The king of ‘absolutely irrational’
Draping fabric across a raging river in Colorado, installing thousands of blue and yellow umbrellas in Japan and California simultaneously, and erecting a monument of 410,000 oil barrels in the desert near Abu Dhabi — each complex undertaking took years of planning and millions of dollars to complete, only to be displayed and then dismantled in mere weeks, never to be seen again. “All of our projects are absolutely irrational with no justification to exist. Nobody needs a running fence or surrounded islands,” said Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, 81, the Bulgarian-born artist known as Christo. Perhaps the world’s best known and most prolific creator of major public art, Christo discussed the evolution of three recent works during a talk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) Thursday evening. “They are created because Jeanne-Claude and I have this unstoppable urge to create. They are made for us first, not the public,” he said...