David Prowler Blog

“[It is] one of the most marvelous books of contemporary art in the 20^th Century. There are many works of art in the 20^th Century, and I am an artist and I project only the work of art. These 280 pages are a work of art, with the nature, with the people, with the traffic, with the birds, with the ocean, and with the sky.”

Christo

You probably know Christo as the artist who (in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne-Claude) hung The Gates in Central Park -after 25 years of public review. They wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris. For two weeks in 1975, he ran a fabric fence through Marin and Sonoma, from Highway 101 into the sea.

The book he’s reviewing above is the “Final Environmental Impact Report, Running Fence” by Environmental Science Associates. In two volumes the EIR describes the Fence and what it might do to the environment. It lays out impacts on archeology, traffic, air quality, energy use, soils, water, noise, and wildlife.

The Fence is described in the EIR as

“18 feet high and more than 24 miles long. The structure would be essentially an assembly of 18-foot by 62- foot white nylon panels, supported by cables and poles, the latter anchored in soil or rock.”

In reality, there were two aspects of the work.

Obviously, there was the material object, which Christo, in the EIR, describes like this:

“The physical reality of the Running Fence will be a beautiful one. The fabric is a fragile material, like clothing or skin. And, like the structures the nomads built in the desert, it will have the special beauty of impermanence. The fabric is a light-conductor for the sunlight, and it will give shape to the wind. It will go over the hills and into the sea, like a ribbon of light.”

The other part, also described by Christo:

“Three years of teamwork, three years of study with engineers, surveyors, botanists, geologists. The Running Fence project also involves politicians and businessmen, supervisors and artists, students and – especially – the local ranchers and landowners.”

Running Fence was fiercely debated and this debate was an important part of the art work.

Pro: “Running Fence will depict the evolution of man from the sea, his enormous efforts to survive and build on the land, and the ultimate destruction of that for which he has strived with such intensity for so very long.”

Con: “It will bring tourists into the county and make it a crummy Coney Island.”

Those of us involved in planning and development usually view this process as an unfortunate series of steps on the way to a building or a plan. But there is an art to it and theatre too.

The Running Fence Environmental Impact Report is also an important part of the work.

I looked for a long time for a copy of the Report and found only one: for $750, listed by an antiquarian bookseller in La Jolla. But I got a copy, and you can too, by downloading it from the Smithsonian’s website, at

http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/runningfence/eir.pdf

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1.Head on.

This morning I was in a meeting in a conference room on the 30^th floor of a high rise office building downtown, looking out at the Bank of America building, the tallest building in San Francisco. It looked different.

In fact, it looked pretty good, tall and slender and elegant. It was as if I’d never seen it. I realized it looked so good because I was seeing it, for the first time, head on.

But when do you get to see a building head on? You have to be up in the air yourself or way far away.

2.From above.

Why is this view so popular? I don’t get it. Hardly anybody ever sees buildings like this.

3.How we really see them.

4. On a table.

Everybody likes to look at building models. But they make a high rise look like a Brancusi sculpture.

Here are some other fans (identities listed at the end):

Donald Trump

Adolph Hitler

Charles de Gaulle

Le Corbusier

Johnny Depp

A couple of times a week I walk from my house to my office at Second and Market Streets and of course there’s only one way to go: down Market Street.

You could write a little essay about the hidden erotic aspects of Market Street, but why be coy? There’s nothing hidden about it. It’s right out there.

That’s what Market Street is about. From the Castro to the spike of the Ferry Building filling the canyon between the highrises, with the neon of mid-Market and the hustle of the financial district in between, Market Street is sexy.

All it needs is barkers like the strip clubs on Broadway yelling “Check it out!”

Sometimes it’s the advertising signs, or the statues, or the names, or even elements of the architecture. Today it’s gaudy and commercial, but topless men and women were at one time heroes – stuck on or holding up buildings.

Whatever you’re into, come find it on Market Street.

And on Market Street there is the loyal opposition, too:

“It might be more romantic to say “I love you” in French than it is in Cantonese; nevertheless, it is still possible to say it. It might be more touching to say it in song than in design, but saying it in design should be achievable, too.

And it is possible to say “I love you” even in architecture, as the Taj Mahal proves.”

Stefan Sagmeister, “Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far”

Some buildings have something to say. It might be a bank building saying “your money is safe in here” or a highrise saying ‘we mean business”. A house could telegraph modest comfort or shout out wealth.

Here are two buildings that tell you about different kinds of power.

Here’s the Federal office building in San Francisco.

I think it says “I’m in charge here. You are nothing.”

This is the power plant at Kennedy Airport. It glows at night and usually there’s steam coming out of the pipes.

These are buildings with clear messages. They’re like words. String buildings together on a block and you might get a sentence, in a neighborhood maybe a paragraph. And when they click it’s poetry.

Everyone knows there are invisible cities. Sure, there are the obvious one with street corners and steps and shopfronts. But then there are the spots and the patterns only some people know.

Somehow drug people know that the corner of Church St. and Market St. works well for them.

Johns know where to find hookers to their particular tastes.

Gang members know where they can safely go and where they can’t.

Cops know where they can pick off speeders.

And there are the cities that live only in memory. When I go to neighborhoods I lived in I can feel the ghosts, remember the parties.

Out my office window now I overlook where I flew off a motorcycle and broke my collarbone, about 25 years ago. Nobody would know but me.

In front of my old apartment in North Beach an old man, Peter Macchiarini, once showed me where he was standing when he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and he told me the curse he’d said. To this day when I walk by that spot I too remember Pearl Harbor and I remember Peter.

Here’s a spot with a past: A banal parking lot for a banal apartment complex in Berlin.

Underneath: the site of the bunker where Adolph Hitler hid for the last two weeks of the war before marrying Eva Braun and killing himself.

Under our feet, a world of wonders.

“Is it possible, after all, that in spite of bricks and shaven faces this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the seraphim, cannot resolve?”

Herman Melville, Pierre, 1852