CITY CRITIC
The Grass Is Fake, but the Splendor Real
Emily Berl for The New York Times
The grass and trees in Park Here are fake, but some visitors stay all day. Margot Spiker and Patrick Kelly read by artificial light amid plastic foliage stapled to wooden trunks. More Photos »
By ARIEL KAMINER
Published: January 14, 2011
Last Wednesday, the day of the snowpocalypse — or was it the snowmageddon, or the snow-my-God or whatever else the weather-fatigued headline writers had resorted to — Central Park was awash in white. Prospect Park in Brooklyn was a freezing no man’s land. And Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx was almost invisible under all that the wind had delivered.
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But at the park on Mulberry Street, between Kenmare and Spring in NoLIta, summer was just unfolding. Warm, happy people were peeling down to their T-shirts and soaking in the sunshine, while others were spreading picnic blankets and gazing up through the lush canopy of foliage. Some flopped down on the hearty carpet of green, curled up against one another and, lulled by the gentle chirping of birds, settled in for a nap.
It’s not truly a park, at least not in any sense that the parks department might recognize; it is the simulacrum of a park, an indoor copy that in weather like this becomes more real than the city’s broad but dormant expanses. The pseudopark, which occupies the Openhouse Gallery through the end of the month and which is open to the public every day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., beckons visitors with a vibrant gardenlike environment and a warm, sunny glow (along with, at certain hours, food vendors like Luke’s Lobsterand Mexicue).
It’s no great feat of agricultural engineering. The floor covering is artificial turf, not sod, despite the example that “The New York Earth Room,” just a few blocks away, has set for decades. The trees are plastic foliage stapled to wooden trunks. The sunlight emanates from light boxes designed to treat seasonal affective disorder. The birds chirp through a sound system.
And beyond that? Park Here, as it’s called, is just the same white walls you see in any gallery, with exposed electric fixtures, hanging theatrical lights and a big industrial heating unit. It shouldn’t fool anyone. And yet it does: office workers looking for a break, couples looking for each other’s arms, the daily yoga class in the corner and, of course, the inevitable stroller brigade, all just relaxing and playing and letting down their guard in a way they would never do if the fake foliage was not there. Some arrive when the park opens and stay all day.
“This used to be an art gallery,” one of the picnickers told his barefoot friend.
“This is an art gallery,” she said authoritatively. “This is someone’s installation.”
Not quite. Openhouse calls itself a gallery but functions mostly as an events space, a rentable temporary home for pop-up shops, parties, publicity events and the like. The so-called installation is the work not of a solitary artist exploring the tension between nature and artifice but of a series of corporate partnerships set in motion by the people who run the place.
For Openhouse, then, Park Here is nothing revolutionary, just a clever way to keep the place’s name in circulation during a slow season. Fine. But for the people who amble in, flop down, spread out, lie on top of each other, flirt, relax, catch up or check out, it’s something more: an experiment in urban sociology.
Strolling around the place and watching the strangers at play, Dalton Conley, a New York University sociologist who has written about growing up in the city, observed that it was a quintessential New York phenomenon.
“One of the factors which, despite perceptions, makes it easy to parent here is that there are no backyards, so you’re not atomized,” Professor Conley said. “You just go to a park,” he said, and automatically find a bunch of other kids to play with. Parks have the same effect on adults, throwing them into close and easy proximity, and promoting unexpected social encounters.
Similar results have been achieved in other unnatural settings, most recently whenPipilotti Rist took over MoMA’s second-floor atrium with an oversize video installation and an enormous round couch on which viewers could just lie back and take it — and each other — all in. But that was under the protective cover of high art. It was critically sanctioned. It was safe. Park Here, in contrast, is just some random storefront, and the people flopped about it don’t necessarily have anything more in common than a preference for being inside to being outside. (Or is it the other way around?)
“As a permanent thing, people probably would say, ‘We need real grass,’ ” Professor Conley said. “But as a temporary thing, they accept the lack of verisimilitude. In fact, I bet some of it is ironic.”
Maybe it’s more fun, that is, because it’s more fake.
Or maybe, in a city so starved for nature that a stroll through a greenmarket can feel like a restorative encounter with the great outdoors, New Yorkers are simply willing to cling to whatever crude substitutes we can find. Maybe we are like those monkey babies in the psychology experiments who pathetically tried to hug a terrycloth doll. In the depths of a January snowstorm, even a terrycloth doll is better than nothing. And the results of this experiment suggest that the ability to respond to even such unconvincing stimuli is an adaptive trait for urban survival.
New Yorkers like to think no one can put anything over on them. But the field data from Park Here shows we enjoy putting one over on ourselves. At some point, during a long and lazy afternoon — sometime after lunch but before my nap — I sneezed. “Gesundheit,” said one of the people lounging by the seesaw. “Allergies,” said her friend.
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