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You can see them from a block away: seven women in yellow dresses walking back and forth on top of an eight-foot-tall yellow platform in Manhattan’s Bryant Park. They look straight ahead as they walk, unsmiling, unaware of the people below snapping photos and recording videos on their iPhones. One woman looks annoyed, another frustrated. Some stomp on the ground, while others shuffle and shimmy across the boards. They all look bored.

This is a work of public art called Walk the Walk, paid for by the Public Art Fund and created by Kate Gilmore, whose video and installation, Standing Here, is a highlight of this year’s Whitney Biennial. Gilmore is usually the star of her videos, performing a daring or foolhardy act for the benefit of the camera: freeing her leg from a bucket of concrete, kicking aggressively through a wall, or tearing a hole in a drywall cube. Often, remnants of those battered structures accompany her videos.

For this outing, Gilmore has hired a team of women to promenade on top of her yellow platform all week, from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Marina Abramovics sit-in at the Museum of Modern Art seems like a clear parallel here, though Gilmore’s show is clearly not “quite the epic feat of public endurance,” as Randy Kennedy puts it in the New York Times. That seems to be the point: the women are entirely replaceable, like many of the office workers in the buildings that surround the park. Once they toss on that yellow uniform, any person can promenade for a five-hour shift, at $15 an hour. It’s not a full-time job, sure, but it’s also not a bad wage.

This is the first time that Gilmore has outsourced the performance of her work to other people, and she has picked a perfect time to do it. Public art, after all, has become an increasingly popular way for many governments (and New York’s especially) to garner some good will and cultural bona fides by hiring, or simply allowing, an artist to produce a work of art. While the city can’t guarantee convenient, working subways, it can offer a Sol LeWitt installation for commuters to enjoy while they wait. And while it can’t assure the safety of its parks (or provide shelter for those that use them as homes), it can at least let Christo and Jeanne-Claude turn one into a banal theme park.

Gilmore’s installation is banal, as well, but intentionally so. The walking women — a sly counterpoint to Giacomettis $104.3 million Walking Man? — go nowhere, moving from side to side of their box over and over again, an endless repetition that mirrors so many office tasks. First hearing of Gilmore’s project, one imagined she might offer up a glamorous spectacle, but these are not femmes fatales. Her models wear frumpy outfits, and their box lacks any defining details, like a cheap version of a Minimalist sculpture. It is perfectly functional, ready to pop up, perform its job, and then disappear.

Also like Christo and Jeanne-Cladude’s Gates, Gilmore’s platform can be walked under and through. Underneath the platform, the sounds of 14 feet resound and echo, an aural reminder of the pent-up power of the seven women up above, as well as the presence and drive of every person pounding the pavement in the surrounding area. While most public art and architecture seeks to compensate for past wrongs (like Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial) or glorify our society’s highest ideals (Frederic Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty), Gilmore presents a more unusual project: a work of public art that is focused on the present, filled with ambiguity, and bravely unheroic.