COVERAGE has always been a priority for Christo. If you weren't there in 1969, when he swathed a million square feet of the Sydney coastline in opaque polypropylene mesh; if you couldn't make it in 1985, when he packaged the Pont-Neuf in Paris in 40,877 square metres of woven polyamide fabric - don't worry. It was captured on film. Christo's contemporary Andy Warhol made art that referred to the mass media, but Christo's was made for the mass media. Cameras roll. Cut. It's a wrap.
For Christo, the packaging is the product. This lends most Christos a certain ambiguity. The wrapped bridge, for example, was both tantalus and paradox: a present that you couldn't open (for to do so would have been to destroy it); a work of visual art whose purpose was to conceal. Christo's art presents itself as a series of gifts - not least to the cartoonist, for whom its creator has become the epitome of The Crazy Modern Artist. When he packaged that stretch of Australian shore, Sydney's The Sun ran a Frank Benier cartoon in which the beaming artist contemplates the whole city, suspension bridge, opera house and all, smothered in brown paper and string. ''Well, that just about wraps it up Mr Christo,'' says an Aussie workman, hands on hips. Christo's grand spectaculars have always invited the deflating pun.
Frank Benier probably couldn't give a XXXX for modern art, and while his cartoon gets Christo's megalomania just about right it says little about the possible logic behind it. For that, you need to look not at the solitary Christo but at the range of what he's done (and is planning to do). A fair sample of the oeuvre is offered by a show now in London at the Annely Juda Gallery, including preparatory sketches...
