Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1995)

Christo: Self

Photos 

Quotes 

• Christo : For many months, years thousands of people are sensitized. They fantasize how they think the work will look awful, and they would like to stop us. Or how the work will look great, if they like to help us, in a way. For many months or years in advance the people anticipate the work. Actively, not only mentally, but they come to public hearings, to all this variety, process of permits. Usually you do not have those things in the work of art. For a work of art you go to a museum, in a gallery. In architecture though, in urban planning, you have that. The fence was extending miles and miles. It's an excursion in the landscape, borrowing so many different qualities- from the water to the highway, the houses, the hills, the cattle, the subdivision. When we started to work at the project, it was basically to interlock all these different types of use of the land: from open land, farmers or ranchers land to the suburbia and small town.

• Christo : These projects, they are about freedom. These projects exist not because some president of the republic likes to have them or some corporate executive or some man of the city, these projects are pure demonstration of creativity. They're absolutely irrational. The world can live without Umbrellas, without the Valley Curtain, without the Wrapped Reichstag. They're absolutely without justification, no moralization. They exist to translate this total freedom. Nobody can buy these projects, nobody can charge tickets to these projects. Even ourselves, Jeanne-Claude and myself, we do not own these projects. These projects- they're so free. This is why they cannot stay. Because freedom is the enemy of possession. And possession is equal of permanence!