ABSTRACT
Landscape is the one that makes the constitutive blindness and invisibility of the visual process most evident. This chapter considers two works of landscape art that dramatize the paradoxical process, the Gilo Wall in Jerusalem, and the Christo Gates in New York City’s Central Park. The Gilo Wall was built on a hillside at the outset of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000 to protect the Israeli settlement of Gilo in East Jerusalem from snipers in Beit Jala, the neighboring Christian Palestinian village on the hillside facing it. The wall is routinely declared to a merely “temporary” measure, but it is also widely suspected of being the key tactic in a permanent annexation of Palestinian land that will make the emergence of a viable Palestinian state in a contiguous, sovereign territory an eco- sociological impossibility.
