Christo - Finally Under Wraps

I definitely would not say that I have a particularly close connection to the artist Christo, who passed away just a couple of days ago.  But I have a few near or missed connections, which I may as well share.

I came onto the scene well after his wrapping of the MCA in Chicago back in 1968-69.  This was his first major wrap accomplished in the US.  The MCA website has some interesting details about the project.  As it happens this is the original location of the MCA, on Ontario St.  I managed to make it there twice, including one time for a Andres Serrano exhibit.  In a lot of ways, I still preferred this location, which was much more scaled back and almost a secret just for those in the know, over the large building that now sits just east of the pumping station.  That doesn't mean I have enjoyed some of the exhibits in the enlarged space, but I do feel that there is so much pointless wasted space in the building itself that I just can't approve of it.  The grassy area in back of the new museum is nice though, and I've listened to a few jazz concerts there.

I never really paid that much attention to what Christo was up to, but for some reason or other, I heard about his proposed project in Central Park - the Gates, which apparently took years, if not decades, to finally get off the ground.  I remember being pretty ambivalent about it, feeling that it was a lot of fuss to justify this project, since Central Park wasn't really supposed to be commercialized.  While it does help that Christo and Jeanne Claude did pay for the materials and the installation themselves (and never had major corporate sponsors), I would be surprised if they covered all the security for the project, to say nothing of all the time that city bureaucrats spend dealing with permits and approvals...  

Nonetheless, I actually made it out to New York on Feb. 12, 2005 and saw The Gates for myself, in fact I saw some of the unfurling of the gates and walked along for a while in the "parade" they had going.  (I think given the size of the installation, there were multiple openings.  I'm quite sure I wasn't watching Christo himself unfurl anything.)  It was a bit more interesting in person than I had imagined, and I feel I more or less got into the spirit of the thing.  While I probably did take a few photos, these are not mine.

At this point, I can't remember if I had needed to go to New York on a business trip and conveniently arranged to make out on the opening weekend, or if it truly was a bit random, and I just happened to go at that time, and then decided I might as well head over to Central Park.  In any event, they were passing out small squares of the fabric that made up the "gates," and I still have two of these squares (which almost makes up for not snagging a porcelain sunflower seed or two from Ai Weiwei's Tate London exhibit when they were still letting the public walk through it).  I was doing some cleaning up of my archives and came across one of them last night, which seems especially propitious.  

What's even more amusing, at least to me, is that over the winter they were doing some major reconstruction of the street one street down from my house.  For whatever reason they had to wrap the poured concrete up in orange fabric, so for one night, we had our own personalized Christo experience.

I'm sure he would have approved.

Update (6/5) As I was doing other cleaning, I came across my Northwestern commencement booklet from 1998 when I received my MS degree.  It turns out that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were granted honorary doctorates at that ceremony, though I don't believe they actually spoke more than a few words of thank you.  It doesn't appear that they wrapped anything in Evanston that year, though there was a Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibit at the Block Gallery in 2000 (possibly set in motion in 1998).  I was living in New York in 2000 so didn't get around to that exhibit.  So that is another very tenuous connection.  That (1998) actually was a pretty good year for Northwestern with a lot of "catches."  They also awarded honorary doctorates to Tony Kushner and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  Justice Ginsberg gave the commencement speech.  I did stumble across the speech as printed in the student newspaper, but I don't have it at my fingertips and oddly it doesn't appear to be in their on-line archives.  If I run across it again, I will scan it and post it on its own page on the blog.