海德公园里的大型漂浮金字塔

Christo’s Latest Work Weighs 650 Tons. And It Floats.
海德公园里的大型漂浮金字塔

LONDON — Wearing a hard hat and a cargo jacket, the artist Christo stood on a platform looking over the Serpentine lake one April morning and watched his latest creation come to life. As ducks glided across the water, men in orange jumpsuits began assembling the installation, a crane hovering above their heads.

伦敦——四月的一个早晨,艺术家克里斯托(Christo)戴着安全帽,穿着工装夹克,站在一个能俯瞰蛇形湖的平台上,看着自己的最新作品诞生。鸭子游过水面,身穿橙色连衣裤的男人们开始组装这个装置作品,起重机的吊臂在他们头顶伸展。

“The London Mastaba,” Christo’s first major outdoor work in Britain, is now floating (through Sept. 23) in the middle of the lake in Hyde Park. A trapezoidal pyramid of 7,506 painted and horizontally stacked barrels, it’s 66 feet tall — as tall as the Sphinx in Egypt — and weighs roughly 650 tons. Named after a flat-roofed structure with sloping sides that originated some 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (the word “mastaba” means “bench” in Arabic), it’s a test for a mastaba roughly eight times as high that Christo hopes to put up in the desert in Abu Dhabi.

《伦敦马斯塔巴》(The London Mastaba)是克里斯托在英国的第一个大型户外作品,现正在海德公园的湖中央漂浮(展至9月23日)。这座梯形金字塔由7506个水平堆放的彩色桶组成,高66英尺,和埃及的狮身人面像一样高,重约650吨。它的名字来源于约6000年前美索不达米亚的一座平顶斜面建筑(mastaba在阿拉伯语中的意思是“长凳”)。它是克里斯托希望在阿布扎比酋长国的沙漠中放置的一座八倍高的马斯塔巴的试验品。

This is less ambitious than past projects by the Bulgarian-born Christo, 83, and his wife Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009. These included extending a 25-mile fence across parts of Northern California, as well as wrapping fabric around a bridge in Paris, the Pont Neuf, and around Berlin’s Reichstag building.

83岁的克里斯托生于保加利亚。与他和妻子珍妮-克洛德(Jeanne-Claude,2009年去世)以前的计划相比,这个作品的规模要小一些。他们之前的计划包括穿过北加州部分地区的一道绵延25英里的篱笆,以及包裹巴黎新桥和柏林国会大厦的织物。

Installing the London sculpture has not been plain sailing, however. Christo had to fund the project himself, at a cost of 3 million pounds, or around $4 million. (Christo does this for all his projects, through artwork sales.) He then spent a year securing permits from local authorities and from the body that manages Hyde Park, and had two and a half months to get everything done.

然而,安装伦敦的这个雕塑并非一帆风顺。克里斯托要自掏腰包做这个计划,花费了300万英镑(克里斯托所有的计划都是自费,靠的是销售艺术品的收益)。然后,他花了一年时间,获得了当地政府和海德公园管理机构的许可,用两个半月的时间完成所有的工作。

“Each work of ours is like an expedition, something incredibly invigorating,” said the artist in an interview. “I love to be here with the workers. I like that process. That journey is so incredible, unforgettable.”

“我们的每一件作品都像一次探险,一种极其令人振奋的感觉,”这位艺术家在接受采访时说。“我喜欢和工人们在一起。我喜欢这个过程。那段旅程太不可思议了,难以忘怀。”

The materials for the sculpture had to be transported into the park by more than 70 trucks, which were ordered to drive at about a mile an hour because the park is full of pedestrians.

这座雕塑的材料必须由70多辆卡车运进公园。由于公园里满是行人,司机被要求以每小时约一英里的速度行驶。

Christo’s nephew Vladimir Yavachev, who oversees all of the artist’s outdoor public projects and was also on site, appeared less worried. “Christo has a lot of engineering sense,” he said. “There is a way to do it, and it’s not impossible.” He said the important thing was to “do it simply” and to “do it quickly, too: It needs to go in, be there, and then go out.”

克里斯托的侄子弗拉基米尔·亚瓦切夫(Vladimir Yavachev)负责监管克里斯托的所有户外公共计划,他也在现场。他似乎没那么担心。“克里斯托有很强的工程意识,”他说。“有实现计划的办法,不是不可能实现。”他说,最重要的是“简单地做”,“快速地做:需要进去,放在那,然后出来。”

Mr. Yavachev — who started working with his uncle in 1991, when he was tasked with carrying the site photographer’s camera bag — said they had regular arguments nowadays, but that it was “actually easier to work with your family, because you can scream at your boss.”

亚瓦切夫1991年开始和叔叔一起工作,当时他的任务是扛着现场摄影师的相机包。亚瓦切夫说,他们现在经常争执,但“和家人一起工作其实更容易,因为你可以对老板大喊大叫”。

“The London Mastaba” rests on a floating platform that’s anchored to the lake bed. This is topped with a steel scaffolding frame that the barrels are attached to. In late April, the floating cubes were only just being laid out over the lake. Two weeks later, the scaffolding frame was partially in place, and a single row of painted barrels had gone up. By early June, the installation looked nearly complete; a green crane lowered rows of barrels onto what was already a hulking mass.

《伦敦马斯塔巴》坐落在一个锚定在湖床上的漂浮平台上。平台上有一个钢制脚手架,桶被固定在上面。四月底,这些漂浮的立方体刚被布置到湖面上。两周后,脚手架框架部分就位,摆起了一排彩色的桶。到了6月初,安装工作已基本完成,一辆绿色起重机将一排排桶放上已经十分宏大的平台。

The Mastaba is part of the summer program of the Serpentine Galleries, and it’s paired with an exhibition of sculptures, drawings and collages focusing on Christo’s work with barrels and with the mastaba shape.

马斯塔巴是蛇形画廊(Serpentine Galleries)夏季计划的一部分,与它搭配的一个关于克里斯托用桶和马斯塔巴形状进行创作的雕塑、绘画和拼贴画展览。

The Serpentine’s artistic director, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, said he had approached Christo after seeing his 2016 “Floating Piers” installation on Lake Iseo, Italy, for which walkways made of fabric were laid out on the surface of the lake. “There’s always been this thought that, somehow, Christo is missing in London,” Mr. Obrist said.

蛇形画廊艺术总监汉斯-乌尔里希·奥布里斯特(Hans-Ulrich Obrist)表示,他在看到克里斯托2016年在意大利伊塞奥湖上的“漂浮栈桥”(Floating Piers)装置作品后,就开始跟他接触。在那个作品中,用织物做成的人行道铺设在湖面上。“不知为何,一直有这样一种感觉:伦敦缺了克里斯托,”奥布里斯特说。

Discussions started, and Christo came to London. On a walk through Hyde Park, he “pointed at the very site where the sculpture is going to be,” Mr. Obrist said, recalling the artist’s determination to put up a floating mastaba, “a form that has obsessed him for a long time.”

讨论开始了,克里斯托来到伦敦。奥布里斯特说,在海德公园散步时,克里斯托“指着这个雕塑即将出现的地方”,回忆起自己想要建造一个漂浮的马斯塔巴的决心,“马斯塔巴的形状在他心头萦绕了很长时间”。

Christo denied that his pharaonic projects were signs of an oversized ego. “There’s a lot of humor there,” he said. “They’re bombastic, they’re very simple,” and “not something intimidating.”

克里斯托否认自己的法老计划是过于自负的表现。“这里面有很多幽默,”他说。“它们很浮夸,很简单”,“不是什么令人胆怯的东西”。

Making them happen, however, was a high-stakes exercise, he recalled.

不过,他回忆说,实现这些计划的过程充满风险。

“Running Fence” — which was up for two weeks in 1976, and stood on the private properties of 59 California ranchers — required 42 months of discussions, 18 public hearings, and three sessions of the Superior Courts of California. It involved more than 2 million square feet of nylon fabric suspended from a steel cable.

1976年,《奔跑的篱笆》(Running Fence)在加州59位农场主的私人土地上竖立了两个星期。为了这个计划进行了42个月的讨论,举行了18次公开听证会,加州高等法院三次开庭。它需要把200多万平方英尺的尼龙织物悬挂在钢缆上。

Some residents resented the fence, so Christo’s machinery was destroyed, and there were bomb threats against the installation. “We had to have an airplane flying” to prevent damage, he recalled.

一些居民很反感那个篱笆,他们毁掉了克里斯托的机器,还威胁要炸掉装置。他回忆说,“我们不得不用飞机 ”,以防装置遭到破坏。

The wrapping of the Pont Neuf nearly fell through when the mayor of Paris tried to revoke a permit he had granted for it. The Reichstag project involved prior testing at a castle and an airplane hangar, bodyguards for Christo because of the death threats against him, and a parliamentary vote introduced by the project’s chief adversary: German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

当巴黎市长试图撤销克里斯托已获得的许可时,他包裹新桥的计划差点落空。德国国会的计划先在城堡和飞机库里进行了测试。由于对克里斯托的死亡威胁,他还请了保镖。该计划的主要的反对者德国总理赫尔穆特·科尔(Helmut Kohl)还提出了进行国会投票。

“The London Mastaba” faced no such obstacles, and Christo’s team said the installation went through smoothly.

《伦敦马斯塔巴》没有遇到这样的障碍,克里斯托的团队表示,安装进行得很顺利。

Now the next big thing for Christo is the desert “Mastaba.” He has no idea whether it will materialize, he said, “But we are advancing.”

现在,克里斯托的下一个大计划是沙漠“马斯塔巴”。他表示,他不确定能否实现,“但我们正在推进”。

“I am like a chess player,” he added.

“我就像一个棋手,”他还说。

“I hope to live to when the project has happened,” Christo said. “This is the most important thing.”

“我希望自己能活到那个计划建好之时,” 克里斯托说,“这是最重要的。”

来源:纽约时报

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