Cresting out of the Serpentine lake is some prehistoric, mythical, yet perfectly geometrical creature. It looks like the Bauhaus designed the Loch Ness Monster; like Malevich dreamed up the Kraken. This is Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude’s first real attempt at their ‘Mastaba’ – a project dreamed up in the ’70s, but so ambitious as to be impossible to realise. Even this one, made up of 7,506 barrels, is just a fraction of their original dream to make it out of 410,000 barrels, striking 150 metres up into the sky.
They’re nothing if not ambitious. Before her death in 2009, Jeanne-Claude and Christo wrapped up the Reichstag and Paris’s Pont Neuf, and they created a 24-mile long fabric sculpture running through rural California. They basically made a name for themselves with enormous, bold, environmental art. But something about The Mastaba feels special – like it was something they’d been working towards fruitlessly from the very, very start.
A mastaba is an ancient Egyptian tomb, a stone edifice for the burial of kings and society bigwigs. It’s a very final place. But even though Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work here is finished, it just feels like another step towards making a work of art they’ll never be able to achieve, an endlessly unreachable goal. It’s the opposite of final, it’s a beginning.
So who is this a tomb for? Do the barrels represent oil, commerce, human greed and environmental destruction? Whatever it is, this work is a question mark more than a full stop.
Over in the Serpentine gallery, the exhibition itself doesn’t really feel like an exhibition of art but of ambition. Most of this is preparatory sketches and models for that single monumental sculpture. There are stacks of wrapped barrels, little paint cans, but it’s mostly architectural models and drawings. It’s less art and more documentation, but what it shows you is a singular, monomaniacal, obsessive drive to create something monumental, to make something bigger than themselves, something unforgettable.
The show isn’t the star. Not by a long shot. It’s a little dull, if anything. But out there on the lake lies an expression of ambition, love and the desire to be remembered. It’s a hard work of art to forget.
@eddyfrankel
