ABSTRACT
The socialist Greater London Council having apparently resigned itself to its promised abolition by the Thatcher government on April Fools’ Day 1986, it was being rumoured in London’s alternative press in October of 1985 that the GLCs leader, Ken Livingstone, was planning to balance his council’s books by spending what remained in its kitty on a Christmas present for Margaret Thatcher. The rumour had it that County Hall (soon to be vacant) was to be giftwrapped at a cost of several million pounds by the expatriate Bulgarian artist Christo Javacheff and presented to Thatcher in a parodic gesture of political compliance. If Terry Eagleton is right in suggesting that ‘what is parodied by postmodernist culture, with its dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity production, is nothing less than the revolutionary art of the twentiethcentury avant-garde’1-an avant-garde which spurned the notion of aesthetic ‘representation’ for an art which would be a direct, material intervention in social praxis-then such a gesture on the GLC’s part would have amounted to politics parodying postmodernism’s parody of a political art. (The rumour, of course, proved apocryphal; the council threw a quarter-of-a-million-pound farewell party for itself instead, and Livingstone embarked on the career of a parliamentarian.)
Meanwhile, in Paris (one of the incubators of what Peter Bürger has termed the ‘historical avant-garde’2), Christo himself had just added another package to an œuvre which, spanning some twenty-seven years, had begun modestly with projects like Wrapping a Girl (London, 1962) and progressed to such bolder and bigger parcels as Packed Medieval Tower (Spoleto, 1968), Packed Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, 1969), Wrapped Coast (Sydney, 1969) and Surrounded Islands (Greater Miami, 1980-3). Completed on 23 September 1985, after a decade of planning, the new work was Le Pont-Neuf Empaqueté. For fourteen days the double span of France’s most photographed bridge stood wrapped with 75 miles of rope and 444,000 square feet of sewn-to-measure nylon fabric whose sandstone tones reflected those of the weather-washed
façades of the Ile de la Cité buildings and concealed the smog-blackened surfaces of the bridge without obstructing the flow of commuter and tourist traffic either over or under its upholstered arches. Handbills distributed to pedestrians by the artist’s uniformed assistants explained of this latest empaquetage:
Le choix d’empaqueter le Pont-Neuf est né il y a dix ans, de ses références historiques, urbaines et artistiques exceptionelles et de sa situation privilégiée qui réunit la rive droite, la rive gauche et l’Île de la Cité, cœur de Paris depuis plus de deux mille ans. La construction du pont a débuté en 1587 sous Henri III et a été terminée sous Henri IV en 1606.
