"Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian"
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Wrapped Reichstag wasn’t a single artwork so much as a 24-year campaign to make an artwork possible, and Christo is quietly insisting that the real medium was time, bureaucracy, and public argument. When he notes that the process “went from 1971 to ’95,” he’s foregrounding duration as a kind of proof of seriousness: this wasn’t a studio gesture but a slow wrestle with German history, parliamentary permission, and the optics of covering a national symbol. The wrap is the spectacle; the paperwork is the spine.
His matter-of-fact aside - “each one of our projects has its own book” - reads like a flex, but it’s also a defense. Ephemeral installations can be dismissed as expensive photo ops. A dedicated book for each project becomes a parallel monument: documentation as infrastructure, a paper trail that turns a temporary act into something legible, arguable, archivable.
The sharper subtext arrives with the rejection of the “art book” and the art historian. Christo is protecting authorship and control over narrative. Art history can frame the work as metaphor (about concealment, memory, postwar guilt), or worse, as institutional trophy. He wants the story told as lived reality: negotiations, setbacks, the grind of persuasion. That choice also aligns with his long-standing independence from patronage and museum logic. By refusing the art historian’s voice, he’s telling you where the meaning is: not in lofty interpretation, but in the civic drama of getting a democracy to agree to let itself be transformed, briefly, by fabric.
His matter-of-fact aside - “each one of our projects has its own book” - reads like a flex, but it’s also a defense. Ephemeral installations can be dismissed as expensive photo ops. A dedicated book for each project becomes a parallel monument: documentation as infrastructure, a paper trail that turns a temporary act into something legible, arguable, archivable.
The sharper subtext arrives with the rejection of the “art book” and the art historian. Christo is protecting authorship and control over narrative. Art history can frame the work as metaphor (about concealment, memory, postwar guilt), or worse, as institutional trophy. He wants the story told as lived reality: negotiations, setbacks, the grind of persuasion. That choice also aligns with his long-standing independence from patronage and museum logic. By refusing the art historian’s voice, he’s telling you where the meaning is: not in lofty interpretation, but in the civic drama of getting a democracy to agree to let itself be transformed, briefly, by fabric.
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| Topic | Art |
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