In Christo’s The Umbrellas (Joint Project for Japan and USA), an aerial photograph of California’s Tejon Pass is spliced together with a drawing of nine yellow umbrellas outlining the curves and slopes of the verdant landscape. Executed in 1990, this work was completed a year before the realisation of the project it illustrates. Yet those 1,760 umbrellas punctuating the California valley, erected on the 9^th of October 1991 at the same t.mes as 1,340 identical blue umbrellas were opened in Ibraki, Japan, are no longer standing today. Ever the creators of ephemeral art, Christo’s The Umbrellas (Joint Project for Japan and USA) were dismantled and recycled just eighteen days later. The project lives on in the memories of the thousands who helped realise it and those who marvelled at it as well as in the few drawings and maquettes that went into its planning.

Though Christo alone executed the preparatory drawings, including the present work, the execution of the final project was a joint venture with his wife and creative partner, Jeanne-Claude. They were known to fly in separate planes so that in case one crashed, the other could continue their work. The merging of the two artists’ artistic vision is reflected in their use of a single moniker – Christo – to refer to their joint artistic endeavours. At the core of their practice is the transformation of the familiar into the unrecognisable, somet.mes s raising questions concerning past, present or future identities such as in the case of Wrapped Reichstag (1971-95) or as in the case of The Umbrellas, simply challenging the public’s complacency with their environment.

Regardless of the message of a given project or its scale and complexity, the stages to completion are the same. Each project has two distinct periods: the “software” and the “hardware” periods. The present work belongs to the former, the phase when the project exists solely as an idea. It is this phase, Christo says, that gives them their credibility. “If we would never have the process, we would never realise the object” (Christo cited in: Interview between Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Gianfranco Mategna, Journal of Contemporary Art, online). Indeed, when working on such a monumental scale, these projects are no easy undertaking. The Umbrellas took six and a half years to complete, involving countless negotiations with Japanese rice farmers, California state agencies, rangers, and national bodies in order to bring the umbrellas from pastel, pencil, crayon, enamel and charcoal into reality. In this way, The Umbrellas engaged with the public even before its execution: “This is the extraordinary thing because this project develops something that normally painting and sculpture do not have,” explains Christo, “This project developed a participatory public. Usually, when people go to galleries and museums, they see the work of art, they like what they like and go away” (Christo cited in: Interview between Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Gianfranco Mategna, Journal of Contemporary Art, online). In other words, The Umbrellas enters public consciousness in the way more traditional Replica Handbags forms cannot, making it immortal.

Unlike traditional sculpture which both encloses and owns space, the ethereal structures of The Umbrellas outline a transitory space borrowed from the landscape. These temporary houses, as they were conceived by the artists, both compliment and enhance the natural space they inhabit. The yellow nylon coverings of the umbrellas in California echoing the blonde grass coating the hills, while in Japan the blue coverings pay homage to the lush green environs nourished by water year-round. At six metres tall, the umbrellas seem like overgrown flowers blooming out of season, inviting the passers-by to marvel at the undulating landscape in all of its sublimity. Perhaps for Christo and Jean-Claude, embellishing nature with The Umbrellas is just a their way to acknowledging the superior beauty and endless creativity of nature over art.