ART-PRESENTATION: Christo & Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba 1958–2018

Born on the same day in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria and Casablanca, Morocco respectively, Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, began their collaboration in 1961. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are celebrated for their ambitious sculptural works that intervene in urban and natural landscapes around the world and temporarily alter both the physical form and visual appearances of sites.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Serpentine Galleries Archive

Many years in the planning, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s outdoor projects generate an extensive archive of preparatory material detailing the organisation and execution of these projects, and those not yet realised. While ephemeral by nature, the life of each project is extended through Christo’s preparatory artworks. With 80 sculptures, drawings, collages, scale-models and photographs, which draws on the artists’ history of barrel artworks and spanning six decades, the exhibition “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba 1958–2018” is on presentation at Serpentine Galleries in London. Simultaneously, Christo presents “The London Mastaba”, a temporary floating sculpture on The Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park. This is Christo’s first outdoor, public work in the UK. The sculpture and exhibition offer an unprecedented opportunity for visitors to experience Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work. Since 1958 Christo and Jeanne-Claude have created works using barrels. While barrel columns were prevalent before 1967, from the late 1960s two basic forms dominate all of the artists’ barrel projects: the wall and the mastaba. In Paris in 1962, a year after the Berlin Wall had been built in August of 1961, Christo and Jeanne-Claude completed “Wall of Oil Barrels – The Iron Curtain”, which closed the rue Visconti with a wall of 89 barrels. In June 1967, following the Six-Day War over the Suez Canal, the artists proposed to close the inland waterway with a Ten Million Oil Barrels Wall. The project was never realized.The mastabas originated in the way in which barrels are often stacked. A mastaba is a flat-topped, rectangular structure with outward sloping sides, dating back to Mesopotamia, where it was a bench in front of peoples’ homes for travellers to rest upon. Christo and Jeanne-Claude realized their first mastaba-shaped structure at Cologne Harbor in 1961 (Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Packages). In 1968, they realized a 1,240 Oil Barrels Mastaba at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Ever since, Christo and Jeanne-Claude tried to build a much bigger mastaba in public space. In the late 1960s, the artists started to work to install a larger mastaba near a highway between Houston and Galveston, Texas. After that project fell through in the early 70s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude proposed, in 1973, to build a smaller version in the middle of a parking lot that was planned to be build near the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Holland, which owns a large collection of Christo’s works. Again, that idea fell through. The exhibition provides a rich context for his new work “The London Mastaba”, for unrealised barrel projects at sites including the “Suez Canal” (1967) and “MoMA, New York” (1968) and for preparatory works for “Abu Dhabi Mastaba (Project for United Arab Emirates)”, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s most ambitious sculpture yet in the Middle East, first conceived in 1977. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s relationship with Abu Dhabi goes back to 1979 when they first visited the Emirate. “Abu Dhabi Mastaba (Project for United Arab Emirates)”, will be the largest sculpture in the world, made from 410,000 multi-colored barrels to form a mosaic of bright sparkling colors, echoing Islamic architecture. The Mastaba is an ancient and familiar shape to the people of the region. The work be 150 meters high, 225 meters deep at the 60 degree slanted walls and 300 meters wide at the vertical walls. The top of The Mastaba will be a horizontal surface 126.8 meters wide and 225 meters deep. The colors and the positioning of the 55-gallon steel barrels were selected by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1979, the year in which the artists visited the Emirate for the first time. The proposed area is inland, in Al Gharbia approximately 160 kilometers south of the city of Abu Dhabi, near the oasis of Liwa. In 2007 and 2008, Christo and Jeanne-Claude contracted professors of engineering from ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US, Cambridge University in the UK and Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan, to prepare structural feasibility studies about The Mastaba. All four teams worked independently and did not know of each other. The artists then hired the German engineering firm, Schlaich Bergermann und Partner, in Stuttgart, to analyze these reports. The Hosei University concept was found to be the most technically sound and innovative. The entire substructure as well as the layer of barrels will be assembled flat on the ground. Ten elevation towers will make it possible to raise the entire structure on rails to its final position in about 3 to 4 days. In 2012, Christo commissioned Pricewaterhouse Coopers to conduct analyses on the social and economic benefits of The Mastaba. “Abu Dhabi Mastaba (Project for United Arab Emirates)”, will be Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s only permanent large-scale work.

Info: Serpentine Galleries, Kensington Gardens, London, Duration: 19/6-9/9/18, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.serpentinegalleries.org