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.
