Coach’s Corner: The Good, Long Fight
J.D. “Jim” Fox is Head Coach at Next Act CoachingThe artist, architect, draftsman, executive project manager, fundraiser, government lobbyist, and international celebrity Christo wrapped Berlin’s Reichstag with aluminum-surfaced polypropylene in 1995 — 24 years after initially seeking approval.Christo, along with his partner-in-all-things Jeanne-Claude, transformed New York City’s Central Park with 7503 saffron (brilliant orange) free-hanging Gates in 2005 — 26 years after initially seeking approval.
Before Jeanne-Claude passed away, they spent 13 years lobbying for permission to put a silvery, luminous fabric fence over the Arkansas River in Colorado. Christo himself gave it eight more years after she died in 2009, but then bagged it in 2017: he changed his mind when we Americans changed our leadership.Let’s shelve the obvious politics. At a recent Times Talk (a lecture/discussion series at the New York Times building), reporter Robin Pogrebin brought up a more interesting topic: since his high-profile projects often involve elaborate struggles to get approved and mammoth efforts to mount and finance, is “the fight” a part of his process? Would he just get bored otherwise?Christo – now 83, thin, tan, with an Einstein mess of white hair – just smiled sweetly and started talking about something else. Pogrebin didn’t push it; probably a smart move on her part.Intrigued, I raised the “Does he need to fight?” question with two women sitting next to me after Christo and Pogrebin left the stage. The consensus: he didn’t say so, but of course he meant so.On some level, Christo has been fighting his whole life. He escaped post-war Eastern Europe by stowing away on a West-bound train. He embraced professional and artistic controversy but developed a talent to charm and persuade along with his obvious talent to create, and the tenacity to get it done.For those who ask why his work is so ephemeral – available to the public for just days or weeks – he points to the major money it takes to keep the installations up and running. And hey, most of what you see is cloth.Learning some of his history has made me even more of a fan. I think he’s the most important visual and installation artist of our time. He and Jeanne-Claude fought and won many extended fights but — remember this, it’s critical — no one really lost those fights. Millions of people participate in his installations, boosting the local economies and government coffers wherever they appear.Coaches love role models, and he’s one of mine. I walked through and under The Gates in Central Park so many times they called me “The Gates Geek” at work, and I was completely overwhelmed when my colleagues erected the coolest professional gift ever – “Jim’s Gate” – in flowing saffron over my office door.I so wish I had gotten to Italy in 2016 when he did the Floating Piers on Lake Iseo – his first big project since his wife died (of course she was in on the 1970 original plan). I would’ve been in the company of more than one million other people who made the trek.Is he sticking with this stamina-challenging but winning formula? His current project, The London Mastaba (made of 7506 stacked and painted oil barrels) is on display in Hyde Park through September. It’s sort of a small-scale trial run for the Desert Mastaba, planned for Abu Dhabi. In the works since 1977, this mother of all Mastabas will consist of 410,000 barrels – making it the world’s largest sculpture, and about twice the size of the Pyramids (Christo showed a video at the Times Talk of his dwarfing theirs).
