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.
