Category: EcoArt in Qatar

In the blog post preceding this, I argue that there is a dissonance between the presence of a nature reserve in close proximity to oil fields in Qatar, and end with the question that perhaps there is not necessarily a divide that exists between the natural world and the petrol dependent one. I found the following quote from Hannes Bergthaller’s article titled “Fossil Freedoms: The Politics of Emancipation and the End of Oil” particularly useful in this context.^[1] Bergthaller writes, “Petroleum, as it figures in these debates, assumes something of the ambivalent status of Derrida’s pharmakon (95–104): flickering between remedy and poison, feeding and frustrating the desire for individual or national self-determination, it is both that which makes liberty possible, and, at the same time, poisons it at the root.”^[2] The concept of pharmakon — both poison and cure, represents Qatar’s exhibition of its petromodern oil fields juxtaposed with its nature reserves.

Serra’s work is not entirely removed from the destructive version of petro-modernity either. Philip Cooke in his article “The Resilience of Sustainability, Creativity and Social Justice from the Arts & Crafts Movement to Modern Day “Eco-Painting”” writes about the various aesthetics of modern ecoart.^[3] Writing about the sustainability of eco art projects by drawing a comparison between Richard Serra and Olafar Eliasson, he argues, “Richard Serra, whose typical work is inordinately expensive, wasteful of energy and materials in its use of huge metalwork, non-locally resourced, but rather, transported over oceanic distances, and solipsistic in its desire to display the artist’s technological learning (wide use of aerospace software in computer-generated metal-shaping) to make art a triumph over the natural environment…”^[4] Although Serra’s work occupies more aerial space than land space, it is true that his work stands out in relation to the natural environment, and appears to conquer the visual field of the visitor. Furthermore, Cooke is right in arguing that the unsustainability of Serra’s projects makes their natural surroundings especially redundant.

However, these criticisms must not negate the cultural impact that both the oil industry and Serra’s sculptures have had despite being firmly established in unsustainable environmental practices. Furthermore, both objects bring into question the nature of their materiality. Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter explores materiality in objects and the moment where they become independent of human meaning making processes.^[5] The Qatar Petroleum signs on the way to the Zekreet desert become agential beings of their own, void of my personal perception of their environmental consequences, they are also things that interact with the world. The Serra sculptures too, independent of Cooke’s interpretation of their unsustainable presence in the desert, interact with their environment in very human ways. The sculptures erode and rust like a person transforming, habituating, or simply being influenced by their surroundings.

^[1] Hannes Bergthaller, “Fossil Freedoms: The Politics of Emancipation and the End of Oil,” in The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (London, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), pp. 424-432.

^[2] Bergthaller, “Fossil Freedoms: The Politics of Emancipation and the End of Oil,” 426.

^[3] Philip Cooke, “The Resilience of Sustainability, Creativity and Social Justice from the Arts & Crafts Movement to Modern Day ‘Eco-Painting,’” City, Culture and Society 6, no. 3 (2015): pp. 51-60, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2015.02.003.

^[4] Cooke, “The Resilience of Sustainability, Creativity and Social Justice, 53.

^[5] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4 of 6.

Richard Serra’s choice of the Brouq Nature Reserve in Qatar for his steel monuments is a rather unique choice on his behalf. While his audience would expect that his decision to base his art in the desert was undertaken because of the significance of that ecosystem to Qatar’s culture, especially with their economic reliance on natural gas and oil of which they get their riches, this was not the case. He did not actually consider any cultural or social narratives when sculpting his masterpiece as the location of the artwork was chosen by Her Highness Sheikha al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani^[1]. Because of this, we are unable to infer much information about what the art could represent from the artist’s perspective, specifically due to the fact that he was solely searching for opportunities to engage in art-creation. Despite this, we can still investigate the importance and significance of the artwork from the perspective of the authority behind it. This is clear because Richard Serra would not be able to carry out the creation of his art without the authorization from the museum/art society in Qatar, through such a powerful figure in the art scene like Her Highness.

“The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans,” says Stephanie LeMenager in her article discussing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.^[2] She argues that the oil spill revealed “a humiliation of modernity as it was understood in the twentieth century, which is largely in terms of the human capacity to harness cheap energy.”^[3] Qatar’s economy also largely relies on oil and gas exports which are significant sources of carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change. In addition to this, the quantity of fossil fuels that Qatar can procure is limited; it will run out at some point. Now while they haven’t had such a disastrous event like the BP oil spill, in order to maintain its powerful economy, Qatar needs to stop relying on fuel exports and invest in other profitable outlets. Thus, Qatar invests millions of riyals annually towards the development of artwork and museums, including two Richard Serra pieces, 7and East-West/West-East.

I believe that the artwork represents the State of Qatar and its values in two ways. First, the significance of the location lies in that the natural terrain of Qatar is not unique and is not, at least conventionally, attractive. Therefore, the artwork being placed in a place of insignificance could express the idea that although Qatar may seem insignificant, it has unique qualities and values that make it special. Second, the nature of the artwork in which the steel monuments are made to be altered by natural causes. Despite the harsh nature of its surroundings, the steel monuments stand tall and simply adapt by reacting to the environment. This could represent Qatar in which although the world is constantly changing and evolving, it still manages to adapt and persevere through it. Countries that lie outside the Western sphere are usually looked down upon which places extra pressure on them to show up. Hence, the pressure that they are subjected to be extraordinary is represented by the harsh environment within the desert. As mentioned previously, Serra stated that the social and political environment did not matter in the creation of this piece, so the intentions of outside actors should also be considered.

Bibliography

Lemenager, Stephanie. “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (2011): 25. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0025.

Niarchos, Nicolas. “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert,” June 18, 2017.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/richard-serra-in-the-qatari-desert.

^[1] Nicolas Niarchos, “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert,” June 18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/richard-serra-in-the-qatari-desert.

^[2]Stephanie LeMenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (2011): p. 25, https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0025, 26.

^[3] Stephanie LeMenager, “Petro-Melancholia,” 26.

A few nights ago a friend drove me to the Zekreet peninsula which happens to be around fifty kilometres west of Education City. The region, also known as Ras Abrouq is home to the Brouq Nature reserve which houses Serra’s monoliths. The drive to Zekreet from Doha is fairly clear at night, with little happening on either side of the road. However, this changed when we neared the desert. Hoping to find a place to park and stargaze, we instead found a McDonald’s sign illuminating the night sky. Driving further into the desert, we found Qatar Petroleum signs on buildings and realised that this region was also an oil field. The juxtaposition of a nature reserve in such close proximity to a nature reserve was jarring, albeit funny. Furthermore, it brought into question my own position as the subject, sitting in a four-wheel drive having the luxurious convenience of experiencing nature from inside an air-conditioned car. Stephanie LeMenager in her article “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” articulates the pervasive presence of the oil industry in our lives.^[1] She writes,

The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans, insofar as everyday events such as driving or feeling the summer heat of asphalt on the soles of one’s feet are incorporating practices, in Paul Connerton’s term for the repeated performances that become encoded in the body.^[2]

If this is problematised, as Le Menager argues it should be, driving to a nature reserve surrounded by oil-fields is then a double-edged sword, since our ability to experience nature is rooted in a practice that is destructive to nature.^[3] In Zekreet our conception of nature is doubly challenged due to our dependence on private transportation to reach the reserve and the presence of the oil-fields.

However, is there ever an authentic experience of nature? William Cronon in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” argues that nature is “quite profoundly a human creation.”^[4] Cronon traces the origin of conceiving natural space as a cultural memory to Western colonial attempts which associated wilderness with savagery, and a biblical reading of nature would conjure images of terror and temptation.^[5] This changed in the 19th century, Cronon argues that it can be traced to the romanticism movement and the importance it placed on the sublime, and the American idea of nature as a frontier.^[6] Cronon writes further, “To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles.”^[7] Nature, therefore, is not an isolated experience but one that is culturally constructed and manufactured. This theorisation of nature as a constructed experience, would then mean that my assumption that the presence of Qatar Petroleum buildings and McDonald’s made the Zekreet desert a disingenuous natural experience is, to a degree, flawed since it assumes that nature must exist in isolation. The modernity of the desert is only natural since it documents human change as well as geographical change.

^[1] Stephanie Lemenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): pp. 25-56, https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.00, 25.

^[2] Stephanie Lemenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” 26.

^[3] Stephanie Lemenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” 26.

^[4] William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), pp. 69-90, 1.

^[5] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 2.

^[6] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 3.

^[7] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 11.

In Val Plumwood’s essay titled Being Prey, she goes into detail about her experience surviving an attack from a crocodile. While out canoeing at Kakadu National Park, a saltwater crocodile catches her off guard and starts attacking her canoe.

“Few of those who have experienced the crocodile’s death roll have lived to describe it. It is, essentially, an experience beyond words of total terror, total helplessness, total certainty, experienced with undivided mind and body, of a terrible death in the swirling depths. The crocodile’s breathing and heart metabolism is not suited to prolonged struggle, so the roll is an intense initial burst of power designed to overcome the surprised victim’s resistance quickly. Then it is merely a question of holding the now feebly struggling prey under the water a while for an easy finish to the drowning job.”^[1]

She thankfully managed to get away from the crocodile trying to tear her leg off, and walked on downstream despite her severe injuries until she was found by a park ranger and taken to the hospital.^[2] Despite what had happened, Plumwood refused to allow the rangers to go and shoot the crocodile that attacked her—a breaking down of binaries between humans and animals or between humans and nature. I’d like to focus on the idea of the breaking down of binaries in relation to Serra’s art installation piece.

With Plumwood, it’s important to remember that humans are typically put on a higher pedestal and are seen as more important than nature—so when nature seemingly breaks that normalized idea, humans feel the need to take action. In this case, the rangers wanted to shoot the crocodile, and the media tried to portray her as a victim not unlike those seen in classic monster movies (think King Kong or The Creature in the Black Lagoon).^[3] Plumwood rejects this notion wholeheartedly, stating that “Because crocodile attacks…have often been followed by episodes of massive crocodile slaughter in which entire river populations were wiped out…1 tried hard at first to minimize media publicity and keep the story for my friends’ ears alone.”^[4]

In a way, Serra also rejects this oppositional binary of humans versus nature with the way he actively interacts with the natural space he’s given. With the “East-West/West-East” installation, rather than changing the natural landscape so as to make the steel plates completely even, he simply adapted and made two of the plates taller and two of them shorter; however, to the naked eye and due to the uneven landscape, they all look like they are exactly the same height.^[5] He uses natural materials that are not harsh on the environment in ways that could damage it.^[6] “…the pillars bring the magnitude of the surrounding into focus,” according to Serra, allowing for the empty ‘nothingness’ of the Zekreet landscape to become something. At the same time, this does beg the question of is it up to us as humans to decide what is nothing and what means something? Arguably, every bit of nature should mean something simply because it exists, which is more along the lines of what Plumwood is leaning towards when she refuses to allow the rangers to hunt down the crocodile. With Serra, his installation falls into the trap of giving off the sense that in order for nature to be viewed as significant by humans, humans need to give it that significance somehow and in some way, which Plumwood would probably find problematic.

Bibliography

Niarchos, Nicolas. “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert,” June 18, 2017.

Plumwood, Val. “Being Prey.” Terra Nova: Nature & Culture 1, no. 3 (1996): 32–44.

“Richard Serra in Qatar – East-West/West-East.” Public Delivery, May 7, 2020.

^[1] Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” Terra Nova: Nature & Culture 1, no. 3 (1996): 35.

^[2] Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” 37-38.

^[3] Ibid, 40.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Nicolas Niarchos, “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert,” June 18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/richard-serra-in-the-qatari-desert.

^[6] Nicolas Niarchos, “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert.”

Richard Serra’s monolithic sculptures in the Brouq Nature Reserve in Qatar provide the visitor with an interactive experience due to their enormous size and their kilometre-long span. Viewers may drive around the sculpture and additionally view the mushroom rock formations present in the desert. One of the reasons why the sculptures are successful pieces of art is because they challenge the conventional notions of the subject-object relationship. When viewing a painting in a museum, the assumption is that the viewer is the subject and the painting is the object. What defines these relations is the ability of the viewer to perceive the artworks in their entirety, placing them as powerful subjects with immense agential control over their perception. However, what makes Serra’s monolith in Qatar different is their aforementioned scale, which hinders the perception of the artwork in its entirety. I believe this aspect to be an accurate metaphor for the issue of the anthropocene– a phenomenon so immense, our view of it is perpetually distorted. Furthermore, the artwork questions the human relationship to nature– whether humans are implicated in the fate of the planet, their impact and whether humans need to intervene or remove themselves from nature.

One of my favourite articulations of the function of ecoart is by Clive Cazeaux, who writes

If I am an artist, I will want to make something, and that thing won’t be an object or event that comes out of nowhere or ends up residing in a vacuum, but will be nestled within a network of interests and concerns, including contender materials and technologies, and the discourses which surround them.^[1]

A secondary, non-artistic function of the sculptures is that it brings more people in to look at the sculptures. The sculpture is positioned quite explicitly in conversation with the nature it is surrounded by, and with the inclusion of the human experience of the art, Serra’s sculptures would be seen as successful ecoart-works from Cazeaux’s standards. To contextualise the sculpture’s position in the Brouq nature reserve, we must further understand what exactly a nature reserve accomplishes in its establishment. Ramachandra Guha in his article “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” looks at the culture that deep ecology has produced in terms of the preservation of wilderness and the divide between anthropocentrism and biocentrism and argues that both are redundant and in some ways harmful to the way we think about the environment.^[2]

Although Guha’s article looks at the implication of American wilderness preservation for the third world, we can see how Qatar too might be buying into the preservation rhetoric like America. To Guha, “…wildlands preservation has been identified with environmentalism by the state and the conservation elite; in consequence, environmental problems that impinge far more directly on the lives of the poor–e.g., fuel, fodder, water shortages, soil erosion, and air and water pollution-have not been adequately addressed.”^[3] Qatar, a country that is wholly dependent on the revenue its fossil fuel industry generates, is implicated in this failure to address the harm that that industry causes while at the same time preserving nature. Furthermore, the undoubtedly expensive sculptures present in the reserve add on to the apparent surface-level activism. Conservation, with the added benefit of experiencing American art in the middle of the Middle Eastern desert, is therefore an elitist construction. A case of the conservation place having its cake and eating it too. Surely this can be defended. The inclusion of the sculptures in the desert allow the viewer to engage with nature, even though that might be in four-wheel drives, since the region is inaccessible by public transport. Furthermore, the sculptures do engage with the environment they are in, their aesthetic value is rooted in striking. Sleek lines cutting through the desert– an arguably (perhaps unintentionally) metaphoric representation of how human intervention slices nature in halves. 

^[1] Clive Cazeaux, “Aesthetics as ecology, or the question of the form of eco-art,” in Extending ecocriticism, (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2017) https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526107145.00013

^[2] Ramachandra Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” 71.

^[3] Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” 75.

Richard Serra is an American artist who primarily works with steel, creating large scale sculptures. In 2014, artist Serra’s sculpture titled, “East-West/West-East” was installed in the Brouq Nature Reserve near the Zekreet desert in Qatar. The sculpture is composed of four vertical plates of steel erected in the desert, spanning a kilometre. Talking about the sculptures Serra said, “Before, there was no way of discerning where anything was in relation to where you were, because you had no point of reference. What that piece does is give you a point of reference in relationship to a line, and your upstanding relationship to a vertical plane and infinity, and a perspectival relationship to a context – and pulls that context together. It makes it graspable. That’s actually a place out there now, and there certainly wasn’t one before. We did that simply by putting up four plates.”

Similarly, the giant monolithic structures amidst the vast desert offer what Nadia Mounajjed calls, “a demarcation of space in a place with no references, effectively making a place in what is considered non-place.” However, Serra’s sculptures do not merely serve to distinguish the place and non-place binary, instead the public nature of the sculptures and their situatedness in the nature reserve bring attention and closer human examination of the desert and its physical and topographical form. Furthermore, the sculptures are embedded in the ecological system of the region because of the region’s effect on the sculptures themselves, perhaps in the way the sculpture would develop rust given its proximity to the sea, or in the way that human interaction with the desert and the sculptures would change their forms. 

Arguments against the installation of Serra’s sculptures in the nature reserve have questioned their sustainability. Philip Cooke in his article distinguishes between the two dominant kinds of eco-artists, those that care about the potential harm that their artwork could cause to the environment, and those that do not. For Cooke, Serra falls into the latter due to the extravagantly expensive materials that Serra uses for his projects, the costs of transportation and sourcing of the materials, which display the artist’s ability to conquer nature. Furthermore, Cooke considers the inaccessibility of Serra’s artwork to anyone but affluent tourists problematic when compared to other ecoartists’ works like Olafur Eliasson’s in New York which was a not for profit project, unlike Serra’s. 

Serra’s sculptures in Qatar attract tourists and locals, partly because of their picturesque environment. However, what does the increased human interaction mean for the ecological space that those sculptures inhabit? Having been to the sculptures, there are tire tracks from cars on the ground that have circled the monoliths, the area around the sculptures is often littered due to the lack of proper waste disposal, and the sculptures themselves have been graffitied. The presence of the sculptures in the desert has brought into question the purpose of public art and its relationship with the nature it exists in. Additionally, it allows us to examine the efficacy of public art as a medium for inspiring awareness about the country’s natural landscape. Serra and Mounajjed both point to the sculptures’ ability to create a non-place- the desert, into a place, however, since this argument undermines the value of the desert as a place itself, we seek to understand the implications of public art in nature, and whether nature needs art. 

Works Cited

Byrnes, Sholto. “US Sculptor Plants 50ft Steel Towers in Qatari Desert.” The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, April 10, 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/american-sculptor-richard-serra-has-planted-four-50ft-steel-towers-qatari-desert-latest-project-east-west-west-east-9249514.html.

Cooke, Philip. “The Resilience of Sustainability, Creativity and Social Justice from the Arts & Crafts Movement to Modern Day ‘Eco-Painting.’” City, Culture and Society 6, no. 3 (2015): 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2015.02.003.

Mounajjed, Nadia. “Reflections on Public Art in the Arabian Peninsula.” Journal of Arabian Studies 7, no. sup1 (2017): 84–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/21534764.2017.1357362.

Niarchos, Nicolas. “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert,” June 18, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/richard-serra-in-the-qatari-desert.

Wainwright, Lisa S. “Richard Serra.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., October 29, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Serra.