Christo and Jeanne-Claude (and a tribute to Nathan Jordan)

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Surrounded Islands. 1980-1983, 6.5 million square feet of pink woven polypropylene fabric and eleven islands in Biscayne Bay.

With my lack of posting for three months, some of you might have the notion that I have died. No– but my brother has. Earlier this year Nathan Jordan passed away two months before his twenty-eighth birthday.

He was my best friend as well as my brother, and being only two years younger than me we grew up together. I was probably closer to him than anyone else alive. His death (along with other stressful events that I have experienced as of late) has driven me into a deep depression recently, hence the lack of new blog entries. But that will change soon.

Nathan is in a better place now, and that's all that really matters; rather than mope around about how much you miss the dead, it's far less self-defeating to celebrate the memories you have of them. So I'll briefly discuss Nathan's merits as an art critic.

He had an introspective mind, he liked art a lot, and he was about ten times the smart ass I will ever be. When I took my first art history class, we discussed the work above, Christo's Surrounded Islands. I later told my brother about it. "Yeah, there was this guy who wrapped a bunch of islands off the coast of Miami in pink fabric just so he could take aerial photos of them." Laughing, his reply was, "Are you serious?! What an idiot!"

Now, when I write I try to make myself sound smart, like I really know what I'm talking about, even when I don't. But it's amazing how my little brother was able to sum up in three words what it often takes me ten paragraphs to say. But there are a few other facets to the wrapping of these islands.

These are indeed eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, situated between Miami, North Miami, the Village of Miami Shores and Miami Beach. (Those are four distinct municipalities.) And these islands are not so much wrapped as they are covered– the fabric you see here extends two hundred feet from each shore. There was a lot of work involved in making each fabric covering fit its island perfectly, as well as picking up forty tons of debris from the islands, consulting engineers, builders, and scientists, and, of course, obtaining the necessary permits. They needed the permission of the governor, the county commission, the Department of Environmental Regulation, and the United States Army. It's really no wonder that this work took nearly four years to complete. Financing was taken care of through the sale of preliminary drawings and lithographs of the islands, and the sale of aerial photographs afterwards proved very profitable.

Christo, who was born in Bulgaria, and Jeanne-Claude, a Frenchwoman who passed away last November at the age of 74, were a married couple who redefined site-specific art by wrapping islands and large landmarks throughout the world with huge amounts of polyester fabric. Here are some of their other works:

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Wrapped Pont-Neuf. 1985, 430,000 square feet of sand-colored polyamide fabric and one four hundred year old bridge.

It took nine years for the duo to convince Jacques Chirac, the then mayor of Paris, to let them wrap the city's oldest bridge. But he finally conceded, and one month later it was covered in gauzy diaphanous cloth. Three million people visited it in the two weeks that it was wrapped.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Wrapped Reichstag. 1994, over a million square feet of fireproof polypropylene fabric, nine miles of rope, and one German Parliament building.

This work obviously took a lot of convincing. There was a letter writing campaign to each of the 662 members of the Bundestag, followed by a heated 70 minute debate that allowed the project to commence. The wrapping took only a week in this case, and the building was wrapped for two; but in those two weeks the work received five million visitors.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were hippies, so they did everything they could to ensure that the environmental impact of their works was minimized. A whole team of biologists oversaw the creation of Surrounded Islands in order to protect the mammals, birds and fish who lived there. But I'm just going to say what everybody else is thinking: What do you do with six and a half million square feet of pink polyester after it's worn out its original use?

If Christo and Jeanne-Claude tried to assign any sort of deep-rooted philosophical meaning to these works, it would be extremely ridiculous. But they didn't. They contended that the purpose of their art was no thing more than to create joy by creating new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Which in my opinion is kinda neat. So sorry, Nathan. I think you were wrong on this one.