What were Christo and Jeanne-Claude hiding?
1963 was a big year for the Hungarian-American artist Christo (b. 1935). He was accustomed to uprootedness, for sure, but that year, he and his wife Jeanne-Claude moved to New York to settle there permanently. After his hard-hitting installation in Paris, in which he sealed off an entire street in response to the erection of the Berlin Wall, one of his first projects on his new continent would be the creation of a series of display windows and store fronts. They all have one thing in common: you can’t see inside them.
In some of these works, like in this one, he takes the paradox even further by installing a light switch. The idea, then, is that somebody is to flick it and “shed light” on something. But on what? The light doesn’t give us even the tiniest of clues; instead, it rather increases our frustration over not having our instinctive curiosity eased. What is it all about? Christo himself didn’t like to give interpretations of his works. But in any case, this series represents a transition from object to psychology. The viewers expectation to receive something, to be given an opportunity to consume, goes unfulfilled. Christo was hiding something in his covered-up store fronts. But he was also doing the opposite. He was revealing an increasingly obvious characteristic of modern man: the symbiotic relationship between the act of seeing and the act of consuming.
