Jeanne Claude (1935 – 2009)

From Three Obituaries and an Afternoon Tea

1 On first seeing Christo Javacheff

And falling in love as rapidly

As the breeze would later stir Little Bay

She changes the locks on her apartment

And addresses her husband thus,

“Your key no longer fits my lock.”

2 Recalling Suzie Quatro’s cheerful but unequivocal

“I hear you knocking but you can’t come in,”

She leaves her husband like a parcel left

Wrapped and pensive on a shelf,

And begins with Christo the first day

Of the rest of her life.

3 This pronouncement, “Your key etc.,” announces

The calm configuration begun years before

On that same shared June day in 1935

When she and Christo were born, a day

As singular as the sun’s blue shadow on snow

Moving as it moves out of cloud.

4 Commissioned to paint a portrait

Of the wife of General de Guilleborn

Christo attended their Paris apartment

And met their daughter Jeanne Claude,

A conventionally married young woman

Soon to wrap herself in billowing destiny.

5 Like recollection’s pebble falling

Into the millpond of Consciousness

She has already fallen in love

When Christo takes off his glasses

And takes chamomile tea having completed

Preliminary sketches of her mother.

6 At the beginning of Aeneid 8, Jeanne Claude says,

Is the most remarkably expressive figure:

Aeneas’ state of uncertainty

Is likened to the reflection of water

Shimmering and moving on a wall;

Just so Jeanne Claude on first seeing Christo.

7 Aeneas in this uncertain state

Stands unknowingly at the mouth of the Tiber.

The god of the Tiber appears

And promises to reverse the currents

To enable his progress upstream;

Just so her vast wrapped future.

8 Born in Casablanca on the same day

As her future partner, Jeanne Claude

Has already established the refrain:

“Of all the enswathed trapezoids in all the world,

Of all the wrapped observation decks,

That you should walk into mine…

9 Of all the vast plateaux and declivities,

All the clamouring stretches of coastline

Waiting to be covered,

Of all the armatures of the world

Waiting to regain their original innocence,

Let us spread a tablecloth over these.”

10 Arriving in Sydney in 1969

To wrap the rock platform of Little Bay

In 92,900 square metres of fabric,

She is photographed at a press conference

Wearing a beret or cap and looking

Like Jeanne Moreau in “Jules and Jim”.

11 Little Bay behind the hospital

Will look briefly like a patient in bandages

Improvised by a generous, genial nurse

Distracted by conversation and laughter.

The coast will look like a long low lumpy

Newspaper parcel of vegetable peelings.

12 Little Bay, wrapped to look

Disconcertingly and therefore pleasingly

Like something else, recalls perhaps

The amusing teatowel image

Of the Opera House pictured

As plates stacked on a washing-up rack.

13 Revelation by enswathement

Is implicit in the appearance

Of Little Bay years after the event

As if it were remembering still

Its ten weeks under wraps

During which time it dwelt on its past.

14 Dust haze hangs over water acres,

Proximate escarpments seem obscurely visible,

Sea birds are wary of leaving shallows;

Noon hangs heavily, as uncertain

As a field curlew. “The absence of presence”

(Jeanne Claude) cries out to be constrained.

15 The brevity of the dragonfly alighting

Translates into the project manifesto:

That something twenty years in the planning

With consultations, interviews and negotiations

Will vanish from the world

After a few dragonfly days.

16 And the dragonfly brevity of the day

Is a single Fraunhofer line

Across the spectrum of the centuries,

Widening in art which voices

(Jeanne Claude: ) “The quality of love and tenderness

We humans hold for what does not last.”

17 92,900 squ. metres of aluminised fabric,

56 kilometres of polypropylene rope,

25,000 fasteners and threaded studs

Deployed opposite the leprosarium ruins

And the remains of its wall which once

Segregated men and women.

18 For ten weeks of daily scrutiny

The sea came from far and wide,

Dragging the moon in its puzzlement

And at low tide dragging the chain

In listless animated attention

Studied this seventy day artifice.

19 The tarpaulins anchored over the rock platform

By 15 professional mountain climbers

And an army of trained volunteers

Were one day covered by a sea mist.

Then, as if metaphor had stepped

Down from the saddle, memory walked abroad.

20 For her baccalaureate in Latin (1952)

Jeanne Claude had encountered in the Aeneid

The concept of scale enlargement and grandeur

So that the notion of wrapping a parcel

Would naturally extend itself

To valleys, cliffs and foreshores.

21 Valleys, cliffs and foreshores

Give off an ozone of exuberance

Which Jeanne Claude embodies

As she oversees the hauling

Of 10,000 oil drums and bales of paper

And tarpaulins, by a team of dragonfly abseilers.

22 A steeplejack lowers himself

From the crane through the admiring air

Full of the Marianne Moore poem about him.

Waterbeetling trapezists and abseilers

Scale the curtained Pont Neuf calling

“Jeanne Claude! Your son’s a poet!”

23 Lipstick-pink round the eleven islands

Of Biscaynes Bay, Miami

Like Al Jolson singing Mamm-y

Or like saltwater crocs

Surfacing and submerging off Florida

In lipstick-pink tutus.

24 “Let us have extended tutorials

On the perpetually temporary

Absence of subject;

Let us make apple-pie beds

Over the earth’s familiar mattress

To startle the reticent into confidences.”

25 “Let us fly flags, umbrellas, curtains,

Saffron wind gates that are not gates

But banners or proscenium curtains

Billowing open on a performance

Largely invented by the audience

As they crowd in to marvel at its curtains.”

26 Absence of subject, art’s ultimate ideal,

Closely relates to absence of purpose

Or presence of delayed purpose

In the body: the appendix, the adolescent breast,

DNA codes pervasively implicit,

Cells waiting like a suspension in music.

27 Covering the legs of the piano – a joke?

Christo (1996): “Now that my hair

Has turned grey and Jeanne Claude’s

Has turned red” (laughter) … Laughter

Is implicit in wrapping a cliff

Or town hall like a birthday surprise.

28 The presence of body organs, pumping and jumping trip

Wires and secreting secretly and pulsing

And generally getting on with it

Beneath cascading visible beauty, might suggest –

If another were needed – another

Rationale for the draped object.

29 And the Pont Neuf or Reichstag

Entirely covered in modest drapes

Such as were thought in former times suitable

To cover the legs of pianos

Might suggest also the mysterious dynamics

Of force-at-a-distance.

30 Jeanne Claude eats a nectarine

And looks again at the Pont Neuf,

Vulnerable, incomplete, hopeful

Like the raised head of a dog

Waiting to be taken for a walk,

And begins applying to local authorities.

31 10,000 communications with authorities,

Petty clerks, chief petty officers, councillors, burgomasters,

Panjandrums, magnates, managers and sub-managers,

Represent ten years of slow dancing and waiting

During which the body cells of Christo

And Jeanne Claude are several times renewed.

32 Jeanne Claude standing in the swimming pool

Writes letters to bureaucrats

On a pad resting on the boardwalk:

“I am hoping by wrapping your town hall

To restore the mystery of distance

So eloquently recalled by blackbirds singing.”

33 Swallows low-skimming in cusps,

Discoursing or at least being discursive,

Turn alternately silver and dusk-grey

Across the face of the mastaba.

Jeanne Christo on her mobile phone laughs:

“A mastaba is a truncated rectangular pyramid.”

34 Stormclouds like a sack of coal dust

Being shouldered by a mountain; a dusk rainbow;

Shimmering rain undeterred by lightning;

Then at noon that same rain returning as vapour.

None elicits the least glance or remark

From the curtains striding through the valley.

35 Jeanne Claude explains over coffee

The concept of the wrapped article:

“We reveal the uncertainty of memory,

The flavour or fragrance of lemon or rhubarb

Faintly present in a rich madeira cake,

Even the absence of a loved one.”

36 Next were to be thousands of unfurled umbrellas

Seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors

In the open countryside: in Japan

Blue, the blue of cherry blossom skies,

And at the same time in California

Yellow, the yellow of Californian poppies.

37 The Mastaba, which after her death

Is still to be realised in the United Emirates,

Will require 110,000 oil barrels configured

As a truncated rectangular pyramid,

A platform for rhetoric or declamation

Or a full moon draining back molten gold.

38 A platform for the rising moon

Might recall the huge inflated cylinder

And its two mammoth cranes

In Kassel, Germany, in 1968,

Their elongated parcel of rosewater air

(Or so it seemed) 80 metres tall.

39 But now Jeanne Claude is elsewhere

In process or gestation or osmosis

Through semi-permeable membrane. She is already

Applying to higher authorities to construct

“Clouds elevated by sea-going cranes”

Or “Picture of an Aeroplane Just Out of Sight.”

40 Jeanne Claude: “Happiness is our only subject,”

Happiness like birds singing but hidden,

Like the cabin in the woods blurred in rain shine.

Consider then these very woods themselves hidden

Under canvas and stout boy scout knots;

Jeanne Claude: “Mystery is happiness, happiness mystery.”