海德公園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.

倫敦——四月的一個早晨，藝術家克里斯托(Christo)戴著安全帽，穿著工裝夾克，站在一個能俯瞰蛇形湖的平臺上，看著自己的最新作品誕生。鴨子游過水面，身穿橙色連衣褲的男人們開始組裝這個裝置作品，起重機的吊臂在他們頭頂伸展。

“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.

《倫敦馬斯塔巴》(The London Mastaba)是克里斯托在英國的第一個大型戶外作品，現(xiàn)正在海德公園的湖中央漂浮(展至9月23日)。這座梯形金字塔由7506個水平堆放的彩色桶組成，高66英尺，和埃及的獅身人面像一樣高，重約650噸。它的名字來源于約6000年前美索不達米亞的一座平頂斜面建筑(mastaba在阿拉伯語中的意思是“長凳”)。它是克里斯托希望在阿布扎比酋長國的沙漠中放置的一座八倍高的馬斯塔巴的試驗品。

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歲的克里斯托生于保加利亞。與他和妻子珍妮-克洛德(Jeanne-Claude，2009年去世)以前的計劃相比，這個作品的規(guī)模要小一些。他們之前的計劃包括穿過北加州部分地區(qū)的一道綿延25英里的籬笆，以及包裹巴黎新橋和柏林國會大廈的織物。

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，安裝倫敦的這個雕塑并非一帆風順?？死锼雇幸蕴脱鲞@個計劃，花費了300萬英鎊(克里斯托所有的計劃都是自費，靠的是銷售藝術品的收益)。然后，他花了一年時間，獲得了當?shù)卣秃５鹿珗@管理機構的許可，用兩個半月的時間完成所有的工作。

“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.”

“我們的每一件作品都像一次探險，一種極其令人振奮的感覺，”這位藝術家在接受采訪時說。“我喜歡和工人們在一起。我喜歡這個過程。那段旅程太不可思議了，難以忘懷。”

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.

這座雕塑的材料必須由70多輛卡車運進公園。由于公園里滿是行人，司機被要求以每小時約一英里的速度行駛。

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爾·亞瓦切夫(Vladimir Yavachev)負責監(jiān)管克里斯托的所有戶外公共計劃，他也在現(xiàn)場。他似乎沒那么擔心。“克里斯托有很強的工程意識，”他說。“有實現(xiàn)計劃的辦法，不是不可能實現(xiàn)。”他說，最重要的是“簡單地做”，“快速地做：需要進去，放在那，然后出來。”

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.”

亞瓦切夫1991年開始和叔叔一起工作，當時他的任務是扛著現(xiàn)場攝影師的相機包。亞瓦切夫說，他們現(xiàn)在經(jīng)常爭執(zhí)，但“和家人一起工作其實更容易，因為你可以對老板大喊大叫”。

“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.

《倫敦馬斯塔巴》坐落在一個錨定在湖床上的漂浮平臺上。平臺上有一個鋼制腳手架，桶被固定在上面。四月底，這些漂浮的立方體剛被布置到湖面上。兩周后，腳手架框架部分就位，擺起了一排彩色的桶。到了6月初，安裝工作已基本完成，一輛綠色起重機將一排排桶放上已經(jīng)十分宏大的平臺。

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.

馬斯塔巴是蛇形畫廊(Serpentine Galleries)夏季計劃的一部分，與它搭配的一個關于克里斯托用桶和馬斯塔巴形狀進行創(chuàng)作的雕塑、繪畫和拼貼畫展覽。

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.

蛇形畫廊藝術總監(jiān)漢斯-烏爾里希·奧布里斯特(Hans-Ulrich Obrist)表示，他在看到克里斯托2016年在意大利伊塞奧湖上的“漂浮棧橋”(Floating Piers)裝置作品后，就開始跟他接觸。在那個作品中，用織物做成的人行道鋪設在湖面上。“不知為何，一直有這樣一種感覺：倫敦缺了克里斯托，”奧布里斯特說。

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.”

討論開始了，克里斯托來到倫敦。奧布里斯特說，在海德公園散步時，克里斯托“指著這個雕塑即將出現(xiàn)的地方”，回憶起自己想要建造一個漂浮的馬斯塔巴的決心，“馬斯塔巴的形狀在他心頭縈繞了很長時間”。

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.”

克里斯托否認自己的法老計劃是過于自負的表現(xiàn)。“這里面有很多幽默，”他說。“它們很浮夸，很簡單”，“不是什么令人膽怯的東西”。

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

不過，他回憶說，實現(xiàn)這些計劃的過程充滿風險。

“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，《奔跑的籬笆》(Running Fence)在加州59位農(nóng)場主的私人土地上豎立了兩個星期。為了這個計劃進行了42個月的討論，舉行了18次公開聽證會，加州高等法院三次開庭。它需要把200多萬平方英尺的尼龍織物懸掛在鋼纜上。

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.

一些居民很反感那個籬笆，他們毀掉了克里斯托的機器，還威脅要炸掉裝置。他回憶說，“我們不得不用飛機 ”，以防裝置遭到破壞。

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.

當巴黎市長試圖撤銷克里斯托已獲得的許可時，他包裹新橋的計劃差點落空。德國國會的計劃先在城堡和飛機庫里進行了測試。由于對克里斯托的死亡威脅，他還請了保鏢。該計劃的主要的反對者德國總理赫爾穆特·科爾(Helmut Kohl)還提出了進行國會投票。

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

《倫敦馬斯塔巴》沒有遇到這樣的障礙，克里斯托的團隊表示，安裝進行得很順利。

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.”

現(xiàn)在，克里斯托的下一個大計劃是沙漠“馬斯塔巴”。他表示，他不確定能否實現(xiàn)，“但我們正在推進”。

“I am like a chess player,” he added.

“我就像一個棋手，”他還說。

“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個計劃建好之時，”克里斯托說，“這是最重要的。”