Sad news: Christo, one of my childhood art heroes, passed this week. Best know for large-scale, site-specific installations, Christo, along with his wife, artist Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, orchestrated the wrapping of Berlin’s historic Reichstag building, Paris’ Pont Neuf bridge and Miami’s Surrounded Islands (among others).
Why? Christo and Jean-Claude claimed that their projects had no deeper meaning that their immediate aesthetic impact. But I beg to differ. Sure, at first glance, these installations were monumentally beautiful from a visual standpoint but they allowed the viewer to interpret the sights in their own mind. Without prompting.
In my eight-year-old mind, when I first saw photos of Miami’s Surrounded islands project, I saw the juxtaposition of nature vs the man-made world.