Editor’s Note: In lieu of our usual reviews and gallery rounds, we will be running a special SHELTER-IN-PLACE series for the duration of social distancing. This series will focus on that which can be enjoyed from home: musings on stream-able films, online art, and memoiristic reflections on colors, permanent collections, and craft. Thanks for sheltering with Artillery, and we hope to see you at our usual gallery rounds soon.

In the first scene of the 1973 documentary short Christo’s Valley Curtain, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are fine-tuning the details of their new installation project. Valley Curtain would be realized as 200,200 square feet of orange woven nylon fabric, weighing over 60 tons, suspended between two mountain peaks in Colorado. The scale is typical of Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s work. In the studio, they are intense, focused. Jeanne-Claude notes that the coloring in Christo’s model is too dark, he adjusts. In voiceover, Christo explains why they embark on such enormous, complex projects:

“Generally the artist is the supreme master in his studio. But for me the excitement really begins when I leave the studio […] The real life experience— engineering problems, dealing with construction workers, the blue prints, the permission from governments, the highway department— all these things give me what I can never imagine. So what happens in the real world changes my original ideas, and the drawings themselves. This is what I like.”

The next 27 minutes (it is free to stream on Vimeo) are just such an exploration of the ways in which “real-life experience” transforms Valley Curtain, which cost about $400,000 and was up for a sum total of 28 hours before a windstorm necessitated its removal. The Maysles brothers, who co-direct with their frequent editing partner Ellen Giffard (past collaborations include Gimme Shelter and Salesman), have a sensibility for absurd subcultural affect that predates reality television. Their gaze gives rise to lovely, surprising shots— a hand rapidly forming different signals to the builders attending the curtain hundreds of feet up, Christo and the A&H construction team sitting on a hillock like a flock of seabirds, Jeanne-Claude lying in the middle of a sunny field in her hard hat. It’s equally attuned to all the different characters that can exist in one space, however, and how they abrade each other. Mortal mishap is just around the bend in their films, including Christo’s Valley Curtain; there’s always the possibility that psychic tension will spill over into actual violence.

The critic David Bourdon once described Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work as “revelation through concealment”, an indelible experience this spring. I watched Christo’s Valley Curtain in the second week of my fever and my fifth week into quarantine. As a nonessential worker, I had been able to work from home until I, too, got sick; then I mostly slept from home. From my bedroom, I saw that Pope Francis presided over an empty St. Peter’s Basilica on Good Friday, and that the frenetic billboards of Time Square looped to empty sidewalks. These images of absence were sobering, but there was irony in their proliferation — they feigned an additional absence, which was all the people still going to work. As the days passed another set of images began circling, this time of crowded subway cars in the Bronx and US prisoners tasked with making PPE. The pandemic exposed that there are two groups in America: Those who can stay home, and those whose endangerment and exploitation is, in fact, “essential”. The ties that bind are rarely so visible.

Watching Christo’s Valley Curtain, I was struck by how these freighted bonds comprise Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, particularly under the close scrutiny of Giffard and the Maysles. Many contemporary artists have taken the intersection of subject and system as a conceptual focus, but the sheer scale of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects makes it their material. First off, each work only reaches the installation stage after exiting a bureaucratic labyrinth. Funding must be secured, environmental impact reports written, zoning laws negotiated, permissions solicited. Then comes the actual installation. To erect Valley Curtain, construction workers from the A&H Builders team hung in harnesses off the sides of a pulley box, which rolled in the air over the valley on a system of suspension lines. On the ground, meanwhile, Christo and Jeanne-Claude haunt the crew like a pair of bohemian poltergeists. As difficulties multiply— rising gales, dwindling daylight, a crucial stretch of cable that tangles at 200 feet up in the air— Christo and Jeanne-Claude pace, berate, and sow alliances with specific workers. Their goals are aligned but distinct: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s is to erect Valley Curtain, and A&H builders’ is for nobody to die in the process. The only likeness is that everybody is constantly smoking. From a paradisal remove, golfers at the Rifle Creek Golf Course watch the halting installation incredulously. “People said he couldn’t do it, but, well he’s an artist; and he’s very well educated,” says one, squinting into the horizon where Valley Curtain is failing to go up.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado, 1970-72. Photo by Wolfgang Volz. © 1972 Christo

And yet, the nightmare of the installation is in exact inverse proportion to the pleasure of a work like Valley Curtain. One understands intrinsically how many hurdles were jumped for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects to materialize as part of our “real-life experience”; The sensation of levity from clearing all those obstacles might be called wonder. Out of nowhere, a heavy state building will be wrapped like a Christmas present, a series of luminous gates will wind through a park, or a curtain will fall into a valley, like the setting sun spread between the peaks and stayed, like a theater curtain over a spaghetti western. The power of these pieces does not come from what they are like, however, but what they are, which is devoid of purpose and a complete pain to install. Valley Curtain’s ridiculous intrusion onto the real world sharpens your sense of the landscape; At the same time, there’s an implicit, immensely satisfying confounding of the multitudinous barriers to Valley Curtain’s existence. In a contemporary capitalist context where manufacture is obscured, the difficult becoming embodied in these works is deeply pleasurable. It’s no small marvel that in order for it to exist, men creaked in a box across the sky, hundreds of feet up, as chatty and acrobatic as blue jays.

Many artists asking what [their] art can “do;” right now, I think, not very much. I don’t believe that it is more vital “now than ever” to turn to x form; what’s vital is staying vigilant about what constitutes an effective response versus what makes one feel better. That being said, the question of feeling is proving crucial. It’s become clear under mass coordinated isolation that depression and anxiety can be public feelings, and that the pathologizing of our emotional world cuts us off from political life. We might turn towards the public realm for happiness, too, and stop treating joy as something to be won and hoarded. Over the decades Christo and Jeanne-Claude were adamant that their art had no purpose beyond “joy and beauty.” In Jeanne-Claude’s words, “We build because we believe it will be beautiful”; in Christo’s, “We make beautiful things, unbelievably useless, totally unnecessary.” When Valley Curtain does finally unfurl, the crew hollers and embrace one another; lovers appear out of nowhere, couples stroll arm and arm, or hold hands, people kiss. My heart ached at all the easy touch.