But Is It Art?

Cindy rigged up these shade cloth panels to give the newly transplanted tomato plants and the Swiss Chard some relief from the sun and the heat we've been experiencing for most of the last week.

Shade Cloth Around the Tomatoes

She was afraid the 90 degree heat and the hot, dry Santa Ana winds would be too much for the plants at this stage in their development, so she draped this cloth to protect them.

This stretch of fabric reminded me of an installation done by Christo in Marin County in the 1970s called Running Fence, which was a huge fabric fence consisting of 2,050 fabric panels 18 feet high that covered about 24 miles of land, running over the rolling hills in western Marin County.

The Running Fence was a temporary installation that was long gone when I moved to Marin County; it was never intended to be permanent and had no practical purpose whatsoever.  The project required over 2 million square feet of woven nylon fabric and a 450 page environmental impact report.

I heard from people who had lived there at the time that, although there was considerable opposition to the project initially, when it was completed they found it to be strangely beautiful.