Christo (1935–)

Running Fence:  Project for Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1976

Diptych:  Charcoal and pastel on paper, and collaged map

57 x 96 inches (both parts)

Acquisition Fund Purchase, 79.24.01

©1976 Christo

Essay by Diane Mullin, Ph.D.
Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

           Running Fence: Project for Sonoma and Marin Counties, California is a related drawing/document of the monumental land artwork of the same name staged by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the summer of 1976.  The multipart image includes an original charcoal and pastel drawing by Christo and a remnant of engineering documents that helped map and guide the creation of the celebrated art project.  Running Fence, created from 1972 to 1976, is an early public project done by the collaborative team.  Noted earlier works include Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet (Little Bay, Australia, 1968–1969) and Valley Curtain (Rifle, Colorado, 1970–72).  Running Fence was comprised of twenty-four and a half miles of heavy woven nylon fabric hung from steel cables stretched between steel posts, laid out across the landscape of the famed California counties.  The construction snaked its way over hills and into valleys, eventually dropping into the azure serenity of the Pacific Ocean.  Its materials allowed the “fence” to do more than simply mark a line in the landscape, as the ever-restless wind animated it throughout its brief, but spectacular, fourteen-day existence.

           Christo Javacheff (better known as Christo) was born in Bulgaria on June 13, 1935.  While living in Paris, he met his Parisian collaborative partner and eventual wife, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who was born in Casablanca on the very same day and died in New York City in November 2009.  The couple settled in New York City, eventually established American citizenship, and worked tirelessly together over four decades to produce monumental projects they described as only about the creation of joy and beauty.[1]  They refused commissions, seeing them as intolerably restrictive of the artist’s free reign over the work.  Perhaps influenced by his upbringing in the eastern bloc, Christo was wary of art’s use—or misuse, as he understood it—in service of a state agenda.  Instead of such typical support, Christo and Jeanne-Claude engaged a democratic-like process with the specific communities associated with their projects and produced original, more portable, works of art whose sales funded the large-scale public projects.  The artists also famously enlisted the support and assistance of droves of volunteers and in-kind supporters.  Running Fence utilized such aid, including borrowed land (and sky), construction assistance, and governmental process and review.  The artists’ website describes the effort as follows:

The art project consisted of:  forty-two months of collaborative efforts, the ranchers' participation, eighteen public hearings, three sessions at the Superior Courts of California, the drafting of a four-hundred and fifty page Environmental Impact Report and the temporary use of hills, the sky and the Ocean.[2]

           The Minnesota Museum of American Art’s drawing was purchased after it was shown in the MMAA’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, American Drawing 1927–1977, which travelled to the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1978.  The MMAA thus, ultimately, contributed to the cost of Running Fence.[3]

           In his remarks at the 2004 presentation of the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, sculptor Bruce Beasley described what he saw as the work’s three soulful rhythms:  the fence’s undulation over the landscape, its meander across the countryside, and, finally, the movement of its fabric panels in the changing wind currents.  Beasley described these rhythms as “playing off each other in a magnificent syncopation of shape, line, and form,” giving the piece a soul of beauty, not function.  Ultimately he said of the fence:

Running Fence was beautiful—startlingly, audaciously beautiful:  stunning in how it engaged and appended the landscape, arresting in its scale in relation to man and its scale in relation to the land.  Large to man and large in extent to the landscape, it was somehow fragile at the same time.  Scale, color, texture, movement, drama, and an incredible sense of authority—Running Fence had them all.  And then one day it was gone.  Vanished at the height of its glory … It was beautiful and perfect and then it was gone.[4]

           The utterly temporary nature of their public projects was paramount to the artists.  Of course Christo’s projects have been photographed and filmed, leaving a plethora of documents—official and unofficial—in their wake.  Drawings like the MMAA’s Running Fence: Project for Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, however, are something different.[5]  Arguably, the famous Maysles film about the Running Fence project[6] captured the drama of the event, but this drawing illuminates its spirit—or soul, as Beasley would term it.  The poetry of the marks and the refined scale of Christo’s objects seem more akin to than a record of the work itself.  The evidence of the artist’s hand alongside a mundane and anonymous trace of the work that collaboratively helped bring the special, temporary thing of joy and beauty to life resonates with the spirit of Running Fence in a way film and photographs of Christo’s work never truly have.

[1] Jan Garden Castro, “A Matter of Passion: A Conversation with Christo and Jeanne-Claude,” Sculpture 23, no. 3 (April 2004): 32.

[2] “Running Fence: Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76,” the Christo and Jeanne-Claude website, http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/rf.shtml.

[3] See American Drawing 1927–1977 (Reykjavik: National Museum of Iceland, 1978) and the MMAA’s object records.

[4] Bruce Beasely, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence: An Appreciation,” Sculpture 23, no. 6 (July/August 2004): 11.  

[5] Other diptych drawings of similar dimensions and media to the MMAA work exist in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

[6] Albert Mayles, David Mayles and Charlotte Zwerin, Running Fence (Maysles Films, 1978).