Between science and art

New tradition

On 27 November, FLNR Scientific Leader Yuri Ts. Oganessian gave a lecture on the evolution of contemporary fine art and the creative paths of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. His report preceded the opening of the exhibition "Gates" in the FLNR exhibition hall, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's legendary art project "The Gates".

Opening the event, JINR Director Grigory Trubnikov said, "Today, we will listen to another lecture on art, an engaging interpretation from the Laboratory's Scientific Leader Yuri Oganessian. It's gratifying that these art history lectures are becoming a tradition. In fact, today, we will take a walk to New York City, where the art project was located in Central Park 20 years ago. Yuri Tsolakovich, you can't imagine how touching it is for all of us; you never stop amazing us with interesting facts from the world of art."

"I'm going to talk about what I feel and I'm not at all sure it's right," Yuri Ts. Oganessian warned. He dedicated his lecture to his friend and colleague Sergey Dmitriev. Welcoming the audience, Yuri Tsolakovich stated that most of those present had heard his lecture on Pieters Bruegel nine months ago. He gave it at the Cultural Centre "Mir" in summer and announced his next talk for 2 December at NUST MISIS. "When I talk about Bruegel, delving into the beauty and harmony of his works, the question arises: what about art today? Art historians shrug, explaining that everything is complicated today. I tried to understand it, yet I realized it's such a dense forest that I can't fully comprehend it," he began his talk. He then shared that he unexpectedly received an invitation from New York to the 20th anniversary of the installation "The Gates". "The year 2005, when the installation was created, was a time when we were working around the clock in Dubna on the synthesis of superheavy elements and I was constantly commuting to New York once in a while, every week. Sometimes, I didn't even go to the city; we held meetings at the airport hotel and I couldn't always see my daughter and her family that live in New York," he recalled. Once in February, his daughter suggested him to see the installation in the city's Central Park and he agreed. "There were gates with orange banners along all the park paths and the total length of the paths is 37 km," Yuri Tsolakovich recounted. "People were walking under the gates and I did, too. It seemed strange to me that so many people were walking under these gates and in just 16 days, all the gates would be removed. Why did they put over 7,500 gates in the park? I had to figure that out."

Yuri Tsolakovich spoke to us about the work of these artists. Christo Yavashev and Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon were born on the same day, 13 June, 1935. He was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria and she - in Casablanca, Morocco. Christo studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, preparing for his diploma and traveled to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, later, visited Vienna and Paris. The report featured early, quite academic, realistic portraits painted by Christo between the ages of 14 and 23. Jeanne-Claude was a philologist; she and Christo met in Paris.

How have form and color, the most important challenge facing an artist, changed in the 500 years since the Renaissance? The speaker showed us how they evolved in the paintings of Bruegel the Elder, then - the Impressionists, later - the avant-garde artists Wassily Kandinsky and finally - Jackson Pollock. The extent of the latter's paintings and the innovative technique (abandoning the brush and spattering paint) gave his paintings the status of millionaire art. Together with the speaker, we marveled at the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, appreciated the vibrant colors of Mark Rothko and learned about other representatives of Abstract Expressionism that originated in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. We agreed with him that the eternal problem had become bifurcated: form had become completely abstract, while color had been simplified to a monochromatic hue.

At the same time, the pop art movement originated in the UK, quickly spreading to the US. Its king was Andy Warhol and Yuri Tsolakovich introduced him with regal panache: he outlined his artistic principles (anything can be an object of art; art need not to be exclusive but popular; pop art unites art and popular culture), presented his famous paintings not only on slides, but also on T-shirts. The conference hall stage was decorated not only with Christo and Jeanne-Claude's favorite installation object, that is, a metal barrel but also with Campbell's Soup cans, widely known since the mid-19th century that Andy depicted in his paintings. He named his studio "The Factory" and it became the centre of all conceptual art in the US. There, having mastered screen printing, he created portraits of celebrities, most notably, Marilyn Monroe that became his muse. His first famous work was an image of three empty Coca-Cola bottles and "Turquoise Marilyn" entered the top five most expensive paintings in the world after paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Gauguin, Cezanne and the abstract artist Wilhelm Kooning.

Yuri Tsolakovich tried to justify the origin of this movement. "They say, art is wine and society is the grapes. This society existed after World War II that devastated generations of men and placed the burden of rebuilding cities and economies on women. After cold and famine, society began to drift toward a consumer society. What were artists supposed to draw from their surroundings, what were they supposed to create?" the speaker returned to the lecture's protagonists. At that time, every self-respecting artist had to find his or her own technique. Christo was already "infected" by conceptualism and new realism, whose adherents questioned the idea that art should elevate or idealize an object. He found his own path - ampacketage (packaging), believing that the wrapper can sometimes be more valuable than the object hidden within, or even the emptiness itself. But first, there were barrels. Once, the artists blocked the longest and narrowest street in central Paris with a "barricade" of 89 barrels. French police demanded that they dismantle the "barricade" and take the barrels to a museum. "What museum, the Louvre?" they demanded. "Take them to America, wherever they'll accept them!" And so, they did. Thus, they began to create installations in the US and other cities around the world featuring thousands of barrels, an idea that had haunted the artist since 1958. However, the largest installation comprising of 410,000 barrels in the form of a pyramid was never realized in Abu Dhabi. Equally ambitious was the project involving thousands of yellow and blue umbrellas, installed simultaneously in the US and Japan as major elements of the 1991 environmental exhibition.

Afterwards, the "wrap wave" hit us. The Reichstag, covered in silver material, the Pont Neuf in Paris, turned golden under thousands of square meters of polyamide and the final project implemented after the death of both artists by Sotheby's - the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, illuminated inside to resemble a lamp. Seeing these seemingly wrapped gifts for the first time, placed under a giant Christmas tree, one experiences a range of emotions - from amazement and incomprehension to admiration for the grandeur of the concept and the beauty, detached from the familiar image of a building or structure. All these projects required colossal effort, persistence and resources for implementation, despite the fact that Christo and Jeanne-Claude never raised funds or sponsors. Permission to "wrap" the Reichstag was received 22 years later and the idea for wrapping the Arc de Triomphe was completed 60 years after its conception. Although the "packaged" objects attracted many people, they were in this form for no more than 14-16 days.

The project "Gates" was no less thorny. After a lengthy permitting process, 150 workers spent three weeks installing 7,503 gates, nearly 5 meters tall, covered in saffron fabric. Yuri Tsolakovich, after visiting Central Park, realized that the installation reminded him of the torii gates at the Shinto shrine of Nezu near Tokyo, where crowds of people pass through numerous saffron-colored wooden gates, leaving notes with requests and hopes.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installations gave rise to new areas, such as landscape art, public installations, as well as environmental and processual art. "Many contemporary artists currently think not only about what they create, but also how it changes the perception of space, the city and people and this is a direct influence of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, according to art historians," Yuri Ts. Oganessian emphasized. In 2011, Yuri Tsolakovich met the 76-year-old Christo. The meeting was very warm and the artist spoke about his projects that were far more extensive than they had been able to implement and presented him with an autographed copy of his book.

Yuri Ts. Oganessian invited us to the exhibition in the adjacent hall, proudly highlighting that one of the achievements of the team preparing the project at FLNR was the fact that the installations "Barrels (1958)" and "Gates (2005)" were presented life-size. Inspired and enlightened, we entered the adjacent hall and walking under the saffron banners, while perhaps not feeling like we were in New York's Central Park, we certainly sensed a certain energy from the installation and the large photographs showcasing the artists' other projects.

And finally, from the vibrant, beautifully published exhibition booklet, we learn that the project's originator and inspirer Yuri Ts. Oganessian was assisted in the organization by the FLNR team, as well as by the staffs of the JINR Press Office and Publishing Department.

Olga Tarantina
photos by Elena Puzynina