Christo and Jeanne-Claude @ Centre Pompidou

Christo, Package, 1960

As thrilling as it was to be back in a museum after four months of "culture online," I was disappointed by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. My vivid memories of the 2001 exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau are overwhelmed with a sense of discovery. Learning how and where (artistically speaking) Christo began his career was an eye-opening experience. My expectations for the Pompidou exhibition were for a similarly exhaustive study of Christo's slow developing brilliance. Prior to the Martin Gropius Bau exhibition, I had known him as someone who wraps buildings and hangs curtains across vast stretches of land. Then to discover Christo's body of work to be so intricately woven together with the history of western art was revelatory. This sense of surprise is nowhere to be found in the Pompidou exhibition.

Christo, Wrapped Oil Barrels, 1958-69

In the early rooms, we see Christo's earliest works made in Paris in which he starts preserving paper and fabric with lacquer and paint. They create a connection with Dubuffet and Fontana, particularly in their materiality of perceived degradation and preservation. Already, in 1958, the packing surfaces, whether paper or fabric, engage the artist's lifelong obsession with concealing and revealing. Whether we are looking at a piece of fabric as an art work placed in a frame, or a wrapped object, we oscillate between admiring the packaging that conceals and imagining the object behind or inside. Either there is no possibility of knowing—thus we don't even try to guess—what is the inside the fabric wrapping, or we know exactly what it is, in the case of the oil barrels, a half-wrapped, chair, portrait paintings in which we see faces through the dirty but clear plastic wrapping. 

Christo, Wrapped Telephone, 1962

There is no denying that politics are wrapped around each object. Even if politics are denied or claimed to be unintended by the artists themselves. How can oil barrels blocking the passageway through a Paris street to echo the erection of the Berlin Wall not be a statement on disrupting the effects of capitalism? The wrapping of objects must also surely be about consumption. Objects are presented as gifts, things of value, things that need to be preserved, or at times, exchanged, protected. On occasion, the wrapping reminds us of butcher's paper around meat, especially when the string so tightly constricts the expansion and contraction of the object. Hanging Package from 1962, dangling on the end of a rope reminds us of a carcass, hung up to dry. Some viewers may recall  Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox (1655) before Hanging Package. Art and the dead animal are one and the same; they are both dead objects on display for all to ogle at. 

Christo, Show Case, 1963

As Christo continues on his Parisian journey, the work becomes increasingly sophisticated, complicated, and somehow more beautiful. In some of the most exquisite, layered and politically cutting works, a room halfway through the exhibition is filled with vitrines and storefronts. These are multilayered, with references to multiple events in the history of art. We are immediately reminded of Matisse's window paintings and Duchamp's Fresh Window, 1920. From Matisse, Christo continues the push towards abstraction, breaking down the boundary between the real and the illusory, finding the forms and materials and structures of painting in the everyday world. And from Duchamp, Christo extends all of the significance of consumerism, of displays designed to tempt buying, not just art, but all other objects that sparkle in shop windows. However, as in Duchamp's Fresh Window, we are prohibited from window shopping, here because the butcher's paper covers the window, or a hessian cloth stymies our looking. Unlike Christo's wrapped objects, the windows contain things we want to see, the object itself is not enough. The light behind the butcher's paper or hessian cloth draws our curiosity. We peer in, trying to see what it is we missing out on. Again, the game of concealing and revealing is made more complex here as the viewer is persistently tempted to see and to know, but always struggles to do so.  

Christo and Jeanne Claude, Purple Store Front, 1964

Thus, the vitrines and storefronts are about looking, but also about blindness, or our inability to see. Simultaneously, the store fronts engage discourses of looking at -- they are, after all, two dimensional objects placed on a wall, as if they are paintings, even though they are not. By extension, they blur even more boundaries; not only between art and everyday objects, but between painting and sculpture, between the conceptual and the aesthetic object of art. 

Christo, Pont Neuf Wrapped, 1980

The remainder of the exhibition is given over to the drawings, maquettes, plans, collages, documents and other objects from the project to wrap the Pont Neuf. Included is a screening of the Maysles Brothers film, Christo in Paris from 1990. Of course, the film is interesting for its documentation of the struggle to realize the project against the backdrop of changing Paris political landscapes (and Mayors). However, as is often the case with exhibitions that document past artistic events, the memory is not quite as exciting as it would have been to walk across the wrapped bridge during its brief existence in 1985.