Marja-Liisa Torniainen

Joy! /1996

Marja-Liisa Torniainen 1996:
Christo and Jean-Claude Projects, Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland 13.1. – 31.3. 1996, Works From Lilja Collection 1996.
Translation by Minna Marttinen 2006. Quote from the Holy Bible: Revised version, London; Cambridge University Press

Elias Canetti and Christo. What have these two great ‘C’s got to do with each other? Remembering a question I had heard about the influence of childhood experiences on an artist’s production, I was searching through my mind for an author who had poignantly described the subject. There are plenty of them, of course, but the first one to suggest himself to me was Elias Canetti. Checking the titles of his main works in an encyclopedia, I found to my surprise that he also comes from Bulgaria – like Christo.

In his trilogy The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear and The Play of the Eyes, Elias Canetti depicts richly and lovingly his childhood and youth as the son in a Spanish Jewish businessman’s family in different parts of Europe – and analyses the impact events would later have on his life. At the beginning of his memoirs, he writes about his wonderful, multilingual and -cultural native town Rustsuk (later Ruse): “Everything I have experienced in later life had already happened in Rustsuk before.”

He left the country at the age of seven.

So Christo Javacheff, later Javatscew, also grew up in Bulgaria. I do not know what kind of cloth was weaved in the factory owned by his family, but in any case his father was a textile manufacturer. Later, as a young man, Christo moved to Paris. He made a living by painting portraits in the street. He was very skilled at that. At that time, he also met Jean-Claude, daughter of a general. Surely he experienced memorable moments in the streets and on the bridges of Paris. You cannot take a bridge with you as a souvenir to America – but you can still parcel it up, can’t you? The union of Jean-Claude and Christo has lasted, as lovers and as colleagues – like Pont Neuf.

When I was young, people used to stretch and fold their sheets before taking them to the mangle – or not taking them. The great mangle was a story of its own. I will not go into that. But all of us children ushed, gleefully, under the flapping sheets being folded. My own son always crawls into a bed about to be made…

In front of highly esteemed visitors, a red carpet will be spread…

Curtains are opened – and drawn – in life and in theatre.

Bookstores and draper’s shops are inspiring places. Too inspiring for someone with small means, so I try to avoid them. What an enormous experience an entire factory with all its cloth must have been… for a little boy. And enormous is what his later creations are, too, no mere kitchen curtains.

For a child there is no such thing as ‘normal’, as he has not yet learned the norms, to do the normal things, to be without experiencing, to live without living. To him there is no separation of the holy and the material, there is just the Wonder of Life. This is the simple fact that artists repeat in their productions, striving to show the miracle and value of it even where we have let it fall into an oblivion of wortlessness.

In the Amos Anderson Art Museum, each floor is filled with Christo and Jean-Claude’s great plans for the use of cloth, detailed drawings of works envisioned and photographs of realised projects.

In them, we all get to sit together under big parasols, to walk in a park along promenades covered with yellow and gold, we Very Important Persons, to stroll on the golden midlle-of-the-road… to find the hidden reality anew

ABRAKADABRA

to see again!

The most characteristic thing in Christo’s works is perhaps their communality, the joy of a shared experience. I hope that the inhabitants of NYC will yet have the chance in future to push forward together through joy’s guard of honour formed by the cloths of Christo in Central Park.

Christo hasn’t.

—————

Well, then, what did Christo and Canetti have to do with each other in the end? Was there something more essential they shared than their native country, social class, emigration, profession and initial letter? Yes! There is a common factor: Masses. Masses. Masses.

“Masse und Macht”, the main work of Elias Canetti, yet to be translated into Finnish(!), is about power and instinctive behavior of the masses, the terror of which the author became to experience already as a child in Vienna before the First World War.

The masses seduced by Christo, however, gather in a more positive spirit, though at the same time, doubting and wondering, into unruly meetings…