Page 19 - Studio Internationa - March 1971

Christo new forms as they spanned the area. There was protects. It innovates, trims costs'. The found
an ironic play between the new surfaces and the texts include one from the Container Corporation
Lawrence Alloway concealed supports; the packaging obscured, of America, naturally, though Christo missed
wholly or in part, the core, but without the automobile ads of a year or so earlier which
destroying the impression of containment. Two explored the notion of cars as 'packages for
exhibitions at the Galleria Apollinaire, Milan, people'. The catalogue stresses Christo's interest
demonstrated the range of this work by 1963. in the aesthetic potential of industrial processes
The first show consisted of numerous packages, or, conversely, the industrial content of an art
containing objects made bizarre by the using found and readymade objects. In Paris he
wrapping: each known object was close at hand was affiliated with the New Realists who, in
and, at the same time, removed. Transparent different ways, were also concerned with the
plastic was stretched or crumpled in improvised interlace of personally constructed art and the
membranes. There were references to the common materials of urban-industrial culture.
ubiquity of modern packaging and to striptease, The second exhibition in Milan consisted of
in which delays and refusals to unwrap are one huge package that almost filled the gallery,
central. in its scale recalling a 1961 project of Christo's
The catalogue for this exhibition3 reveals for a wall of oil drums built in the Rue Visconti,
clearly one aspect of Christo's earlier work. It is Paris, in 1962. The project is presented with
a single sheet, of photographs and textes high specificity. The street is measured,
trouves, dealing with packaging in terms of the shops are listed, an historical point of
advertising. 'We're deep in packaging'; interest is quoted from a guide book, and the
`Packaging often ranks next to product in
influence upon a buyer'; 'Why not let our
Christo
packaging people help you ?'; and 'Westvaco Arco della Pace Wrapped Project 1970
packaging gives you impact. What else ? It Drawing 71 x 56 cm.

A connection has been proposed between
Christo and Dada by William Rubin, who noted
that Man Ray 'was the first to wrap an object.
But his gesture remained unique'.' 'His Enigma
of Isidore Ducasse was a mysterious object—
actually the sewing machine of
Ducasse-Lautréamont's famous image—wrapped in
sackcloth and tied with a cord. It anticipated the
recent empaquetages of Christo, who has even
greater aspirations, such as packaging certain
skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan' 2. The
differences seem greater than any connections
with Christo, however. Man Ray's object
was, as Rubin observed, 'mysterious', at
least until the contents of the package were
recognized; then it became suggestive. Its
content is the sexuality of Lautréamont's image
of the umbrella encountering a sewing machine
on a dissecting table. Thus, the covered object
of 192o was well within the boundaries of the
erotic iconography which is what so much
Surrealism (and some Dadaism) amounts to,
only. This has little in common with Christo's
use of the package in which the identity of the
contained object is not subject to games of
transformation, but remains itself. We can
indicate the function of literalness in Christo's
work if we consider the course of his
development.
In Paris in 1958 he made his first series of
objects, called Inventory, in which he mixed
wrapped, painted, and unmodified articles.
This variety of treatment, however, was soon
reduced, either by the use of repeated identical
objects or by the total wrapping of objects. In
1959 he made tables which carried wrapped
objects, packaged in such a way as to obscure
their identity. Here Christo began an
exploration of the geometry of surfaces; as the
covering stretched from point to point of the
enclosed object or objects, the connections made
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