Theory & Event

I want to get beyond the very limited and extremely specialized conception of art—I want to get beyond the museum, the gallery, and generally what is deemed normal in art today.

—Christo ¹

The problem is to actually possess the community of dialogue and the game with time which have been represented by poetico-artistic works.

—Guy Debord ²

On June 25, 1995, a team of workers supervised by Christo and Jeanne-Claude completed the artists’ latest project. Formally called “Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin 1971–95,” the project was a remarkable achievement. As a work of art, it transformed Germany’s 100 year-old (and temporarily vacant) parliamentary building and its surrounding space. As a public event, the wrapped Reichstag posed a challenge to the cultural imagination of all who came to view it.

Visually, the wrap reconfigured and elided the large, neoclassical (and not always well-loved) structure which stood, in Christo’s words, like a “lonely monolith” ³ at the end of a large, grassy, open area between the Brandenburg Gate and the Spree river. The project had taken years of planning, months of preparation and many weeks of construction. Now the formidable old structure stood cloaked by 100,000 square meters of silver-colored polypropylene fabric held in place by 15,600 meters of blue rope. Importantly, Christo and Jeanne-Claude limited the aesthetic and public life of the Wrapped Reichstag to two weeks. In this brief period, some 5 million visitors from Germany and abroad experienced the artists’ visual challenge. To what extent, in Debord’s sense, did this artistic spectacle escape its aesthetic representational status and engender both a “game with time” and a “community of dialogue”?

As a game with time, the wrapped Reichstag invited two ways of seeing. First, the wrap’s temporal brevity accentuated the fundamental impermanence and ephemerality of Christo’s conception of cultural praxis—one that defines his oeuvre. The work clearly challenged the timeless character typically associated with bourgeois “museum art”: here was a fleeting and ephemeral act that deconstructed any aspiration toward immortal, auratic forms of culture. ⁴ Second, by intervening in a particular context and space of German life, albeit briefly, the work of art sparked memories of, and discursive practices related to, numerous historical sedimentations associated both with the Reichstag and the German past. ⁵ It was a “game with time” both as an aesthetic event and as a cultural—indeed historical and political—intervention.

Moreover, the wrapped Reichstag also engendered “a community of dialogue” in several important and interrelated ways. The project’s very scale and immediacy, as well as the media attention given to it, invited a fresh dialogue on the nature of art. The artists’ singular intervention in German everyday life not only stimulated “aesthetic” deliberations, but also kindled discourses on countless issues pertinent to contemporary German life. In short, the project was a wide-ranging Gedankenanstoss—a stimulus to thinking about art, culture and politics.

To be sure, the resultant public discourses did not progress toward a coherent dialogic telos: while focussed on the aesthetic event, participants were not necessarily impelled toward consensus and mutual insight. Instead, their discursive practices became increasingly decentered and open, eventually creating a multiplicity of perspectives and subject positions. As Christo had anticipated (undoubtedly drawing on his experience with prior projects), the conscious injection of beauty and aesthetic form into everyday life fostered frequent suspensions of normal discursive practices and themes, in the process opening up new possibilities in thought and action. The artists’ work, as he had noted in an interview in 1994, “triggers strong feelings so...