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Video: How an artist hid the Reichstag and the Arc de Triomphe and what Hristo Yavashev put into his short-lived works
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
In the fall of 2021, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris will hide under a layer of packaging. The person who conceived this - the artist Hristo Yavashev - is no longer alive, the work is destined to outlive the creator. Here, of course, there is a paradox - after all, the entire creative life of Yavashev and his partner and wife Jeanne-Claude was devoted to the illustration of the thesis about the fragility of art, the theme of its rapid and irrevocable reincarnation and further disappearance.
What was hidden under the layers of packaging
It seems that wrapping such a huge structure as the Arc de Triomphe with cloth is too adventurous, but Hristo Yavashev has already had to do this, and more than once. Suffice it to mention the Berlin Reichstag, which, through the artist's efforts, in 1995 hid under a hundred thousand square meters of silvery fabric.
For centuries and millennia, creators have sought to create something imperishable, something that will outlive themselves and their memory. Architectural monuments, marble sculptures, paintings painted with time-resistant paints, ceramics that give an opportunity to touch the antiquity - all this Yavashev decided to leave outside his creative search, focusing on creating works that were destined to last for several days and then leave into oblivion.
At first, the artist created wrappers for small objects: cans, a telephone, a chair, and a violin. By packing objects, Yavashev seemed to be “packing” part of the space. An ordinary, at first glance, object turned into something unique, into a project with history, with its own energy. At the same time, he was not the property of the artist - Yavashev was not burdened with any of his works. They were hatched for a very long time in my head, for some time they were preparing to come true, and then in a short time they became the center of attention and became part of the past - and part of modern art. Hristo Yavashev also played up in his work the theme of the disappearance of objects - albeit temporary, which was provided thanks to kilometers of packaging material.
One of the first truly large-scale projects of Hristo Yavashev was "Running Hedge" - a work on which the artist worked from 1972 to 1976. A wall of white cloth, meandering and reflecting sunlight, stretched for 24 miles. In 1983, the artist surrounded eleven islands near Florida with cloth.
And in 1985, Hristo Yavashev "dressed" Pont-Neuf - the oldest of the Parisian bridges. Preparation for the final act of this performance took ten years - and nine of them Yavashev tried to get permission from the French authorities to conduct it. The bridge was wrapped in golden cloth. A total of three million people saw him.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Hristo Yavashev was born in the Bulgarian city of Gabrovo on June 13, 1935. By a strange coincidence, the main woman of his life, his constant partner in life and work, the Frenchwoman Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon, was born on the same day.
The son of a textile factory owner and secretary of the Sofia Academy of Fine Arts, Hristo entered this educational institution in 1952 and studied there for four years. In 1956, having arrived in Prague in Czechoslovakia, he crossed the border with Austria and settled in western Europe, two years later moving to Paris. There he met his future wife.
Jeanne-Claude, while her romance with Yavashev began and developed, was engaged to another man and even married him. But two months after the wedding, she went to a Bulgarian artist. In 1960, the couple had a son, two years later, Jeanne-Claude and Christo were married.
Their first joint project took place in 1961, and this tandem lasted until the death of Jeanne-Claude in 2009. In total, the couple created twenty-three works - not much, since the creation of each could take years and even decades. The Reichstag project has been in the works for twenty-five years - a quarter of a century! - to last only two weeks.
In a sense, the project for packaging an architectural structure turned out to be comparable to construction: projects, sketches, drawings, creating models, obtaining permits - this is what the first stage of work on the next work was filled with. At this stage, the artist received funding for the further implementation of his plans - the aforementioned sketches Yavashev put up for sale, at the same time arranging exhibitions. In terms of money, Christo and Jeanne-Claude adhered to a firm position: they financed their work themselves, did not accept sponsorship.
The couple wanted to get as close as possible to the freedom of the artist - and they probably succeeded. Independence from investors, from ownership of their works, independence of the works themselves - this is what Hristo Yavashev demonstrated in his creative life. The artist admitted that the true meaning of his works is incomprehensible to himself. First of all, in order to understand the feelings that a bridge wrapped in cloth evokes in Parisians, you need to understand how they generally feel in relation to this landmark. Not being a Parisian, Yavashev could not have known this.
What is left of the works?
Each of Yavashev's projects had a unique history and was filled with its own energy. A wide variety of people took part in the "wrapping", not only idle spectators. For example, sometimes the artist's idea was to attract climbers instead of using construction cranes.
In 1984 - 1991, Yavashev was preparing the project "Umbrellas" - it was supposed to take place simultaneously in Japan and the United States. More than three thousand umbrellas, yellow on American soil and blue on the islands, were opened simultaneously. Each was nine meters in diameter and six meters high. The umbrellas were dismantled shortly after installation.
The work of Hristo Yavashev made it possible to revise the long-established view of the object and the space around it, the packaging hid details and details, allowing you to see the main thing that is hidden under the fabric: the size, height, proportions of the object, its originality and uniqueness. Since 2009, he worked alone. In the fall of 2020, the "packing" of the Arc de Triomphe in the French capital was supposed to take place, but in May Hristo Yavashev passed away. As a sign of respect for the artist's memory, this last project of his will nevertheless be carried out a year later. Khristo Yavashev died in New York at the eighty-fifth year of his life.
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