LeBaron: Christo's death revives memories of 1976 and the North Bay's 'Running Fence'
The death of the artist Christo in his New York City loft last Sunday was a personal loss for many of us who are old enough to remember the magic of his Running Fence.
Christo and his wife and partner in art, Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, are lauded by the world’s art community as innovators of a new style of environmental art and praised by critics like the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins for their bold ventures that were “grandiose, ephemeral” and “absurdly beautiful.”
Tomkins’ description certainly fits the project that brought them to us in the mid-1970s, promising to hang a 24-mile “curtain” that would follow the curves and dips of the western Sonoma and Marin ranch landscape to skinny-dip into the Pacific Ocean.
And that is what they did. And we all watched and wondered through some 20 months of meetings, permit applications, denials, appeals and bureaucratic gymnastics never seen in these parts before.
There are many versions of the Running Fence story. Every one of the thousands who saw it has a story. Some can be found, digitized, in special collections of the Schulz Library at Sonoma State. Here’s one, written at the 10th anniversary of the event.
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ON SEPT. 7, 1976, the Running Fence unfurled across 1,000 yards of rocky shoreline and disappeared into the Pacific Ocean, a shining white ribbon of light reflecting the rays of the sun. It was also an illegal act.
It had begun its journey on a hill above the freeway in Cotati and headed west, changing color with the sunsets, rippling with the winds, placing exclamation points for emphasis on the golden hills of western Sonoma and Marin counties.
The 20 months preceding had been a local reporter’s dream come true. The Christo story was ideal — no blood spilling, no lives ruined, just good clean governmental acrimony.
The ’60s liberals, who were supposed to be the intellectual leaders and understand all that conceptual stuff, lined up vehemently against Christo’s project while the conservative West County ranchers joined with New York gallery owners, museum curators and art professors in support.
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OH, THE WONDER of it all,” wrote The Press Democrat’s Petaluma reporter Bob Wells in January of ’74 when Christo and Jeanne-Claude called a press conference at the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds to announce the plans.
Then, for a year we familiarized ourselves with this man Christo, who had wrapped a beach in Australia with synthetic fiber and hung an orange curtain across Rifle Gap in Colorado.
“It’s just an art project,” he deprecatingly told a Petaluma meeting of ranchers whose land would be crossed by Running Fence.
But they didn’t believe that, even then. And Dr. Peter Selz, an art professor at UC Berkeley, didn’t either. He called it “the greatest aesthetic engineering experience since the Great Wall of China.”
The economics of the project, Christo told us, were “irrelevant to the art” but the legal and political machinations that lay ahead (even he could not have known how many there would be) were “part of the art process,” he said.
In January of 1975, Running Fence got its first public hearing before the Marin County Planning Commission — and lost. The commissioners voted 3-3 to disallow a permit for the 4 miles of Marin County the Fence would traverse. The tie vote constituted a denial. The circus had begun.
