Christo’s latest work weighs 650 tons, and it floats
LONDON — Wearing a hard hat and a cargo jacket, the artist Christo stood on a platform looking over the Serpentine Lake one April morning and watched his latest creation come to life. As ducks glided across the water, men in orange jumpsuits began assembling the installation, a crane hovering above their heads.
“The London Mastaba,” Christo’s first major outdoor work in Britain, is now floating (through Sept. 23) in the middle of the lake in Hyde Park. A trapezoidal pyramid of 7,506 painted and horizontally stacked barrels, it is 66 feet tall — as tall as the Sphinx in Egypt — and weighs about 650 tons. Named after a flatroofed structure with sloping sides that originated some 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (the word “mastaba” means “bench” in Arabic), it is a test for a mastaba roughly eight times as high that Christo hopes to put up in the desert in Abu Dhabi.
This is less ambitious than past projects by the Bulgarian-born Christo, 83, and his wife JeanneClaude, who died in 2009. These included extending a 25-mile fence across parts of Northern California, as well as wrapping fabric around a bridge in Paris, the Pont Neuf, and around Berlin’s Reichstag building.
Installing the London sculpture has not been plain sailing, however. Christo had to fund the project himself, at a cost of 3 million pounds, or around $4 million. (Christo does this for all his projects, through artwork sales.) He then spent a year securing permits from authorities and from the body that manages Hyde Park, and had 2½ months to get everything done.
“Each work of ours is like an expedition, something incredibly invigorating,” the artist said in an interview. “I love to be here with the workers. I like that process. That journey is so incredible, unforgettable.”
The materials for the sculpture had to be transported into the park by more than 70 trucks, which were ordered to drive at about a mile an hour because the park is full of pedestrians.
Christo’s nephew Vladimir Yavachev, who oversees all the artist’s outdoor public projects and was also on site, appeared less worried. “Christo has a lot of engineering sense,” he said. “There is a way to do it, and it’s not impossible.” He said the important thing was to “do it simply” and to “do it quickly, too: It needs to go in, be there, and then go out.”