Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Raleigh. My surgery went well—apparently I have a whole new tendon now; I’ve named it Derek—so I’m getting around on a knee scooter while we catch up with all our peeps here. Derek seems to be settling in nicely. We’re also taking full advantage of Amazon to buy fun things like new underwear and phone cables. It’s all very exciting.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Some of you may have seen news stories about the recent Christo installation in Paris. Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, were artists known all over the world for large-scale, temporary outdoor installations. Perhaps you remember The Gates, in New York’s Central Park? I didn’t get to see that one, and it’s one of only a few things in my life that I truly regret.
Last month, a two-year project (or a sixty-year project, if you include the inspiration stage, which I definitely do) culminated in the wrapping of the Arc De Triomphe in shimmering silvery fabric. We went to see it the morning it officially ‘opened’ (I’m not sure how one defines ‘open’ when the object in question is a 15-story tall monument in the middle of a traffic circle).
It was surprisingly beautiful. The fabric caught the light, brilliant silver against the perfectly blue sky. Traffic around the Arc had been stopped for the two-week duration of the installation, so we walked around and under and stared at it from every angle. It’s incredibly accessible—you just step out of the Metro at the end of the Champs Elysees, and there it is, this giant silver thing. It looks almost weightless, like a breath, but you know full well, from every photo you’ve ever seen, or the photos you took yourself the week before, or even just years of walking by and not really noticing, not paying close attention, not really, that the Arc de Triomphe is actually profoundly heavy. It’s not quite of the earth—it’s man-made, of course, to commemorate Napoleon and his very human life and times—but it’s fully grounded in the earth, built of stone and deeply settled.
To see it looking so delicate, like a bubble, or a fairy, or a firefly, was a very happy surprise.
It’s the second Christo we’ve been lucky enough to see; the first was The Floating Piers, in northern Italy a few years back. That, too, was beautiful and surprising, and again, we were lucky enough to go on the very first day, before various challenges became apparent (mainly, the size of the crowds jamming into a tiny village next to a lake). All we saw was the magic.
The difference between the Piers and the Arc, I think, is that I know the Arc. I had never heard of Lake Iseo before I read about the Piers. I had never been there, and likely never will again. The Arc, though, is a symbol of Paris. If you’ve flipped through a guidebook, or watched a heist movie, or visited the City of Light, you know what the Arc de Triomphe looks like. It looked that way before, and now it looks that way again. But in between, for a brief moment, it was something different, its true form visible but obscured, transformed into something more.
The idea of temporary art is a bit strange to me. As someone who loves museums full of paintings and sculptures that are older than my country, my instinctive understanding of art is that it’s a creative effort, the product of which is meant for posterity, for the ages. But that’s not always true, and my brain struggles a bit with the idea of spending so many years on a masterpiece that will quickly become nothing but a memory.
The Balinese are known for elaborate funeral rituals that require the construction of huge, expensive timber-and-plaster structures/creatures. We watched some being built, when an elderly relative of the local king died, including a black bull, as tall as a two-story building, beautifully painted and burnished with gold leaf. The construction took several weeks, under a shelter by the side of the road. Every day we’d ride by in our taxi, and several men from the village would be out there working in the heat of the day. Every day the bull got a little bigger, a little fancier.
The day of the funeral, we stood by the side of the road with the rest of the onlookers (there were many) and watched as the procession wound through the village. Utility workers had gone though a bit earlier and taken down all the wires, so that the creatures wouldn’t catch on them. The body was carried on a bier as tall as the bull, a sort of gilded, bejeweled, floral tower. It took an hour for the whole ‘parade’ to make its way to the pyre. We bowed out at that point; as soon as the electrical wires were reconnected, I wanted to find AC and ice. But all that art—the creatures and towers—were all put on the pyre, to accompany the body. All that work—the labor and creativity and commitment of all those artisans—all burned up in a moment.
It took more than two years to to complete Christo’s Arc De Triomphe, but the project was sixty years in the planning. I like to think of myself as a process person, but Christo’s project required a determination that I can’t imagine. In a place like Bali, where you can’t really assume everyone has electricity and running water, the process of preparing for a funeral represents so much more than temporary art. We learned that some families will temporarily bury a body, so that they can take a few years to save up for the cremation ceremony. Then they will spend weeks or even months painstakingly creating the art that will go up in smoke, in a few minutes flat.
Notre Dame, another famous symbol of Paris, is being rebuilt after the fire that destroyed the tower in 2019. One would’ve thought the cathedral was the opposite of temporary art—it was built for the ages, meant to last forever, or at least a very, very long time. It’s eight hundred years old now, and has been reincarnated, renovated, and reconstructed a multitude of times, and yet it still stands. It’s being rebuilt—again—a sign, if there ever was one, of our human capacity for optimism.
I suppose all art—no matter how long it’s meant to last—comes from the same place.
Take care,
Lisa
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