Wrapping the Reichstag.

Like a bulky long-distance parcel wrapped to withstand rough handling en route, the Reichstag sat in its open field as though Christo had just pushed it out of the door of a passing shuttle. Did the Reichstag still exist or would David Copperfield remove the drapes to reveal thin air? As the breeze buffeted the material folds between the ropes the hidden form appeared to breath, sigh and fidget under its constraints. Light effects on an overcast day made the spiky, wrapped Reichstag look in reality as unreal as Christo's graphite drawings before the event. This silver apparition, sometimes white or grey depending on weather, a brief transformation of Paul Wallot's otherwise undistinguished 1894 building, proved that Andy Warhol's prophesy of 15 minutes' fame holds for buildings as well as people.

The action, between June 17 and July 10, was accompanied by an avalanche of facts: 120 assembly workers and 90 mountaineers in two teams worked in four-hour shifts for six days. They planned to secure the last rope on June 23 - the Reichstag remained wrapped, like a huge reunification girl, until July 6. 100 000[m.sup.2] of polypropylene material, weighing 61 500kg, was woven in Westphalia and aluminium-coated in Baden-Baden; 15 600m of blue polypropylene rope made in Bremen was used, removed and recycled. The hanging folds were modelled on a test rig in Konstanz and anchored with 1000 000kg of weights. The steel armature, to protect pediments and statues, came from Chemnitz. Inflammability, safety and structural integrity were tested with German thoroughness. From the moment a convoy of lorries rolled through Berlin to deliver the materials to site, state security and art worked hand in hand. It cost an astonishing total of DM 12 million, financed purely from the sale of Christo's art works.

German news broadcasts became Christo reports. Television used the event to document the building's history, and showed archive film of Christo over 24 years, growing older, trying to convince successive Bonn politicians, many of whom did not live to witness the wrapping. The most repeated questions were; Is it art? What is art? Christo and Jeanne-Claude quoted Groucho Marx: 'Art is the shortened version of Arthur.' It was a boost for Berlin beer and sausage stands, a marketing circus, a media event, a source of employment. Advertisers used the wrap motif to sell beer and cigarettes. It was a free spectacle open 24 hours a day for only two weeks, as Christo said, '... in opposition to everything that can be reproduced because it is not permanent and cannot be bought'. In the name of artistic freedom and independence Christo's Reichstag wrapping company policed copyright infringement, street hawkers and press access. When asked: 'Why do it?' Christo replied: 'because we want to see it. We don't know what the Germans will think because we are not German.' What did it add to know that it had taken Christo and Jeanne-Claude 24 years to obtain permission for their idea? A German comedian's comment was to produce a quick doodle and say it had taken him 40 years. Christo's opinion that art 'is what an artist does' is his life; single-minded, hectic activism, political debates, dealing with bureaucratic processes, organising and detailing the product. A concept art of which he is the last successful exponent. While in the '60s to wrap a telephone, still ringing but inaccessible, as an expression of the conflict between life and art was enlightening and magical, the Reichstag wrapping only reached Olympic proportions of organisation and distance. Since his early employment in Bulgaria, painting facades along the travel routes of foreign dignitaries, Christo has continually been engaged in Potemkin illusions. Is an object more present when, all of a sudden, it disappears? Is what you see more important than the truth?

Jeanne-Claude commented in 1971 that it would be just as interesting to achieve permission, from the then West German government, as to actually wrap the building. During his first exploratory visit to the Reichstag in 1976, when asked why he wanted to wrap this particular West Berlin monument in preference to any other, Christo replied that it had both a political and metaphysical meaning for him. At school he had learnt how Dimitroff, later to be Bulgaria's minister president, was falsely accused of the 1933 Reichstag fire.

As national symbol the Reichstag has been much used and abused. When Michael Cullen, the American photographer, first suggested the Reichstag to Christo as a suitable case for wrapping, in August 1971, the West German government sat in Bonn and West Berlin was a subsidised satellite shop window, not even constitutionally part of West Germany, sticking its tongue out to the east. The Reichstag, right up against the Berlin Wall was an embarrassment, a reminder of the failure of the Weimar Republic; Hitler's trumped-up arson charge against the communists; the reign of National Socialism; and defeat by the Allies, particularly the Soviets who planted their flag on its bombed roof in 1945. Restored for the second time in its history, the building limped on after the war as tourist attraction and museum with pedagogical German history exhibitions, and assembly rooms used annually for a symbolic West German parliamentary meeting. The dedication in stone over the pediment, Dem Deutschen Volke (for the German people) must have seemed bitter irony. Any thought of ennobling it as an art object would have been thought of as bad taste for a young democracy taking great pains to learn new ways.

A wrapping before 1989 would have been provocative, an opening of still festering wounds. Now that cold war enmity has been replaced by an economic struggle, between regions of a united country, it serves as wallpaper over the cracks in German unity. If 1989 had not happened it is doubtful whether government permission for the wrapping, gained after a Bundestag debate in February 1994, would ever have been given, but in its wake Christo's initial concept lost its sting. At the very moment Berlin's Tourism Marketing company hailed the project as a sign of the city's 'tolerance and cosmopolitan' nature, and used it as an advertising vehicle for self-congratulatory backslapping, should it not have been abandoned? Still bearing pock-marked wounds from shell firing and Cyrillic graffiti left by Soviet soldiers, the Reichstag has come in from the cold, been symbolically blessed by an American Bulgarian artist and is to be sanitised by an English architect.