Esquire — June 2018 85Even as he edges into his mid-Eighties, Christo’s gaze is fixed forward.
“I am in quite good health, I cannot complain or anything.” He chooses not to
reflect. “Retrospective will be done when I am dead,” he says. “I don’t like to
spend one moment of my life looking backwards.” He likes to talk only
about the quantifiable — years, dimensions, costs — and tells me as our
interview nears its end, “You can write anything philosophically, but please
don’t misspell names, locations and places. hink I be very, very cross.”
Still, inherent in the work are many curious paradoxes which pose ques-
tions about the mind of their creator. On the one hand, by being financially
self-suicient, Christo has enormous mastery over his oeuvre, and the free-
dom to instigate projects of a scale and ambition of which most artists can
only dream. On the other, he devises concepts that are, by their very nature,
subject to the intricacies of bureaucratic structures and the whims of the
very powerful, making them, at times, maddeningly beyond his control.
Each work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude can be interpreted as a ges-
ture of extreme democratic generosity: providing a spectacle to the
masses, a source of wonder, for no obvious gain other than aesthetic
pleasure and the satisfaction of having achieved them. It can also be seen
as an act of audacious and ruthless egoism: an individualistic artistic
vision imposed upon a landscape, manipulating it in ways that should,
perhaps, be beyond humble human capabilities.
Christo doesn’t mind which you choose. He shrugs of atempts to put
him in an artistic tradition. “I like to do, and that’s all. And I do it my way.
hat’s all.” At times, he seems almost wilfully simplistic when he explains
his artistic decisions, perhaps a reaction to the elitist obfuscation of tradi-
tional art spiel; when he announced the London Mastaba at the start of
this year, he explained that the colours of the barrels — red and white
stripes on the sides; red, blue and purple on the ends — were chosen to
reflect the Union flag and British royalty (or as he puts it to me, “Of
course, the Majesy love the mauve”).
His work, their work, he says, is about the here and now, as it always hasbeen. “First thing you should know: we are working with the real things,”
Christo says, taking of his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I do
not know how to drive. I never learned to drive. I don’t like to talk on the
telephone. I hate to talk and not see people. I do not understand anything of
computer. I cannot understand anything that is virtual, not real. I like to
have real kilometre, real wet, real dry, real wind, real fear, real joy. This
almost unstoppable pleasure to have the sense. With these very real things.
Only when we’re still alive. Ater that will be gone.”With any luck, in a few years’ time, perhaps even less, a company call-
ing itself Abu Dhabi Mastaba Ltd, or whatever the Emirati equivalent might
be, will set up camp in the desert outside Abu Dhabi. here, several hun-
dred engineers and builders, working on a concept devised by engineering
professors at Hosei Universiy of Toyo in 2007, will erect 10 concrete tow-
ers, standing in two rows of five. Next, they will construct five flat sides and
cover each in many thousands of oil barrels, their curved surfaces painted
in orange and yellow stripes, with circular ends that erupt in a blaze of red
lilac, light pink, pale brown, ruby red, bright yellow, cobalt blue, deep orange,
pastel green, grass green and ivory. Once the barrels are in place, the sides
will be raised on rails, up and over the 10 towers, in a single, miraculous feat
of hydraulics, like a magician liting a limp linen napkin into solid form.
hen, finally, ater many decades of persistence and persuasion, many
years of speculation, and many, many millions of dollars, Christo and
Jeanne-Claude’s “Mastaba (Project for the UAE)” will be made real.
Hopefully, a tiny figure, dwarfed by the magnitude of his creation, will be
there to witness it.
he Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine), will be on display in
Hyde Park, London, from 18 June to 23 September. he concurrent exhibition,
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and he Mastaba (1958–2018), will be on
display at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from 19 June to 9 September;
serpentinegalleries.orgA 1979 scale model of the Abu Dhabi Mastaba
(Project for United Arab Emirates)Wolfgang Volz & André Grossman © 2017 Christo | Wolfgang Volz © 1982 Christo | Wolfgang Volz © 1979 Christo