Wrapped Roses

Christo, 1968 · Gallery 408 · Floor 4

The roses are fake. Let's start there. Plastic flowers, wrapped in plastic, tied with plastic string. Nobody needs to change the water. Christo made this in 1968. Called it Wrapped Roses. He was pretty direct about titles. And here's what else he wanted to wrap that year. This place. The Museum of Modern Art. Seventy thousand square feet of canvas, thousands of feet of rope. Plastic over the sculpture garden. He had drawings. He had models. He was serious. The fire department wouldn't go for it. Neither would the police. The insurance people said the minute the wrapping started, the coverage stopped. Permission never came through. So the museum put his plans on display in the lobby. Called the show Christo Wraps the Museum. Ended with: Drawings for a Non-Event. Later, he and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and partner, wrapped a bridge in Paris. The Reichstag, in Berlin. Paid for it all themselves, selling his drawings. No corporate sponsor picking the color. That was the business: sell art someone could take home to make art nobody could take home. But come back to the roses. You can still tell what they are. The plastic lets you see enough. Christo said his work was very literal. He wrapped things, and they stayed recognizable. A chair was still a chair. Roses were still roses. But now there was something else to look at. Normally you take the wrapping off to get to the thing you bought. Here, you'd be undoing the thing you came to see. He made a bunch of these. They went to collectors. And the people who worked for those collectors kept unwrapping the roses. Putting them in vases. Christo thought that was funny.

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