The Running Fence installation art project blurred the traditional line between what is art and what is not. Additionally, it ended up blurring the line that let us identify the piece’s artist. At the outset of the film, I thought that Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude would be considered the artists, and their 27-mile nylon fence; the artwork. . I did not think that the fence would look like art, and I didn’t really consider their project to be art, in the classic sense of the word. As the documentary progressed, however, I came to agree with Christo in thinking that that the artistic elements of the project were everything that went into the fence’s construction. The town hall meetings, the arguments, the agreements, the labor, the teamwork, all of those elements were, in fact, a beautiful work of art in and of themselves. In the end, the fence itself also turned out to look magnificent as it curved up and around the California countryside. In a sense, then, the Running Fence project was art from start to finish.
While Christo and Jeanne-Claude came up with the idea for this piece and were important in the pieces construction, the true artists of this piece were the people who either gave Christo support or the ones who opposed him. The battle between the pro-fence people and the no-fence people proved to be one of the most interesting aspects of this whole project. Here we have Christo, out in the middle of nowhere, building this incredibly long fence while there is all the back and forth bickering going on. It made the end product that much more impressive.
