#runningfence

For two weeks in September 1976, a veiled fence extended for nearly 25 miles along the Sonoma countryside. Depending on the time of day, the white fabric stood dark against darker hills, or lit up in the sun, or took on the earthy hues of its surroundings. The fence marked no border but itself. It looked maybe like a line of ships or a caravan of sheep—locals couldn't agree. There was no consensus on what it meant to be on one side of the fence or the other, although people did take sides. Its scale suggested the work of an alien species. The alien species was Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and the work was Running Fence.

In the Maysles documentary of the same name, you can see the fence billow peacefully in the breeze. In contrast, construction was a loud and hectic process. Christo and Jeanne-Claude had conceived the project four years prior. But because the fence ran through public and private lands, a complicated series of public hearings and beaureacratic sign-offs had to take place. Many locals were against the idea; at one point, Marin County nixed the plan.

At Studio AHEAD we try to live art by designing spaces to be lived in. What impresses us most about Running Fence is not the fence itself, nor its otherworldliness or beauty or contentness to stretch across a portion of land we love. What impresses us is that the work essentially forced a bunch of strangers to gather in public and discuss what is and isn't art. To think about fabric and space and dimension. The public's response ranged from the purely positive to "What kind of art is that, hanging a piece of rag up for 50 miles? I can hang a rag up! I bet [Christo] can't even paint a picture!"

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were used to controversy and setbacks. Their previous work, Valley Curtain, which stretched between two mountains in Colorado, took over two years to complete but lasted 28 hours before the wind tore it open. The impermanence was the point. "It's like our lives," Christo said. Nothing of Running Fence remains on the hillsides. It is remembered on film, a plaque somewhere in Sonoma, and by whatever contours it left in the seawind that is now free to move freely over the hills. "Look how it describes the wind" is how the fence was once described. The wind in turn describes at least one idea of what art is: being touched by a sudden shift of the invisible.