Umbrella Art Unfolds as Massive Project : Environmental sculpture: Christo has 2,000 at work on his plan to place 1,760 giant yellow parasols along stretch of Interstate 5 near Gorman in October.

In Christoland, the countdown had reached Day 138.

That many days remained before the flowering at Gorman of the latest gigantic environmental sculpture by the artist Christo.

Toiling on it on a sunny Thursday not long ago were workers in offices, factories, classrooms, rice fields and on mountainsides.

They were in Tokyo, Toronto, San Diego, Ft. Worth, Bakersfield, the German city of Bayreuth, the little Japanese town of Hitachi-ota and on the Grapevine along Interstate 5.

Come October, Christo plans to adorn a 19-mile stretch there with 1,760 big yellow umbrellas. Each will be as tall as a two-story house, wider than a boxing ring, weighing in at 448 pounds. They will run single-file up mountainsides, cluster in fields and dominate small-town streets.

Simultaneously, a 12-by-1 1/2-mile area of rice paddies and villages in Japan will be ornamented with 1,340 big blue umbrellas.

On Christo’s signal, the umbrellas will be cranked open. The luminous canopies will, he hopes, create a spectacle that will burn into the memories of millions of people expected to see the three-week “exhibition.”

Some will love it. Some will belittle it. Hardly anyone in its vicinity will be able to ignore it.

Meanwhile, 2,000 people will be employed making it. Before the beauty and light come the laborers and lawyers.

Whatever its merit as art, a Christo work is a construction job. With his government permits, international suppliers and teams of engineers, Christo seems more like a condo developer than an artist in a studio.

He cheerfully proclaims as much.

At the moment a painter is mixing paint, Christo said, he is a chemist: “If it is too thick, he must add turpentine.”

“I am the same,” Christo said, “except that my chemistry is made up of landowners, politicians, engineers, workers, attorneys, fabric, steel, mountains, trees, roads, houses, bridges, rivers, wind and light.”

When seeking permission to erect his “Running Fence” in Central California in the 1970s, Christo earnestly informed one audience of hostile citizens that, like it or not, they were part of his artwork.

More than 4 million people will see the Grapevine section of “The Umbrellas,” according to Christo’s people. If they are right, that will mean twice the usual traffic on I-5 during the three weeks.

“All the umbrellas, they are bigger than my imagination,” the bespectacled Christo said, gesturing as widely as possible in the compact car in which he rode toward Bakersfield.

The front passenger seat was empty. Christo sat in back, as always. It is a rule for the 56-year-old Bulgarian-born artist, whose life has many rules. The back seat, he says, is safer.

In jeans and a plaid shirt, Christo was on his way to a factory inspection and a TV appearance planned to help recruit 900 laborers for October.

“Many times when a sculptor makes a drawing to plan a sculpture, it looks much better than the final, hard object,” he said. “But on my projects, no drawing I make can ever match the real things. The project is so much more exuberant.”

Since 1958 he has surrounded islands in Biscayne Bay off Miami with floating pink fabric. He has hung an orange curtain between two Colorado mountains. He has wrapped the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris. After disarming the opposition in California farm communities, he built his 24-mile white fabric fence from just outside Cotati to Bodega Bay.

To many art critics, all this adds up to not much.

For instance, no major Los Angeles museum has bought any of his project drawings, the only permanent aspect of his work.

Thomas Hoving, ex-director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, once said of Christo’s work: “It’s frivolous, it’s fun, it’s games, it’s hype art, it’s publicity art, it’s art for the media . . . it’s not serious art, it’s not important art.”

A few are entranced. Christo’s work “explodes the concept of art as we have for centuries known it,” Jan van der Marck, the director of the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami, said, approvingly, in a debate with Hoving.

The business community of greater Lebec seems to be unambiguous. It loves him.

“This will put Kern County on the map,” said Lana Fain of the Kern County Board of Trade. “I think it will be a big boom to the area, both in economics and notoriety.”

Christo pays for each project entirely himself, refusing grants, donations, subsidies and volunteer labor--another rule.

“The Umbrellas,” his biggest so far, will cost more than $26 million. It’s a vast sum, but this is no starving artist. Drawings by the prolific Christo fetch up to $360,000 apiece.

The money buys him artistic freedom, including the right to change his mind.

The installations were well along, but Christo remembered in the car that he had noticed a boulder near Lebec and decided that one of the umbrellas should rise from the top of it.

“It will be like a wildflower growing out of the rock!” He strained against his shoulder belt. “A wildflower in the desert!”

His wife, Jeanne-Claude Christo-Javacheff, riding next to him, shook her head. She is the major-domo of Christo’s projects--his chief administrator, art dealer, personnel director, money manager and president of their corporation. He saw a wildflower. She saw drilling costs.

“That is going to be one of our most expensive umbrellas,” she said.

“Like a wildflower,” Christo said.

In Japan, Henry David Stokes was struggling to remove the obscurity in which “The Umbrellas” seemed to be wrapped.

Stokes is project director for Christo in that country. He has spent four years working his way through the bureaucracy getting permits. He made deals with the 452 farm owners and villagers in the umbrella zone. (The Grapevine area, although larger, has only 26 landowners.)

Stokes managed to plant most of the umbrella bases before the spring flooding of rice paddies.

But the ex-Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times was not doing so well in obtaining the publicity to make “The Umbrellas” a popular success.

“The vast majority of people in Japan have never heard of this project,” he said.

True to his rule, Christo had refused an offer to appear in ads for a client of Dentsu, a big advertising agency in Japan. The client would have publicized “The Umbrellas” and helped pay for the project.

Not having Dentsu disappointed Stokes. “They are an immensely influential organization in newspapers and television here,” he said. “If they are moving on your side, everyone knows what’s going on.”

Stokes started Day 138 of the project with representatives of an influential industrialist, “just to keep him informed of what we are doing.”

His last appointment came in the evening when he met with representatives of a printing company that wanted to use Christo reproductions in a 1992 calendar.

“I had to tell them Christo does not do that either,” Stokes said.

Meanwhile, in the Ibaraki Prefecture, 75 miles north of Tokyo, a small office staff was making plans for the installation of 289 more umbrella bases.

World headquarters for “The Umbrellas” is a one-story office building in Lebec. Amid stately oak trees in the back courtyard, American construction foreman Vince Davenport and general contractor Augie Huber were testing a hand cart that Davenport had designed to transport umbrellas.

Christo does not allow his vehicles to leave established roads. Most umbrellas thus will have to be carried part way to their stands. A hand cart would ease the transport over comparatively gentle terrain.

The two men lifted an umbrella onto the cart and started rolling it around the lawn. To their delight, it worked perfectly. Davenport and Huber, both of whom moved from Kansas City for the project, were soon wheeling it about excitedly.

“Pretty neat, Vincent!” Huber yelled as he went inside to take a telephone call.

In the mountains and fields of the Grapevine, 24 workers were installing umbrella bases. Work is slower than in Japan because the terrain is much rougher. Some sites are so remote that the umbrellas will be lowered by helicopter.

On the mountainsides it is often fiercely windy and fiercely cold. Jerry Quick was bundled in several layers of work clothes as he and two others attached the 80-pound base for Umbrella No. 456 to anchors sunk in the earth.

Like all jobs on “The Umbrellas,” Quick’s is temporary. He regularly works as a substitute English teacher.

“Christo is like Coleridge, the poet,” Quick said, shouting to be heard above the wind. “He has visions, dreams.”

He gestured toward the rolling mountains. Far below, traffic moved steadily along I-5.

“Just imagine what this will look like when all those umbrellas are up here, all over these mountains. It is like he is creating his own world, like Kubla Kahn’s.”

In Bayreuth, Germany, the Blaha company was dyeing rolls of the nylon polymide that will top the umbrellas. Each roll weighed 800 pounds. “The Umbrellas” will use about 300 rolls.

In San Diego, where rolls of fabric arrive from Germany by ship, 18 workers at the North Sails company were making canopies.

“We have to get the blue done first because they have to go to Japan,” special projects manager Whitney Gladstone said.

North Sails is the world’s largest sail maker. It is where the sails were made for Dennis Conner’s 1987 America’s Cup vessel.

Even so, Christo’s order is a huge one for the company. It wanted the job so much that it made 26 prototypes before he approved one.

By Day 138 the company was 77% through the project. A wheel drew the nylon fabric from huge rolls to a table. A laser device cut the fabric into triangles. Seamstresses hemmed them and sewed them together, eight to an umbrella, 15 umbrellas on that particular day.

Two days earlier Christo and Jeanne-Claude had paid a visit.

“They made a point of meeting all the workers and talking to them a bit,” Gladstone said. “The workers really appreciated it. All the time we did the America’s Cup sails, the workers never met Dennis Conner.”

In Ft. Worth, 25 workers at the Snow Corp. were making 144 plastic boxes that are fitted around the bottoms of the umbrellas.

They not only cover the base and anchors. They will also serve as benches. Christo envisions families’ picnicking on them.

The covers are made by a process that normally produces plastic furniture.

“We are used to making products that have a function and serve a real purpose,” said Luke Snow, whose father started the business 31 years ago. “This is a product of an entirely different nature. It sort of puts the fun back into the work.”

In Bakersfield, a company called Rain for Rent assembled 27 umbrellas. Two 30-worker shifts welded, drilled, fastened, painted and tested the 390 parts sent to them by suppliers.

“We figure that in this whole project there will be 1.1 million fasteners,” said Mike Grundvig, a Rain for Rent engineer. “That’s a lot of nuts and bolts.”

At Cal State Bakersfield, Christo was sitting at a desk looking into a camera, taking call-in questions on a show being televised to campuses in the Cal State system.

Christo hoped students would get excited and sign up to work at minimum wage in the fields in the final days of preparations. They will be needed to haul the umbrellas to their bases, erect them and crank them open.

Why does he refuse gifts and donations, he was asked. He explained that he makes a good living by selling the elaborate drawings that he makes for the projects.

“It is my decision how I should spend that money,” Christo said. “I could buy diamonds for my wife or build a house in the Hamptons, a castle in France. But I take my money and put it into the making of my projects.

“This $26 million is being spent for a work of art that cannot be bought, cannot be purchased, cannot be controlled. No one can sell tickets. Because I believe possession is the enemy of freedom. The very idea at the bottom of this project is freedom.”

Later that afternoon at an outdoor reception on campus, Christo was given celebrity treatment by a crowd of about 100. TV news crews taped stand-up interviews, and people pressed forward to have their pictures taken with the artist.

Jeanne-Claude handed out postcards of his past projects, and Christo autographed them.

“I love this! I got the islands!” music student Nancy Ivey squealed, showing her post card of “Surrounded Islands” to a friend. “This is so cool. I’ll hold on to this for years, like my tickets to the Santana concert.”

Christo’s Greatest Hits “I also like the umbrella because it has inner space. It is like a house without walls, and the visitors standing underneath will feel protected and embraced by the fabric above . . . ‘ --Christo

Past Projects:

1972: Hung 200,000-square-foot orange nylon curtain across mountain gap in Colorado.

1976: Ran white nylon fence through 24 miles of Sonoma and Marin counties.

1978: Covered walkways of Kansas City park with 143,000 square feet of orange nylon.

1983: Surrounded 11 islands off Miami with pink polypropylene.

1985: Wrapped famed Pont Neuf in Paris with 440,000 square feet of fabric, right.

The Latest Work:

“The Umbrellas”

NUMBER: 3,100 umbrellas (1,760 in California, 1,340 in Japan).

HEIGHT: Each umbrella is 19 feet, 8 inches.

DIAMETER: Each is 28 feet, 6 inches.

WEIGHT: Each umbrella is 448 pounds.

COLOR: Yellow in California, blue in Japan.

PLACEMENT: Umbrellas will sit in custom-made bases, held by anchors designed to secure them to soil, rock or riverbed.

LOCATION: Mountainsides, open fields, forests, rice paddies, town streets and a churchyard.

TIMING: Umbrellas are designed to remain up for three weeks, starting in October.

COST: More than $26 million.

PEOPLE EMPLOYED TO INSTALL: 1,600.

OF NOTE: Cost is being paid by Christo; he accepts no donations, grants or subsidies.

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, “Christo: The Umbrellas,”

from the Satani Gallery of Tokyo