"Running Fence" and Meditations on the Beauty of Art

In a very general sense, I'm a sucker for unusual things and things with very obvious order. So when presented with Christo and Jeanne-Claude's outdoor installation art piece Running Fence, my interest is already piqued. It was a twenty-four and a half mile long fence, 18 feet high, composed primarily of steel poles and cables which held up 2,050 incredibly large sheets of white nylon along its length as it crossed the prairied hills of two Northern California counties, ending in the Pacific Ocean. Unusual? Very. Obvious order? Yes. Check and check; I already like it on a base instinctual level, but there's so much more to it.

Running Fence was big. Really big. It was so big, that the only way to experience the full breadth of it (from some top-down cartographic image) would have, ironically, not even allowed someone to really get a feel for what the actual piece of art was. The fact that in order for one to view the art as it was intended to be viewed required them to physically be in the presence of the fence is so cool. It's the type of large scale project that can make a person feel miniscule and overwhelmed when they're near it, but it's small enough to be examined in its entirety given an adequate amount of time and a person's patience and endurance.

But the piece was only extant for 14 days; and then it was gone. So really, would the average artsy person even have enough time to walk along those 24.5 miles, taking note of each steel pole, every corner of white nylon sheet, the way every panel of fence is identical to the last and yet somehow different too? Unlikely. With a piece like this, looking too hard into the details seems pointless at best and frustrating at the worst.

It is what is---a giant fence of white sheets running along some hills and into the ocean. I can appreciate it for its intrinsic novelty and its strong patternistic qualities. I imagine other people can appreciate Running Fence for other reasons and feelings of their own; and just the same, I'm sure plenty of others don't care for it all. But it's the simple fact that it doesn't try to be something bigger than or deeper than what it is in the most basic sense that really excites me.

Seeing the Maysles Brothers' documentary of the preparation, construction, and completion of Running Fences is cool, not only because is shows the piece in video form, but especially because it shows the social reactions to the fence (even before it's begun construction). It's so interesting how things, specifically art in this case, make people feel, and how those feelings can be so strong or weak and so contrasting or consonant with each other. And all the while, the piece of art is completely impartial. It simply is (or isn't, in the case of Running Fences) and people react to it. That's where the real beauty of art lies, in various people's thoughts about it,and in their subsequent expressions of said thoughts, and in the mingling of those differing expressions. Art can only be something if people let it be.