Water, Water Everywhere: Olafur Eliasson & the East River

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The New York Sun

The most ambitious Public Art Fund project in the city’s history, “The New York City Waterfalls,” which opens today, places a dramatic frame around a stretch of historic waterway that we may never experience the same way again.

In 2005, the last citywide public art project of comparable scope, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates,” in Central Park, worked by reorienting park visitors to Olmsted and Vaux’s pedestrian pathways. You could call it a radical artistic gesture in the service of a conservative aesthetic goal — making people see the perspectives the park’s designers painstakingly created, and that simply don’t exist for casual park users who insist on jaunting across lawns or through brush. The Danish conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson’s “New York City Waterfalls” similarly outline for us the historic pathways along which — and as a result of which — this city grew.

The “Waterfalls” are a series of big abstract fountains or “waterwalls.” The latter is a term sometimes used to describe the cascading water features in such places as Greenacre Park (on 51st Street, between Second and Third avenues) and the atrium of Trump Tower (Fifth Avenue at 56th Street). New York, in general, has done less than it might have with water features in public art. We notably lack an abundance of great fountains. (Though that is not to say we don’t have a few good ones, such as the Bethesda Fountain, in Central Park, and the Pulitzer Fountain, in front of the Plaza Hotel.) The 1961 changes to the city’s zoning code, encouraging plazas and atria, conspired with a Modernist aesthetic of public art to give us the waterwall, in part as a belated attempt to make up for our paucity of aqueous art, and in part to soften the edges of the Modernist aesthetic itself. Thus, to sit in Greenacre Park, or in Trump Tower, or in Olympic Tower (Fifth Avenue at 51st Street), or in Paley Park (53rd Street, between Fifth and Madison avenues), is, regardless of any aesthetic infelicities, an enjoyable experience: Cascading water possesses a miraculous ability to soothe. Mostly it is an auditory thing — like a relaxation tape. Sit close enough, and the waterwalls may also refreshingly cast their mist upon you.

Mr. Eliasson, together with a small army of laborers, engineers, city officials, and others, has given us, through October 13, the four biggest waterwalls the city has ever seen, or is likely ever again to see. The “Waterfalls” are all set up on the East River, and range in height between 90 feet and 120 feet. They are best experienced in passage, from a boat.

The northernmost is set up adjacent to Pier 35, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, just north of the Manhattan Bridge. One is set up under the suspension span of the Brooklyn Bridge, in front of the Brooklyn tower of the bridge. Next comes the waterfall between piers 4 and 5 on the Brooklyn waterfront, roughly on the line of Joralemon Street. Finally, a waterfall stands at the northern tip of Governors Island, opposite Battery Park. The locations aren’t random. Each answers the dual needs of environmental feasibility and of calling attention to ambitious projects promoted by the administration of Mayor Bloomberg: the East River Waterfront Park in Manhattan, Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn, and the reclamation of Governors Island.

But, as with “The Gates,” “Waterfalls” seeks also to make visible not just the sites of ambitious new projects, but also a historic pathway that we’ve forgotten the historic meaning of as our ways of using places have changed over the years. The “Waterfalls” guides us, in dramatic fashion, along a stretch of river that once upon a time was one of the busiest waterways in the world. Once, sailing and then steam-powered vessels from across the seas arrived and departed from the piers along this corridor. The port was New York City’s lifeblood — the thing that called the city into being and sustained it for centuries. The city economy has changed so dramatically in the last 50 years that river traffic has all but ceased. A 19th-century New Yorker time-traveling to today’s city would not get over the placid surface of a water once ever in roil. Mr. Eliasson speaks eloquently of how the river is almost more of a vitreous than an aqueous substance for today’s New Yorkers, and how his “Waterfalls” volumizes our experience of the water, reminding us that this is, indeed, a waterway.

In the late 16th century, Pope Sixtus V largely rebuilt Rome. The pope wished to create visual linkages among pilgrimage sites, to create what the sociologist Richard Sennett calls “tunnels of vision.” Sixtus achieved this through the placement of obelisks. Christo and Jeanne-Claude created their Central Park tunnels of vision through hanging orange draperies. And Mr. Eliasson does it with the biggest waterwalls ever. Of course, the New York projects were temporary, unlike the relative permanency of Sixtus V’s Rome. They remind us that New York may not be the Eternal City, but, in the view of some, an ever-changing place, the palimpsest-like history of which may momentarily be made visible by artists.


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