When, and if, it is built The Mastaba (Project for Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) be Christo and Jeanne-Claude's only permanent, large-scale public artwork and the largest permanent work of art in the world. At the anticipated 300 meters long, 225 meters wide and 150 meters high it is 3.3 meters higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza and made from 410,000 multi-coloured barrels to form a colourful mosaic, echoing Islamic architecture.

While they were alive Christo & Jean-Claude made a point of emphasizing, if not belabouring, their “longstanding friendship with the people of Abu Dhabi” and often cast the project in abstract, utopian, apolitical tones emphasising how the barrels, as found objects, have been pervasive in their practice and the ‘Mastaba’ is perhaps one of the oldest geometrical building forms in humanity dating back to Mesopotamia.

However. It is inescapable that this specific work was first conceived by Christo & Jeanne-Claude in 1977. This is just four years after the 1973 oil crisis or ‘first oil crisis ‘ when the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Saudi Arabia, proclaimed an oil embargo in reaction to the Yom Kippur War. The United Arab Emirates had only become an independent entity six years earlier 2 December 1971.

The 1970s energy crisis that rippled through the Western world, particularly the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, which faced substantial petroleum shortages as well as elevated prices due to the ’73 embargo and the subsequent supply disruption caused by 1979 Iranian revolution. In fact the 1970s was the high-water moment for oil. The World oil production per capita began a long-term decline after 1979 and the crisis has been seen to precipitate the first meaningful shifts shift towards energy-saving (particular, fossil fuel-saving) technologies in the 20th century.

At first blush the work is obviously Brobdingnagian verging on the absurd. Christo, in particular, in his later interviews was unabashed in emphasising it’s status as the biggest sculpture in the world – the net volume of the 410,000 barrels alone would be around 65,184,790.9 litres.

However absurd this proposal might seem perhaps it needs to be squared against the primary use of standard barrels. An August 30, 1976 report by the New York Times, “... Or 1977 Oil Crisis”, noted that OPEC production in 1976 was roughly an average of 29.3 million barrels a day. Forty-six years and one global climate emergency later in 2020 the world produced 76,124,800 barrels of oil per day. OPEC’s average daily production was 30.6 million barrels. The United Arab Emirates, produced an average of 3,138,249 barrels of oil per day. Worldwide oil consumption in 2020 was an average of 88.5 million barrels per day.

Christo & Jean Claude’s proposed sculpture. Which is the biggest sculpture ever made. Taller than the great pyramid of Giza will only use 0.46% the number of barrels we consume in oil every day. Let us not forget that Oil is a fossil fuel. It energy is generated by breaking the ground, excavating, dreding and incinerating ancient fossilized organic materials, such as zooplankton and algae.

What is the more absurd gesture?

- Proposing 65,184,790.9 litres of empty barrels be piled in the middle of the desert.

- Incinerating 14,070,375,601 litres worth of fossils every day to fuel something we call an ‘economy’ without a hint of irony

Put in those terms, The Mastaba seems a fitting monolith for a bygone civilisation whose idea of innovation was cremating the remains millions of years of worth of life just so we might accelerate for a few.