Meeting the Midas of Muck

Ten years ago I was in Essen to see Ute Eskilden's ground-breaking exhibition on German women photographers of the 1920's at the Folkwang Museum. I had known the work of three of those artists--she had amassed 53! I was in such a state of euphoria from these epiphanies that I reacted to a small newspaper ad for an inaugural exhibition in nearby Oberhausen--in a gasometer.

It was called "Fire and Flame" and turned out to be a brilliant visual history of the industrialization of the Ruhr Valley. I have since told anyone who would listen when I leafed with them through the catalog,"Das Feuer und die Flamme", that it was the most original and illuminating exhibition I had ever seen in fifty years of museum hooverings. At the time I didn't know it was part of a decade long effort to save the Ruhr Valley from its past mistakes.

Today I returned to the largest gasometer in Europe to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude inaugurate "The Wall", 13,000 oil barrels painted yellow, red, blue, and other assorted lesser shades, astride the interior which had been garnished as well with two complementary exhibitions on the history and evolution of their shows covering the Reichstag and their umbrella deployments in Japan and California.

I use the term deployment advisedly because what I learned from their mini-museum in the Oberhausen gasometer was that their projects are really 5% art and 95% logistics. The young woman who has run their shop since the Reichstag show (characteristically they fund their expensive performances by selling Christo's drawings) explained that this superficially Odd Couple are actually a perfect match--she confesses she can't draw at all, even though they met in art school in Paris in 1958, and he concedes that he can't keep track of anything. Together, they have worked their quirky temporary miracles, time after time. He muses; she manages.

This go is unique in that for the first time they have a "sponsor" picking up the multi-million dollar tab--the IBA, a consortium of Ruhr Valley institutions and individuals who for ten years have been "saving" the relics of deindustrialization by finding new uses for old buildings--the gasometer is merely the biggest and most unusual.

But listen to the guru of the Ruhr, 62-year-old Karl Ganser, a scientist from Munich with an ecological vision: "The aim of the IBA, held in one of the oldest and most important industrial regions of Europe, is to preserve such disused production facilities as a testimony to the technology of industrial architecture. And to give them a new function. Unlike previous IBAs this exhibition does not focus on architecture and town planning, but tackles a much broader programme--no less than the cultural, ecological, social and economic restructuring of an entire region. The scope of the IBA includes over 100 projects in 17 towns and many companies in the area between Duisburg and Dortmund. Not only industrial buildings are included in the programme, but also a 70-kilometers long stretch of industrial wasteland, 300 square kilometers in area,which was redesigned in accordance with ecological and aesthetic criteria. A basic principle at the heart of the philosophy behind the IBA is the realization that long-term economic viability must go hand-in-hand with a responsible approach to the environment." (The Wall, Gasometer, Oberhausen 1999, 13,000 Oil Barrels, Photos Wolfgange Volz, Taschen Verlag, Hohenzollernring 53, D-50672 Koeln, p. 6).

Thus speaketh the Midas of Muck. For six hours yesterday, two bus loads of cynical, seen-everything journalists were driven to several of those 100 projects--and their astonishments were palpable.

A fan of the Odd Couple since 1976 when, teaching in Northern California, I watched their "Running Fence" drift lazily across Sonoma and Marin counties in an almost 40 mile march to the Pacific, I was eager to watch them "at work". Part of their process in an enthusiastic interaction with their "customers". They both risked terminal index finger cramp autographing color photos and catalogs for the media mob. And they happily led fleets of TV cameras around the show, giving nutritious sound bites about their aims and accomplishments.

When I asked Jeanne-Claude which of their projects were their favorites, she tartly replied:"A mother and a father can't play favorites with their children; they love them all equally;" and after a well-timed pause, worthy of a Jack Benny she added,"but I can tell you which project we find most interesting--our next one."

"The Wall" fits Karl Ganser's program beautifully: Oil is a powerful metaphor for the ambivalent results of industrialization, especially after the Oil Crisis of the 1970's. But Christo had been interested in oil barrel imagery as far back as l958 when he barricaded a Paris street with a stack of them, and in 1961 he directed a larger deployment in Cologne Harbor. So when the IBA called, he was willing and able.

Not all of the IBA aesthetic choices appeal to my increasingly derriere-garde sensibility. The humungous Richard Serra monolith on a mountain of slag merely adds to my sense of industrial desolation--made preposterously pretentious by its unflattering and unintended juxtaposition with a brilliant red bridge left over from a great flower exposition at the foot of the mountain.

And Dan Flavin's dinky neon fritterings in a former power station look simply silly in their shticky decoration of the huge, splendidly sculptural transformers. German culture is increasingly and uncritically obeisant to American arty hip hop.It's a strange outcome of their defeat in World War II, I think. They'll get over it, as they regain self-confidence without the old Prussian arrogance. But this is just gratuitous nitpicking on my part.

I recently took my German girl friend on an Easter visit to Philadelphia, where I live when I'm not in Weimar. My house is in the Far Northeast, the last part of the city to be developed, mainly since World War II. To get to Center City where all the tourist teases are, you take the Frankford El--through some of the most depressing deindustrialized parts of a city that peaked in population in 1950 (2 millions, now down to 1.5, but with a Metro population of 4.5 millions, since the educated and affluent have moved to the suburbs).

Unlike the Midas of Muck, our City Fathers have concentrated on reviving the Center where the suburban affluent work and sometimes have the courage to play. For the deindustrialized sectors in North and West Philly, their effective mandate has been to let it rot. Now my German friend is an Ossie, from Halle (Saale), so she knows desolation: the former DDR is still afflicted with the heritage of Russian looting and lassitude about keeping things up. But even with such "preparation" she was dumbstruck. My reaction to the Midas of Muck's domain is that I never really had access to images of such alternatives before. The IBA's decade of renewing the Ruhr has proven to me that there are viable options for evading the desolation of deindustrialization.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are by no means raving ideologues. But with wit and irony they too show ways out of the wasteland. "The Wall" is a delightful testament to the Faulknerian hope that mankind will not only endure but possibly prevail as well.

You have until October to sample this glorious caper. (As Oberhausen's fire chief confided to me at the vernissage, after that it becomes impossible to heat the huge interior of the gasometer.) A stunning complementary exhibition at the Schloss Oberhausen is the proper way to prepare yourself for "The Wall".

Take the 122 bus from Platform C outside the Main Train Station. (I stayed overnight at the Ibis Hotel in Dusseldorf's Main Train Station. It's 130 DM--cheaper (79 DM ) weekends, and a twenty-five minute train ride to Oberhausen.) The Gasometer is a delicious leafy ten minute saunter from the Schloss.

The cheapest way to get there from London is VLM from London City Airport to Moenchengladbach (290.54 DM return). Take the #10 bus to the Main Train Station, a free sixteen-minute ride with a plane ticket. There the S-Bahn leaves for Dusseldorf twice an hour, for a thirty-minute ride to the Hauptbahnhof. You save money if you buy a ticket straight through to Oberhausen.