To experience art

All our days over the past three-plus months have been consumed by COVID-19 and #BLM.  If your days were any different, then you are the problem.  

But, yes, there are other things happening too.  A student emailed me a couple of weeks ago about the birth of his first child.  A father for the first time!

And there are deaths.  Like that of the artist Christo.

Christo, the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist who turned to epic-scale environmental works in the late 1960s, stringing a giant curtain across a mountain pass in Colorado, wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin and zigzagging thousands of saffron-curtained gates throughout Central Park, died on Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 84. 

He was truly a one of a kind artist, whose works included the installation over the mountains in between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, which is where I lived back then.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude simultaneously placed 1,760 yellow umbrellas in the Tejon Pass, just north of Los Angeles, and 1,340 blue umbrellas on a hillside near Ibaraki, Japan.

Thanks to Christo for helping the art-challenged like me also to experience art.

I have blogged about the umbrella project before; the following is a slightly edited version of my post from June 18, 2016.

****************

I have no clue about art.  

But, despite the art-challenged ignorance that envelops and defines my existence, I appreciate art in my own way.  Perhaps this is nothing but yet another version of Justice Potter Stewart's comment "I know it when I see it."  

I am happy when I see the beauty in art!  And I did see--and experience--one unique piece of art: Christo's umbrellas.

It was yet another warm and sunny day (in early fall, I think it was) when we drove up to the Tejon Pass in order to look at the umbrellas up, close, and personal.  And, of course, to stand under an umbrella because of the bright and hot sun!

I should note that the photo here is not mine, but one I found on Flickr--this too is from Gorman, and is exactly how I remember it.

The neatest thing about Christo's umbrellas was that the art was an experience.  Because, unlike a painting that might hang in a museum for centuries, Christo's umbrellas were temporary.  I liked that Buddhist sand mandala approach of his to remind ourselves of the temporary lease we have on this planet.  Like how what we experience now cannot be experienced again ever.  It is more than mere "art."  A few days later, the umbrellas were dismantled.  They were gone ahead of schedule because of an unfortunate accident that killed a visitor.

I would have loved to experience one of his projects and "walked" on water.

Source

Only Christo could have imagined such a project:

“The Floating Piers,” a walkway stretching three kilometers, or nearly two miles, that connects two small islands in Lake Iseo, in Italy’s Lombardy region, to each other and to the mainland.

In the interview, Christo talks about how this idea of his had been rejected over the years--nearly forty years--by the governments in Argentina and Japan.  Finally, Italy approved this art installation.  Christo comments :

Art is in the DNA of the Italian people.Italy has a paragraph devoted to art and culture in their constitution. In the US, we have a paragraph about guns.

I don't know if that that comment on the Italian constitution is true.  It does not matter to me; I rarely ever understand art and the artistic mind.  But, damn, I would have loved the "Floating Piers."