Wrapping-Paper

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have become well known names in the art world due to their projects in which they ‘wrap’ famous monuments, Trees and even coast lines. Perhaps one of the best known of these projects came from 1995 when they wrapped the Reichstag in Germany. Christo and Jeanne Claude state on their website that “the work is more about altering an environment than wrapping,” ((http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/faq)) and this quote really resonated with our group and has helped to influence the progression of our piece.
The grandstand has been sat without a purpose for so many years that it seems to be in a disused environment. The horse stables across the road in the common is an everyday reminder that could be said to signify the grandstands previous grand purpose but, more often that not, the grandstand is completely ignored. Within our piece we wanted to draw attention to how easy it is to blend into your environment and how it is possible to break out of it and alter your environment, much like how Christo believes that his wrapping work helps to alter environments. We covered half the room on wall newspaper to try and draw attention to that part of the room but it also allowed a backdrop with which to camouflage ourselves. To create the sense of taking an audience on a journey through our piece, we felt the changing of the environment was essential. In order to achieve this it was important to show a progression and this was achieved by having a series of parts to our performance. The first part where we were dressed in newspaper and were standing up against the wall of newspaper signified the way in which the grandstand often goes unnoticed and the poem we recited was reminiscent of the grandstands history. The second part with the betting slips was a comment on society and to try and make an audience think about maybe the darker side of the grandstands history. Then the Horse projection. This was important to our piece, as the horse image was the first moving picture ever produced. We felt that this was not only relevant to the grandstands history of horse racing but also solidified the horses place in history and shows that it was an important animal to all generations. Then in contrast to this we then wanted to show how the Horse as an animal has lost some of its grandeur, much like how the grandstand has lost some of its grandeur. The last part of the Performance incorporated the latest horse news and we touched on the horse meat scandal and then related it to the Grandstand by naming the mince after the Lincoln Handicap Winner.
Throughout the entire process we found that the performance took on a lot of new meaning for each member of the group. As we developed our performance further we added a lot of new elements that we felt related directly to the grandstand and also were indicative of the environment that the grandstand would have been, in such as the use of the betting slips. The betting slips were indicative of a time when the grandstand was used for the horse racing that we had based our performance on. The betting slips we used to try and give a different element to the performance and to show a theme of loss and how fickle gambling can be. By throwing up the betting slips at the end we wanted to try and show an ending to the grandstand and that there was an ending of life happening there.
Donald Brook states on Christo’s work that ‘A function of art, is perhaps, to provoke life out of its closed circuits and dying ritual,’ ((Donald Brook – The Little bay Affair – Art and Australia – December 1969 Volume 7 Number 3)) and I feel that by using the grandstand as our Site we helped give life back to a place that’s had its only purpose die.