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WHe wasn’t busy wrapping houses and bridges in large sheets of cloth, Christo was wrapping everything. The Bulgarian artist made his name – together with his partner Jeanne-Claude – with a wrapped in the Reichstagjealousy Triumphal Arch it is covered Pont Neuf. They found a way to live, embrace, protect and destroy the entire world. But in the 1960s, he was trying to wrap the air. Nothing more.
Christo (Jeanne-Claude was not given full credit at this time) wanted to have air inside the room, but the original idea was limited by the current problems. Now, 50 years after it was first presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and six years later. Christ’s death in 2020he finally pulled it off. The opening room at Gagosian is cut horizontally, a large polyethylene bag that divides the room in half, held to the ceiling by white ropes. It falls to the ground, sinking into the center of space, forcing you to lie down to get under it. You are forced into a physical relationship with work, pressured to change the way you interact with nature.
Space is still active, literally, empty – there is nothing but air. But now that breath has been made flesh. It has a visual appearance.
The amazing trick of this work is not only to make air a tangible substance, but to make it rich. The plastic bag begins to collapse, swell with strings. It hangs in space, forcing itself into the room. It looks like flesh that can’t be contained by clothes, love handles explode on a tight waist. How amazing is that? Making air visible, physical, heavy.
It’s not the only time Christ work and air. He spent the 60’s making bubble wrap, trying to contain imperfections. Pictures in the vitrine show Documenta’s work in 1968: a huge polyethylene tube that he couldn’t tie. It is seen firing silently before the US Air Force appears and stands up for display. It’s funny, funny phallic, the air bone is a very strong plastic that reaches the sky in a German park. It makes the results of the body of the great work more visible: not only the air is visible, it is the air made by the body, tied with a rope. Christo, you old dog.
In the last room, an old Volvo car belonging to one of his art dealer friends is covered in paper. The dealer had bought a new car but was too attached to the old one to let it go to storage. Christ’s intervention is a work of protection. He has preserved the past life of this car, he has preserved all the memories worn in its leather, steel and rubber forever. It lives here as a monument to its past.
Christo’s works are a mixture of deep and silly humor. The car is a Volvo in paper. The massive installation looks like Gagosian found the builders hard and couldn’t control it. But then work creates all these ideas of space and weight, bodies and friendship, history and memory. You think about your body in this room, the air you breathe, the hours someone spends in that car driving down the street to see their family or go to the beach, and suddenly you feel a little emotional. And all Christo needed to accomplish this were ropes, a canvas and a very large plastic bag.
