Via Middle East Online -
SAINT-PAUL - In a break with their usual temporary installations, the artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude on Saturday unveiled a plan to build a giant pyramid of oil barrels in the desert of the United Arab Emirates.
"The Emirates is very keen to see this project realized," Christo said at a presentation of models and drawings for the 150-metre (500-foot) monument, roughly two thirds of the height of the Eiffel Tower.
The idea for the pyramid, with a flat summit, made up of 390,500 oil barrels piled up horizontally, dates back to the 1960s, the artists said. Two earlier attempts to erect it in Texas and the Netherlands came to nothing before the couple decided to turn to the UAE.
But then the Iran-Iraq war put the project on hold. It was only revived two and a half years ago.
The so-called Mastaba project takes its name and shape from the rectangular funerary constructions of Ancient Egypt. The exact location for the pyramid, which will be entirely in yellow-orange shades, has yet to be finalised but it will definitely be somewhere in the desert in the UAE, they said.
The project is a far cry from the ephemeral artworks for which the couple are best known, like wrapping the Berlin Reichstag and the Pont-Neuf in Paris: "According to engineers, the Mastaba could last for 5,000 years."
A change of philosophy? Christo's more pragmatic response is that "Arab states are less susceptible to provisional works and change."
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Mastaba comes from the Arabic for bench, because when seen from a distance it looks like a mud bench. Mastabas are considered the forerunners of Pyramids and were the standard tomb type in early Egypt.
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