers he met in Sofia through his elder brother, who eventually became a star of Bulgarian theatre and film. Often called a conceptual/environmental artist (the correctness of this designation is highly debatable), Christo first gained critical and public attention in Paris in the early I96os. His Iron Curtain-Wall of Oil Barrels (I96I-I962), which barricaded the Rue Visconti in the heart of Paris, struck many as a political statement-an answer by an Eastern bloc emigr& to the construction of the Berlin Wall the previous year.

Though Christo's art inevitably has addressed the contemporary mo- ment, later in the I96os, '70s, and '8os, he came to be less politically obvi- ous. He began to experiment most specifically with fabric, "wrapping" huge public buildings, monuments, bridges, and walkways in various colors of usually nylon woven material. Certainly the artist's most spectacular uses of fabric in the I970S and I980s were the projects Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado, 1970-72; Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, I972-76; Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, I980-83; and The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, I975-85.

Valley Curtain used 200,000 square feet of orange nylon polyamide strung across the Grand Hogback in Rifle, Colorado. The curtain was sta- bilized by IIo,ooo lbs. of steel cables and 800 tons of cement. Unfortu- nately the curtain blew to shreds a day after it went up. But the following year Christo tried again and mounted it successfully. Running Fence was on an even larger scale: an I8-foot-high continuous ribbon of white fabric (supported by steel poles and cables) skimming over nearly 25 miles through Sonoma and Marin counties, California, and then diving into the Pacific Ocean. Surrounded Islands was pink woven polypropylene fabric spread around II islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay. Christo's wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris with 440,000 square feet of golden fabric allowed car, river, and pedestrian traffic to continue to use the bridge.

Umbrella Logistics The Umbrellas took more than six years of planning by Christo and

Jeanne-Claude Christo-Javacheff. Born Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon in Paris on 13 June 1935, the same day as Christo himself was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, Jeanne-Claude met Christo in Paris when he was commissioned to paint her mother's portrait. Married just as Christo was gaining some notoriety, they have a son in his early thirties, Cyril (born I960), who is a

76 Findlay/Walterscheid

i. Christo sells the pre- t :i liminary studies and plans of his projects in order to finance his endeavors. The sale of this early umbrella .

Claude)

poet. Despite their contact with enormous sums of money in developing their projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have lived and worked at the same address in New York's Soho district for the past 28 years in relatively modest circumstances. They have no second home. Jeanne-Claude plays an essential role in Christo's art: as his business manager and art dealer, she at- tends public hearings and lobbying sessions with Christo; raises the money for the projects by selling Christo's drawings, collages, early artworks, and

lithographs; and manages the payroll for the projects. Even though he does most of his work alone in his studio, Christo is

the epitome of the collaborative artist: he works with close associates over

many years; with workers over perhaps a few months; with spectators/witnesses over a few weeks. In addition to Jeanne-Claude, support for Christo as artist comes from several close, paid advisors. Among these are construction engineer August L. Huber III, general manager of The Umbrellas on both continents; Henry Scott Stokes, project director in Japan; Thomas M.R. Golden, project director in the United States; Wolfgang Volz, project photographer; and Masahiko Yanagi, project historian.

Christo 77

As in several earlier projects, this central team came together at various points over an extended period to work out the parameters and logistics of The Umbrellas. Christo, Stokes, and Golden, for example, had to secure permits from 478 private landowners in Ibaraki and California as well as from 44 government agencies in both countries, 24 in California alone. The team also developed contracts with 1 different manufacturers in 5 countries to make the 3,I00 umbrellas. Details for filming and photograph- ing the project also had to be worked out. Christo projects have been filmed by Albert and David Maysles (who made the documentary Gimme Shelter about the Rolling Stones). Typically, a large book filled with many photographs by Volz also appears after the realization of each project. Even arrangements for traffic control, among other tasks, were handled by Christo and members of this central advisory team.

Various members of this group also were responsible for testing proto- types of the octagonal umbrellas (each 19' 8 '/4" x 28' 5") in the wind tunnel of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa to withstand gusts of up to 65 mph when open and IIo mph when closed. A press release of 20 September 1991 states: "Each umbrella is filed, recording the vertical and horizontal angles of the slope, the base condition, the bearing and distance to benchmarks and adjacent umbrellas."

Despite the vastness of detail his projects require, Christo remains in- tensely involved with their progress on a daily basis. He and Jeanne-Claude attended hours of public hearings and meetings with government officials to get permission to plant the umbrellas in Japan and California. Christo visited and discussed his project with each of the 478 landowners whose land would be involved. He and Jeanne-Claude also met with the companies that manufactured the umbrellas and attended testing sessions for pro- totype umbrellas.

Christo personally selected the location for each of the 3,I00 umbrellas. According to Huber, the 56-year-old artist ran up and down every hill and peak choosing the precise plantings for each of the umbrellas:

He didn't do it like you or I would do it. He would get halfway down a mountain and look over his shoulder and decide that he wanted to move one or add one, so he'd run back up the hill. The engineer who did the actual surveying of the positions after Christo looked at them added up the vertical difference from one to the other and the sequence that he looked at them and figured out that it was the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest twice. (1991)

In addition, the Christo team had to process applications from approximately 2,500 potential workers to install, monitor, and eventually dismantle the umbrellas. Each worker in the United States, for example, was paid at least minimum wage ($4.25 per hour) and was protected by workers' com- pensation.

The Umbrellas, Christo's most expensive project yet, cost $26 million. It used 4.5 million square feet of nylon fabric, almost I miles of steel poles, 73.5 miles of aluminum ribs, 35 miles of aluminum struts, and 2,000 gal- lons of blue and yellow paint. After the closing of The Umbrellas, all materi- als were scheduled to be recycled: the paint to be scraped off aluminum parts, which would be melted down and reused; the steel bases to become scrap metal or bases for satellite dishes; and the fabric destined for erosion or flood control (Christo 1991; and Goodwin 1991). Finally, the plan in- cluded restoration of the land in both Japan and California to its original state before The Umbrellas.


2. Christo's earlier work, Running Fence (I972- I976), created afence of i8foot-high white fabric that ran for nearly 25 miles in California. (Photo by Jeanne-Claude)

During the planning stages, Christo in his New York studio made many precise colored sketches, collages, and painted photos of how the umbrellas would look in both California and Japan. Through Jeanne-Claude's sale of such studies, the artist gains independent funds for the realization of his

projects. Inevitably at the conclusion of every project, Christo and Jeanne- Claude owe considerable bank debts, which they pay off in time. Christo has never accepted sponsorship of any kind: no grants, foundation money, or commissions. Yet the public can view his artworks free. Thus Christo

speaks of himself as different from those artists who might work in stone or gold or steel creating "permanent art." The ephemerality of his art, as he suggests, "is really a profound challenge to the immortality of art [. . .]. All my projects are about freedom. They cannot be bought; they cannot be commercialized" (Christo and Christo-Javacheff 1992).

The Umbrellas Show

The Umbrellas show did not open on 8 October I991 as planned but rather on the 9th, because of a typhoon approaching the coast of Japan. Af- ter the typhoon passed, Christo saw his blue Japanese umbrellas open the next day at dawn and then, later, he saw the yellow umbrellas open in California at dawn of the same day. The sun had traveled west around the world, circling from Japan across Asia, the Soviet Union (which still ex- isted at that time), Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, the East Coast of the United States, the Midwest, and finally southern California. Christo had raced east to once again greet the sun at dawn. On opening day his artwork in the United States alone was covered by AP, UPI, Reuters, maga- zines such as Time, Newsweek, and Life, and all the major TV networks, including CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, PBS, and the BBC, as well as

Christo 79

German and Japanese TV. Estimates suggest that more than three million spectators on both continents flocked to and interacted with the show and talked with Christo's monitor/workers about the project.

The artwork stayed open to visitors 24 hours a day. In both California and Japan, spectators brought picnic lunches, which they ate under the umbrellas. One couple in California got married under an umbrella; another couple was chased away by police late one night for having sex under an umbrella. An atmosphere of joy and connection prevailed, not only among the crews who raised and monitored the umbrellas but also with those who observed them.

On Saturday 26 October 1991 at approximately 5:00 p.m., nearing sunset, one of the umbrellas along scenic Digier Road in California (one of Christo's favorite vistas) was dislodged from its moorings by freak high winds that observers reported came from a swift and sudden dark cloud. The umbrella flew through the air like a kite-448 lbs.-and killed a 33-year- old spectator, Lori Rae Keevil-Mathews, of Camarillo, California. Christo, in Japan, immediately ordered all umbrellas closed on both continents (four days early) and flew to California, where he held a press conference ex- pressing his sadness over the accidental death.

The day after the woman in California was buried, another shock occurred. A Christo worker in Japan, 5 -year-old Masaaki Nakamura, died of electrocution. The crane he was working on to dismantle an umbrella in Japan was hit by a flash of electricity from a 65,ooo-volt high-tension line.

The Umbrellas as Performance Christo objects to the notion of his art being compared to theatre. In a

telephone interview of 19 February 1992, he said:

When discussing my project, not only The Umbrellas, usually the art historian/art critic is very little aware that one of the most important parts of my work is that nothing, nothing, nothing of my project is make-believe. It is so far away from theatre. We have 2,000 people working on the project. I don't like to have 2,000 workers to look nice in the photography and the movie, but because we need 2,000 workers.

But The Umbrellas seems to have some performative elements. There was an enormous setting: the compelling spectacle of yellow and blue umbrellas planted in the contrasting environments of two continents. There were roles and actions to be performed: 2,000 workers raised and removed the umbrellas, while some served as monitors interacting with the public who came to view the spectacle (workers ranged in age from teenagers to retir- ees in their seventies). There were costumes: the 2,000 worker/monitors wore white hard hats bearing Christo's signature, white tunics designed by Christo, plus their own jeans and construction boots. Christo served both as director (regisseur) and scenographer. There were technicians and engineers who advised Christo and served to bring his artistic vision to practical realization. (Christo's earliest sketches of The Umbrellas, for example, show very thin-stemmed structures-unfeasible from an engineering point of view-which Christo's engineers convinced him to redesign.) There was a publicist who put out press releases and dealt directly with those who would write about the project (Jeanne-Claude). There were spectator/witnesses (more than three million) who viewed the umbrellas, sat under them, took millions of pictures, and interacted with worker/monitors.

3. Landowner Roy Bakman, in his home near Gorman, CA, listens to Christo describe his plan

for The Umbrellas. The umbrellas on Mr. Bakman's land remained

for a three-week period. (Photo by Wolfgang Volz)

Christo's awareness of theatre, particularly that of the Russian Golden

Age of the I92os and 1930s, already has been noted by Jan van der Marck. The highly experimental work of Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Vakhtangov, Evreinov, Tairov, and others was based in fiction, to be sure, but such directors also experimented with the most advanced theatrical techniques and forms of their time: constructivism, biomechanics, time study, fantastic realism, synthetic realism, mass spectacle. As van der Marck suggests, Christo's roots lie in such fertile projects as Evreinov's mass spectacle The Storming of the Winter Palace (7 November I920).

In this project, Evreinov developed a fictionalized restaging of the beginning of the Russian Revolution on the exact site in St. Petersburg where the event had occurred three years earlier. The Storming of the Winter Palace used a cast of more than 8,000 soldiers, sailors, workers, and actors. An or- chestra of 500 certainly was a make-believe/fiction, in the sense that no or- chestra had accompanied what had happened three years before. But the

firing of guns by the cruiser Aurora anchored in the Neva River must have added a touch of reality. More than oo00,000 spectators attended the one- day event. Evreinov had developed an enormous spectacle with thousands

functioning at the level of performer and many more thousands function-

ing as spectator/witnesses. As regisseur, presumably with many assistants and advisors, Evreinov brought his mass spectacle to a realization beyond theatre.

In addition to being aware of the Russian Golden Age directors and their productions, Christo spent I956 in Prague hanging out at the theatre of the famous Czech experimental director E.F. Burian. Before World War II, Burian had worked on a small stage but used enormous projections of

images behind his actors. His productions prophesied the work of Josef Svoboda after the war. So Christo clearly has a few roots in the theatre.

The Umbrellas as Ritual

Anthropologists suggest that ritual is efficacious-that ritual has real re- sults in the real world (see for example Schechner I976). Christo's Umbrel- las is not so easily identifiable as ritual, since its real effects cannot easily be measured in a society or group at large. Its real effects in the real world are more easily identified at the level of individual participants. And certainly what may seem efficacious to one individual may exist simply as a pleasant or bad artistic experience for another. But through reports of those who

participated in the project, either as workers or as spectator/witnesses, something at least bordering on efficacy seems to have emerged.

Most people are skeptical of speaking publicly of their profound and inti- mate experiences of artworks that changed their lives, artworks that are efficacious. Such statements often seem self-indulgent, sentimental, overly subjective, too emotional, resembling the smug accounts of TV evangelists who give the impression they have talked with God by telephone earlier in the day. When one speaks personally of an efficacious experience arising from confrontation with an artwork, hopefully one does not sound like a

person in the supermarket tabloids who was whisked away for a time on a UFO. An efficacious experience occurs in the real world. It is a real event in the mind of the experiencer. Such experiences do occur. They are at least "virtual realities."

No very adequate critical/theoretical language has yet been invented to deal with efficacious experience. The distinguished Brechtian scholar/trans- lator/critic Eric Bentley probably did the best job of it in his open letter to

Jerzy Grotowski after seeing a performance of Apocalypsis cum figuris. Bentley's open letter was a long review. But at the heart of it stood this statement:

4. Christo and engineers Simon Chaput (left) and Vahe Aprahamian (center) spent an extensive amount of time finding placement sitesfor the umbrellas in southern

California. The opening of the umbrellas took six years of planning. (Photo by Wolfgang Volz)


During this show, Apocalypsis, something happened to me. I put it this personally because it was something very personal that happened. About halfway through the play I had a quite specific illumination. A message came to me-from nowhere, as they say-about my private life and self. This message must stay private, to be true to itself, but the fact that it arrived has public relevance, I think, and I should publicly add that I don't recall this sort of thing happening to me in the theatre before. (1969)

Bentley uses the language of first-person autobiographical reportage, though he does not elaborate specifically on his "illumination." Neverthe- less, his approach and language suggest a beginning step in reporting such experiences.

Our individual reports of the Umbrellas experience follow.

An Insider's View

As a journalist, I'm supposed to be objective about what I write. But in early I990 I wrote an article about Augie Huber, a Kansas City construction engineer and Christo's general manager for The Umbrellas (Walter- scheid I990). During our interview, Augie told me all about Christo: how he funds his projects himself, how he spends years working out construction details and getting government permits, how he employs hundreds of workers to erect his huge artworks. Here was an artist who achieved his impossibly large-scale vision with integrity and meticulousness. And the end product was a thing of breathtaking beauty. I privately decided: Screw observation. I want to help put up those umbrellas.

So in late September 199i I set out from Kansas City in my aging Chrysler E-Class for the Umbrellas project site in southern California. I packed my car with sunscreen, trail mix, and, as instructed by a mailing from the Christo camp, "heavy work shoes through which snake bites cannot penetrate."

At 29, maybe I'm too old for something like this, I told myself as the miles rolled away beneath my car. Relatives and friends I stayed with on the way nodded their heads politely as I tried to explain my mission. "I understand what Christo wants to do," said one well-meaning friend, "but why?"

Once I got to the project site, though, I found kindred spirits. Most of the more than 9oo workers there came from California, but many others traveled thousands of miles for the chance to open Christo's umbrellas. On orientation day we gathered in the big dirt parking lot in Frazier Park that served as the check-in area. Despite dust and wind and 95-degree heat, a feeling of friendly excitement prevailed. We filled out W-4 tax forms and received photo ID cards, then shuffled into a big white tent to hear orientation speeches from Christo and his advisors. I saw Christo standing qui- etly for a time in one corer, wearing his customary faded jeans and work boots and a white floppy hat, watching the proceedings intently.

The next morning at dawn I met my crew: five women and five men in their mid-twenties to early fifties. Among us were two artists, an actor, a real estate entrepreneur, a community planner, and an administrator for nonprofit groups. Our crew leader was a walrus-mustached man named

Christo 83

Patrick Tiemey, a 4I-year-old landscape architect from North Miami Beach who had worked on Christo's Surrounded Islands and The Pont Neuf Wrapped. Pat issued us hard hats, special shirts, water jugs, and tools. Then we boarded the van that took us to our worksite.

Our job was to erect I9 umbrellas-less than one percent of the total project-high atop the Tejon Pass mountains in an area known as Grape- vine Peak. When we got to our assigned hilltop we found the umbrellas lying on their sides shrouded in gray plastic. They'd been dropped onto the hillsides by helicopter a few days earlier. Our instructions were to posi- tion each umbrella at a preset steel base, unscrew a plastic base cover, slide the umbrella pole into a hinged base sleeve, and bolt the pole to the sleeve. Then came the fun part: raising the 20-foot-long umbrella Iwo Jima- style until it stood upright-not an easy maneuver on some of the steep slopes Christo chose for his huge brushstrokes.

We cheered after we raised our first umbrella. But by IO:OO a.m. the cool morning breeze gave way to Indian summer heat, and we focused on doing our work as quickly and efficiently as possible. Instead of moving in a pack from umbrella to umbrella, some crew members stayed behind to screw on the plastic base cover while others ran ahead to get started on the next one. Leaders started to emerge-the physically stronger and more tech- nically adept members of the group. But Pat insisted that everyone do each step of the job at least once. When I used a ratchet for the first time in my life to tighten a large bolt, everybody in my crew waited patiently until I finished. I felt embarrassed at my lack of skill, but I also felt secure within the group. Despite our different ages, sizes, genders, personalities, and lev- els of expertise, what bound us together was a belief in the sheer goodness

5. When 33-year-old Lori Rae Keevil-Mathews was killed after being hit by an umbrella dislodgedfrom its moorings by high winds, the project closed down. Here are the remnants of this disheveled umbrella as they appeared after the accident. (Photo by Gene Blevins, courtesy of the Los Angeles Daily News)


6. Crew members rotated tasks among the group, so that each got a chance to

perform all aspects leading to an d inclding the

"blooming" of the umbrella. here Alice

Cunningham cranks open an umbrella into a "blossom." (Photo by Ellen

Walterscheid) i

of Christo's vision We instinctively gave mutual support for a profoundly personal experience.

It seemed almost too good to be true. By the end of the day our sweaty, dusty crew barely had enough energy

left to speak to each other. We sat exhausted on the parched grass and looked down into the valley at the hundreds of gray missiles that other crews had erected during the day. Christo's vast canvas was coming to life. To think that all these gray stalks dotting the landscape would soon flower into yellow umbrellas seemed unreal.

Later, riding down the mountain in our work van, I asked members of

my crew why they wanted to work on the project. Joe Murphy, a 25-year- old vagabond artist and world peace advocate from Colorado, had this to say:

My first exposure to Christo was seeing a movie about Running Fence when I was younger-much younger-so I've always been familiar with his work and actually that was one of my earlier influences for being an artist. So far I'm impressed by the attention to detail that Christo has had. He's pretty much answered all my questions as far as the recycling of the materals afterwards, you know, just the awareness of the landscape and the impact on the land. The project in general I think is really wonderful, just a rea lly wonderful happening. The community is just great. Everybody is here for a good purpose.'

Alice Cunningham, 25, lives in Los Angeles and is trying to make a career as an actor. She signed up because she admired the way Christo pays for his projects himself

As an actor I've been looking around with some dismay at my own future in my own career because so much of it is oriented around the

marketplace. You know if you want to do theatre it's very hard to do theatre that's not safe, that's new, because you can't make money doing it, so we have Shakespeare festivals and The Importance of Being Earnest for the thousandth time-not that all that stuff isn't wonderful-

Christo 85

but it's really hard to find new work. And then of course there's TV and Hollywood, and that is aimed toward making a buck too. I just was really inspired to see an artist finding ways to do what's most important to him and to do it the way he wants to do it. That's really empowering, and I guess I feel empowered being a part of it.

Cooke Sunoo, 46, Hollywood project coordinator for the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles, summed up his desire to work on The Umbrellas in one sentence: "I wanted an opportunity," he said, "to be a speck of paint on a masterpiece of art."

At one point as we worked we saw Christo on a neighboring peak, watching another crew install an umbrella. His documentary team trailed him with their cameras. Indeed, documenting the project preoccupied a lot of us; most brought cameras in our backpacks. The real estate man in our crew brought a camcorder, and at one point got so busy taping us that our crew chief told him to put the thing away and get back to work.

We took two days to install our 19 umbrellas. But we had to wait four more days before we could open them. To everyone's dismay, we got word that a typhoon in Japan would delay the opening by at least a day. Christo, who by this time had flown to Japan, faxed a message telling the workers to be patient. Blossoming Day was to be a joyous celebration, said the fax, and the threatening weather brought no joy. Please be patient.

So the crews spent a day picking up highway litter as a goodwill gesture to the surrounding community. I used the rest of my newly found free time to drive around the project site and check out the displays of kitsch blooming up and down Interstate 5. Local merchants were selling unauthorized T-shirts, watches, note cards, buttons-even a 14-karat-gold "umbrella" pin for $225. One stand offered chartreuse plastic water bottles with the words "I saw the umbrellas blossoming" emblazoned on the front.

7. All the crews worked together to raise the umbrellas. Ellen Walterscheid's crew raised their umbrellas Iwo ima- style. (Photo by Ellen Walterscheid)


A woman came up to me and asked where I bought the grimy shirt I was wearing, the sleeveless white tunic Christo had designed for the workers. When I explained to her that I was a Christo crew member and that the shirts weren't for sale, she looked crestfallen. "That's the only shirt I've seen around here that I halfway liked," she said and moaned. One worker I knew said he was offered $500 for his shirt but refused to sell it.

Forty miles north in Bakersfield, where I was staying, people who saw me in my dusty uniform asked about the project. A mail carrier collared me on my way into the post office to ask whether the umbrella bases were

permanent. I told him no. "My wife and I are going to drive down to see it this weekend," he said. "We figure it's a historic thing. After all, it cost- what?-$I million." When I told him $26 million, his eyes bugged out.

Inside the post office I talked with a woman who was mailing a copy of the local newspaper's special Christo supplement to her sister in Monterey, who was coming down that weekend to see the project. "He's making a statement," she said of Christo and The Umbrellas. "I think it's fantastic." Behind us in line stood a government worker named Pete Thrift who was

leading a tour of visiting Brazilians for an organization called Friendship Force International of Ker County. The Brazilians told me in halting En-

glish that they'd never heard of Christo but were anxious to see the

project. Pete said he hoped the project would bring Bakersfield exposure. Most people he knew were excited; his neighbor had put up umbrellas around her yard in honor of the event.

At a drugstore where I was buying film, a clerk told me he thought the

project was a waste of money. "I mean, a guy spending $58 million for

something like that," he said, "when so many people are starving?" Then he mentioned that he planned to take his daughter on a helicopter ride over The Umbrellas that weekend.

Back at my motel, I wrote a freelance dispatch about the project for the Kansas City Star (I99I). Later I got a frantic phone call from my boyfriend Bob in Kansas. His computer had just crashed. I considered telling him: "OK, your files are gone, calm down. Just think like Christo, treasure the

ephemeral, don't dwell on the past." But somehow I didn't think my newly hatched philosophy would soothe the distraught voice on the other

8. Here we can see the

opening of two umbrellas concurrently on "Blossom-

ing Day," 9 October 1991. Before the umbrellas were opened, a gray plastic sheath and a plastic inner- lining had to be pulled off. (Photo by Ellen

Walterscheid)

Christo 87

ill~ g~9. Along with the umbrellas, vendors selling kitsch

~ ~ !k ~ '

~~endi !~i ~sprang up around the sites. to see the project. I wanted someoneis man was selling

~~~~'~~ ~ i'i 4 j' umbrella hatsfor ive

Finally, a fax arrived dollars to passing motor- -' ... i . ............ ists. (Photo by Ellen Walterscheid)

end of the line. So I kept quiet. Still, I was anxious for Bob to come out to see the project. I wanted someone from my "other life" to enjoy The Umbrellas with me.

Finally, a fax arrived telling us the blue umbrellas of Japan were blooming. It was time. On Wednesday, October 9, our crew met on Grapevine Peak to crank open our payload. Already we could see yellow blossoms

springing up below us as other crews raced around the hillside. But we had decided early on to savor our opening. Christo said the umbrellas should open at 7:30 a.m., but he didn't dictate the pace.

We pulled off the gray plastic sheath of our first umbrella, then removed the clear plastic inner covering. We attached a winch to the pole and slowly started cranking. The winch mechanisms made a loud clicking sound, and the ribs of the umbrella started to rise.

In less than a minute the huge canopy spread to full flower. The yellow nylon fabric shimmered in the morning sun. Each panel of the canopy bil- lowed in the breeze. We cheered, then stood back in awe. The umbrella was beautiful, more beautiful than I had expected, more beautiful than all of Christo's colored drawings.

Were we stunned by the umbrella because we planned to be stunned? No. The reality of it was truly astonishing.

Richard Chon, a staff writer for the Bakersfield Californian who elo-

quently covered the project from start to finish, wrote in a review on

opening day:

We live in an age of debased spectacles, where our responses to hype have been enervated by continuous disappointment. But the umbrellas are a refreshing tonic, a case in which the preview didn't give the plot


away and, in fact, scarcely hinted at how fabulous the actual product was. The umbrella project's immense scope, its charm, its protean ability to transform itself, were unpredictable, even to the artist. Those who came up to the Tejon Pass before the blossoming, who viewed the umbrellas in their gray upright pods and attempted in their mind's eye to imagine how they would look, were shocked at how dramati- cally they came alive. [. . .] When their droopy wings rose slowly before snapping into sharp planes, one felt privileged to be watching, as if a creature was being born before one's eyes. And when the wind blew through their canopies, they seemed to respire, to vibrate with the energy of life. (1991)

After we opened our last umbrella, we sat down for a picnic beneath its shade. By now the slopes below us had begun to resemble fields of giant yellow poppies. Pat asked whether anyone wanted to make a toast, but no one volunteered. Maybe we thought a toast would have been too corny. Maybe we were too tired. Maybe we already were growing distant from each other. But perhaps that was to be expected. The week-long job was over. We knew we'd probably never see each other again-unless maybe at Christo's next project.

Later, down on level ground, I got in my car and drove along the interstate frontage road. I was struck by the randomness and rhythm of the placement of the umbrellas. I felt amused by their presence and surprised at how small the more distant ones looked against the massive hills of Tejon Pass. I craned my neck to spot my crew's umbrellas, but I couldn't tell which ones were ours.

That night Christo held a press conference at the construction yard. I cheered along with the other workers as he hopped out of his van, newly arrived from a quick visit to Japan, wearing his jeans and construction boots. He was grinning, elated. He leaped up on a platform to address the crowd and thank his workers. "No sketch of mine," he said, "no drawing or collage of mine, ever can match the real thing."

For four days after the opening I worked as a monitor on The Umbrellas. The job involved some police duties, such as telling people to put out their cigarettes (the dry grass posed a great fire hazard) and stopping curi- ous sightseers from climbing fences onto private property. But mostly monitor duty was a chance to answer questions and find out what people thought of the artwork.

I felt like a strange hybrid of museum docent, sentinel, and cult member as I talked to delighted visitors as well as to skeptics who challenged me to persuade them that The Umbrellas had any merit. (I don't know if I per- suaded them-but at least they felt compelled to stop their cars.) I played photographer for countless couples and families posing under the umbrellas, and many people offered me food from their umbrella picnics. One morning when it rained, all of us-monitors and visitors-stood under the umbrellas to keep dry.

The people I met during monitor duty under the umbrellas remain as vivid to me as the people I worked with installing them.

There was Billie, a docent at the Newport Beach Art Museum who asked me all about myself and wanted to discuss whether the process was the art in Christo's art. As her tour bus got ready to leave, she turned back to me abruptly and said: "You know, even our conversation just now was almost an imperative."

There were Ruby and Les Golonski, a couple in their fifties from Los Alamitos, California, who stood eating hot dogs as they looked at the ex-

Christo 89

~:~' !' - _io. . In this view of The Umbrellas, we are look-

..... ~:;/~~~::~}& '~- '-~ X ?ing south over Calfornia 's Interstate 5 at the trail of

"O; ~ 'yellow umbrellas. (Photo

"~ ii~~~~L~~~~~- ;, . by Doris Stewart, courtesy 4:~ !'il i i,t.> of the San Francisco

;:kzi:i~i~ :Chronicle)

hibit. "I think it's beautiful," Ruby said. "The umbrellas are like silk. I think maybe they should auction them off or something, give the money to charity when they close it." Les: "It's kind of nice, because nowadays anything anybody does, they've calculated what the return is going to be, and this guy, he's not getting any money from us. These people [he ges- tured at the concession stand nearby] are making a few nickels, but we can come here and see it without spending a red cent, so that's kind of inter-

esting." Ruby: "Yeah, it's kind of like art for everybody, you know, for the whole world really."

There was 9-year-old Ansley Andrews, a girl from Fresno who'd just finished driving around the umbrellas exhibit with her mother. "They were


fabulous," she said. "They were big too." I asked her why she thought Christo wanted to put them up. "Well," she said after a few moments of thought, "I think he wanted to make people have more fun these days."

Visitors spoke in metaphor and simile as they viewed the artwork. "It's as though he sprinkled the umbrellas," said a man to his companion as they sat eating lunch under an umbrella and pointing at distant hills. "Like planting umbrella seeds," she said.

Early one morning I met Myra, a slender woman in her fifties wearing a yellow blouse the color of the umbrellas ("I didn't realize it matched when I put it on this moring") and smiling with delight as she snapped pictures of the exhibit. She asked whether I'd seen the review in that morning's Los Angeles Times in which art critic Christopher Knight panned The Umbrellas as "lame" and "empty of transformative effect" (I99I). "He's so wrong," Myrna said, gesturing at the other smiling visitors who wan- dered around her. "This is joyful! Look how much joy this is bringing people!"

Then there was Lawrence Garcia, a man headed for a solo weekend camping trip in the mountains who stopped his Jeep Eagle beside an umbrella to talk. He wore hiking boots and a fedora. He wanted to know whether Christo needed any more monitors for the next weekend, because he wanted to sign up. Before he left he pulled a slim wedge of wood from the ribbon of his fedora and gave it to me. The printing on the wedge said: "The Matchless Table Leveler. Restores Balance in a Dangerously Unbalanced World." "I invented it," he told me. "I invent things under the name Jack Catholic."

"That's the most handsome man I've ever seen," said Jackie, my 58-year- old monitor partner, as Lawrence Garcia drove away. I had to agree.

By this time Bob had arrived in Califoria, and he paid me occasional visits at my monitor site as he drove around exploring the artwork. I felt both startled and comforted whenever I saw his familiar face coming toward me under the umbrellas.

One afternoon I encountered a young man and woman sitting under an umbrella, each looking out in a different direction. The woman told me she was an artist who sets up "little scenes in my studio and paints water- colors of them." She said she'd been feeling depressed because of the slumping art market-"People are just not buying art"-and her husband had been down about his slow construction business. They'd decided to drive out to see the umbrellas to cheer themselves up. The woman smiled. "It's inspiring just sitting under them. They look like music to me," she said, pointing at the up-and-down lines of distant umbrellas. But her husband fired a barrage of questions at me: "He spent $26 million for this? Jeez. Who's he going to sell them to when it's over? Huh-they're going to be recycled? Why doesn't he just sell them?" The woman looked at me and said: "I can understand spending $26 million for something like this. This is necessary-this is food for the spirit." Her husband sat scowling, unimpressed.

And there was the bus driver from Bakersfield, a Hispanic woman in her thirties who was overjoyed at The Umbrellas. She shook my and Jackie's hands, then asked us to pose for pictures under the umbrellas and even sign our autographs. "This is so wonderful," she told us. "Everyone who lives around here has been so different since these umbrellas came. Everyone's more excited-they're nicer, they're happier, they're more po- lite."

"It's going to be so hard to go back to regular society after this," Jackie said to me with a sigh.

Christo 9I

My last afternoon as a monitor I stood alone on a hilltop under an umbrella, in the wind and slanting sun, watching the traffic move along the highway below. Up that high, there was no noise. I felt dusty, tired, and extremely peaceful.

I felt more full of possibility than I'd felt in a long time.

-Ellen Walterscheid

An Outsider's View

I first saw The Umbrellas from about five miles away on Saturday afternoon, 12 October 1991, as I drove alone in a sluggish rental car south from Bakersfield to Gorman, California, a distance of about 40 miles. Gorman is a small town just off Interstate 5 situated on the south end of Christo's 18 miles of umbrellas. This was the first weekend of the show, and I was on my way to meet Ellen Walterscheid for a late fast-food lunch at Carl's Jr. Restaurant in Gorman. Ellen had left Bakersfield in her own car before dawn that morning to get to the crew gathering site near Frazier Park by sunrise. I'd arrived by air in California late the evening before and had slept in at the motel.

From five miles away, I could see two sunlit barren peaks rising on either side of the highway and hundreds of dots of yellow umbrellas like dandelions running jaggedly from the small town of Grapevine below up the sides of the two mountains. As I got nearer the town, I saw huge clus- ters of umbrellas in the valley and many more on the sides of hills. The spectacle was awesome. I was struck by how closely the real thing looked to Christo's preliminary colored drawings, copies of which Ellen had shown me more than a year before. But the drawings in no way could capture the scope of what I was seeing. It was exciting-a little breathtaking. My heart rate speeded up. The umbrellas were not something simply added to the natural terrain; they blended with it, enhanced it.

Just after I'd spotted the first umbrellas on the two peaks appproaching Grapevine, I passed a semitrailer truck, probably headed for Los Angeles. The driver was craning his neck, looking all around. He seemed a little puzzled, not quite understanding what these hundreds of yellow umbrellas planted along Interstate 5 and running up into the mountains were doing there. He had not expected them? Who knows? But he was grinning broadly, partly in disbelief.

As I passed the town of Grapevine, with its large bunches of umbrellas, the terrain got much steeper, and my rental car slowed noticeably as I drove through Tejon Pass and saw the small village of Lebec off to the west. Lebec, I learned later, was the publicity headquarters for The Umbrel- las, where visitors could obtain maps, press releases, fabric swatches, and information of all kinds about the project. All around were large, sun-colored umbrellas-hundreds of them in every direction-with people sitting underneath and walking among them. People were smiling; nearly everyone was taking pictures. Helicopters carrying spectators raced across the peaks, though it's worthwhile noting that Christo had suggested that on the ground, in an automobile, was the best way to view The Umbrellas. In contrast, he'd said years before that the best way to view Surrounded Islands was from above-from the bridges, the high-rise buildings around the bay, and from the air.


The traffic got much heavier as I saw signs for the Gorman exit ahead. When I pulled onto the exit ramp, I had to wait with a string of other cars before I could tur right on the frontage road leading to Carl's Jr. Umbrel- las were planted right in the center of town near the gas station and the restaurant. I was a little late and had trouble finding a parking space because the street was jammed with other vehicles also trying to park. But finally I pulled the car into a spot some distance from the restaurant. I walked past the numerous kitsch merchants hawking unauthorized T-shirts and mementos. It was hot. Ellen said temperatures had been in the 9os all that week during the raising and opening of the umbrellas. There was a grand crunch of people, most of them with cameras, in this little town that had never seen so many people nor such an event. And never would again. There was a festive carival atmosphere, a cross between Mardi Gras and Broadway near Times Square on a summer's afternoon.

Carl's Jr. was packed with diners, and I couldn't find Ellen either inside or outside. But finally we spotted one another-she was late too-and both of us asked in unison, "Where've you been?" It turned out the traffic had slowed her down too. I felt like a stage-door johnny picking up a famous actress. She was glowing. She was still in her costume: Christo hard hat, Christo tunic, jeans, and construction boots, which she'd bought a month earlier at Wal-Mart in Lawrence, Kansas. Her tunic and jeans were a little muddy from all the days she'd worked in them. And she was a little sun- burnt. But she was glowing.

Finally we got some lunch. She was excited-so many people, so crowded-and we admired the various vistas together through the windows of the restaurant. She was spilling out the events of the day, talking about the people she'd met as a monitor and what they'd said about how wonderful this whole thing was, how moved most people seemed to be by the sight of the umbrellas. But she also mentioned some who seemed a little confused about what was going on.

A man sitting alone at another table said he'd come up from Los Ange- les on a motorcycle. He asked how many more miles north did the umbrellas go. Ellen said, "This is only the beginning. They go for another almost 18 miles and end at Grapevine." The man with the motorcycle looked surprised. Shaking his head in belief/disbelief, he said: "Boy, that's really something." Ever the worker/monitor, although she was off duty, Ellen said, "You ought to go see all of them-and take a few side roads."

Over the three days I viewed the umbrellas, friendly conversations like this with strangers constantly sprang up. And I don't think it was simply because I was dealing for the most part with laid-back Californians. With Christo's umbrellas as a point of collective focus, we all had the same thing in common: we were perpetually surrounded by these yellow structures.

There was an unmistakable aura of community. According to newspaper reports, members of the California Highway Patrol were greatly surprised at how well-mannered, well-behaved, and orderly the crowds were. Traffic on Interstate 5 during The Umbrellas was reported as io times heavier than normal. During our telephone interview several months later with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Jeanne-Claude said the chief of the California Highway Patrol had told her that "never in his entire career did he have so few acci- dents on Highway 5 as during The Umbrellas" (1992).

After lunch, Ellen and I got into my sluggish rental car (which we cheerfully dumped that evening) and drove before sunset up into the side roads around Gorman and eventually the whole I8-mile length of Interstate 5. In Gorman, we saw the small pond where Christo had planted several umbrellas in water, though it was rumored (and Christo in our interview

Christo 93

confirmed) that water had to be piped in to keep this pond afloat. Near the Tejon Ranch, we saw horses romping together in a meadow surrounded by umbrellas. We were stunned by vistas where we saw hundreds of umbrellas in all directions. We drove up scenic Digier Road and tried to spot the distant site, high up, where a few days earlier Ellen and her crew had erected I9 umbrellas on Grapevine Peak. Her group had named themselves the Condor Club and had made up a rap song about themselves. We weren't sure we'd found the Condor Club's umbrellas, high up, dotting the peak. But maybe. Ellen took a few pictures, just in case we'd spotted the right ones.

Over the next two days (Sunday and Monday, 13 and 14 October I991), I left Bakersfield before dawn with Ellen, she driving. Each of those two days, we would see the umbrellas rising up from Grapevine into the mountains just as dawn was breaking. And we'd get a little excited. "They're still there!" I'd say. And then we would go to the crew meeting point in Frazier Park, and she would get on a minibus with other monitors and be taken to her site for the day. I would drive away in her car and have breakfast along the highway. Alone I saw the horses frequently again in the meadow surrounded by umbrellas. Alone I saw people enclosed, sheltered, protected (particularly from the sun in parched California) by Christo's whimsical artwork. I talked with people about nothing in particu- lar but only about The Umbrellas. I went to the pond again near Gorman where umbrellas were set in water. I went up scenic Digier Road at least twice every day. And, like others, I took pictures . . .

In the afternoon, I'd try to find where Ellen was monitoring and sit under an umbrella with her. One day I talked with one of her co-workers, Joe Murphy, who gave me one of his "peace pieces," a tiny ceramic sculp- ture with a hole in the center, intended as part of a "peace chain." And then Ellen would be off work by 3:00 p.m. and we'd eat lunch. Once again we went to Carl's Jr. in Gorman. Another day, we went for a beer at Okie Girl Restaurant and Brewery in Frazier Park, which Ellen told me was the favorite hangout for the crew workers. Later, we'd tour The Um- brellas together until sunset, taking pictures, sometimes arguing about ri- diculous things, sometimes important things, sometimes hugging, laughing, making jokes, watching people.

And those final two days I was in California, after sunset, in the dark, Ellen and I would drive those 40 miles back to Bakersfield, passing signs indicating roads to such small towns as Weed Patch, Pumpkin Center, and Greensfield. Then we'd bring back food to eat at the motel and watch the World Series and the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill confrontation on television.

On the morning of IS October, we ate breakfast at a restaurant in Bakersfield. Our waitress, a woman named Robin, asked if we were going to see the umbrellas. Ellen said she'd worked on them. Robin was impressed and told us about how much she'd loved seeing the umbrellas and how she'd told off several stodgy members of her church who'd said the $26 million might have been better spent. Robin had told them: "Look, this is his hobby. If he wants to spend all that money and let us see the umbrellas for free, that's his business." After breakfast Ellen drove me to the airport, kissed me goodbye, and put me on a plane back to Kansas. Then she took off for San Francisco in her car to see an old high school girlfriend and her husband in their new home. And I didn't see her again safely back in Kansas until the evening of Saturday, 26 October. Except for the four days in California, we'd been apart the whole month and it was good to be together again.


But that same Saturday evening of reunion was the night we saw on CNN Headline News that, during a sudden storm, a young woman had died after being struck by a dislodged umbrella on Digier Road, our favorite vista. We'd been to a play (The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs) that evening and had come back to my place for a late dinner. I was in the kitchen making the meal; Ellen was near the television but reading the newspaper; neither of us was paying much attention to the television until we heard the news of the accident.

It was not easy eating dinner. We even got into a small argument about whose fault it was that someone had died. I'd made reference to the wind tunnel tests in Canada, how the Christo group had carefully verified the strength of the umbrella structures. "There must have been a miscalcula- tion," I said. Ellen claimed that the winds must have exceeded what the umbrellas were tested for, and I eventually confirmed her opinion. But a great cloud of sadness hung over us that night and for many days after. When later that night we heard that Christo in Japan had ordered the umbrellas closed immediately and was headed for California, I told Ellen: "He's doing the right thing." Our sadness further intensified a few days later when we learned that a Japanese worker dismantling an umbrella also had died.

I've asked myself in the months since viewing The Umbrellas in Califor- nia whether their powerful effect upon me had to do with the artwork itself, with seeing them with Ellen, or with the two accidental deaths that occurred at the end of the project. Maybe all three are explanations. I know I was awed and moved in California before the deaths by simply the sight of so many umbrellas, so well placed, the happy faces of people viewing them and walking and sitting among them. I felt a very strong communal sense with those who, as I, had come to view this enormous artwork. It was fun, it was whimsical, it was something totally out of the ordinary. It was something that brought viewers a bit closer to one another simply by their mutual focus. Surely, despite Ellen's and my little ar- guments, I think we both felt even closer to one another in this environment of umbrellas that Christo had created for us.

But the two deaths do, in some way, play into my feelings about The Umbrellas: that such a beautiful yet ephemeral uniting of art and human be- ings with the natural environment underscores the ephemerality of everything-the environment itself, life itself, relationships, and art too. The two deaths were accidental yet underscore something of the work's metaphor of ephemerality, which opens into a cluster of endless metaphors. As I approach my 6oth birthday this year, I have thoughts and feelings like this more frequently than I did at 35. Christo's Umbrellas simply has set such thoughts and feelings in motion.

-Robert Findlay

After the Umbrellas Closed

Both the lush green valley in Japan and the dry parched landscape in California have been restored to their natural conditions. The land looks just as it did before Christo, his advisors, and workers raised their 3,100 umbrellas. Christo:

The removal is entirely finished. [In California] we [had to] rake the land to guard against erosion. And the removal phase went quite fast

Christo 95

in Japan because there was no raking involved and also there were fewer umbrellas to remove there. Everything is now done. (1992)

The Umbrellas, Japan-USA I984-91 now exists only in individual and ul- timately collective memory, assisted by the millions of photographs taken by spectator/witnesses and official photos by Christo's photographer, the filmed documentary, and the huge book to be published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Inevitably the project will be associated, at least in part, with the two accidental deaths that occurred. But, perhaps more importantly, it will be remembered too as a large, ambitious artwork. With presumably few exceptions, the artwork was seen in toto on both continents by only Christo, Jeanne-Claude, and Christo's central group of engineers, organiz- ers, filmmakers, photographers, et al. So in a sense, the artwork will exist in a kind of mythology for most who saw only a part of it. One can only presume that the sense of community that occurred in California also occurred in Japan.

Since the realization and closing of The Umbrellas in October 1991, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have not had a particularly easy time of it. The two accidental deaths associated with the project, though covered by liabil- ity insurance, were particularly disturbing. When Lori Rae Keevil-Mathews died in California, Christo immediately ordered the project closed "out of respect to her memory." A New York Times article by William Grimes states: "Friends of the artist say that he was devastated when he heard of the death in California" (1991). Filmmaker Albert Maysles reported that Christo had wept, something Maysles had never seen before. Later, with the death of Japanese crew worker Masaaki Nakamura in Japan, Christo's grief was compounded.

In our telephone interview the following February, Christo reflected on the two deaths:

It's really terrible that we have a tragedy, but it's something miracu- lous that it did not happen before with some other project. We have 2,000 plus workers, 3 million visitors, and, of course, a very public space. So much chance that something can go wrong. We were more concerned that the helicopters would collide. Really, in the case of Ms. Mathews, she and her husband had admired the work. The irony is that she died at the project rather than somebody just passing by.

Christo plans to dedicate the book on The Umbrellas to the memory of Lori Rae Keevil-Mathews and Masaaki Nakamura.

The Grimes article suggests that because of the two deaths Christo will face great difficulty in enlisting the cooperation of public agencies. Grimes quotes James Clark, executive director of the Public Art Fund in New York City, as saying: "[The deaths] can't help but have an impact when review boards and agencies look at proposals." And Grimes also asserts that insurance companies may become wary of underwriting a Christo project.

Despite the sadness and uncertainties-and the fact that Christo and Jeanne-Claude still have to pay back the bank loans for The Umbrellas-they are both positive and hopeful, and with good reason. Shortly before we spoke to them in February 1992, they had just returned from Berlin, where they had been negotiating positively with German government officials about the realization of their long-standing "project in progress" titled Wrapped Reichstag. This is a project proposed exactly 20 years ago but es- sentially ignored by German authorities. Helmut Kohl, for example, had said several years ago that the Reichstag would not be wrapped as long as


he was chancellor. Nonetheless, with the reunification of Germany and the moving of the capital from Bonn to Berlin, the whole atmosphere has changed. As Jeanne-Claude said, "lt used to be Christo and I would knock our heads on closed doors [about Wrapped Reichstag] every time. Now the president of the Bundestag [Rita Siissmuth] sent us a fax to come see her. We of course accepted the invitation immediately-you bet." And Christo added:

The president of the Bundestag is one of the most popular politicians in Germany-also very powerful-and can make decisions much more freely without consulting the chancellor. With the reunification of Germany and especially last June, [the decision] to move the capital to Berlin, of course that was the enormous change. And the idea of what the building should be not only politically but urbanistically. [The building is] still a focal point of everything that is happening in Berlin in the late 20th century. [That's] probably why she's interested in it now. Of course there's a lot of historical reason. We are confronted with symbols.

Though plans are still tentative, Christo sees the possibility of realizing Wrapped Reichstag in 1994 or 1995.

Note

i. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from interviews conducted by the author during October I991.

References

Bentley, Eric 1969 "Dear Grotowski: An Open Letter from Eric Bentley." The New Yor

Times, 30 November, section 2:I, 7, I8.

Chon, Richard 1991 "Umbrellas Mirror Life's Unpredictability. The Bakersfield Californian, I

October:AI, A6.

Christo, et al. 1973 Valley Curtain. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1977 Running Fence. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1986 Surrounded Islands. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Christo, and Jeanne-Claude Christo-Javacheff 1991 "Christo: The Umbrellas, Joint Project for Japan and USA." Press release, 20

September. 1992 Telephone interview with co-authors. 19 February.

Goodwin, Morgan E. I991 "Christo's Umbrellas Will Be Recycled." American Metal Market 99, 6

November:8.

Grimes, William 1991 "Umbrellas' Closing Leaves Christo with Empty Palette." The New York

Times, 12 November: C3, Ci8.

Huber, August L., III i99I Interview with Ellen Walterscheid. Frazier Park, CA, 7 October.

Knight, Christopher 1991 "The Umbrellas of Christo." The Los Angeles Times, I October:FI, Fi8.

Christo 97

Schechner, Richard 1976 "From Ritual to Theatre and Back." In Ritual, Play, and Performance. Ed-

ited by Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman, 196-222. New York:

Seabury Press.

van der Marck, Jan 1981 "Christo: the Making of an Artist." In Christo: Collection on Loan from the

Rothschild Bank AG, Zurich. La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

Walterscheid, Ellen 1990 "Huber's Practical Touch Perfects Christo's Umbrella Organization

Kansas Alumni Magazine, June:4o-4I. I991 "Blood, Sweat and Thousands of Umbrellas." The Kansas City Star, 13

October:Ji, J8.

Robert Findlay is Professor of theatre and film at the University of Kansas. He is co-author with Oscar G. Brockett of the recently published second edition of Cen- tury of Innovation (Allyn and Bacon, I991), and his articles on modem and con-

temporary theatre have appeared in TDR, Theatre Journal, and Modern Drama. Findlay's research on Christo has been supported by grants from the The- atre and Film Faculty Department Fund and the General Research Fund of the University of Kansas.

Ellen Walterscheid is afreelance writer and editor living in Lenexa, Nebraska. She is a frequent contributor to such publications as the Kansas City Star, Kansas City Live!, Women in Business, and Kansas Alumni Magazine.

TDReading Robert Findlay was co-author of "Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre," vol. 30, no. 3 (TIII), 1986.

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