A DESERT ODYSSEY
Towering monoliths dot Qatar’s landscape, and their remoteness is part of the appeal,
DOHA, QATAR— Standing in the desert like a remnant of a civilization that built towers of art the way we build towers of commerce is East-West/ West-East, a sculpture by Richard Serra.
Four 15-metre-high slabs of iron, 250 metres apart from each other, rise in a row between two desert hills.
This is Qatar, where the gleaming city of Doha rose from a similarly blank desert canvas in just 35 years.
So the sculpture is not a remnant then, but a parallel, commissioned by the emir’s sister. It has been built 80 kilometres west of the city in the Brouq Nature Reserve, on this slight but wealthy nation’s west coast.
There’s no regular transit in Qatar yet, so to see Serra’s masterpiece, visitors need to drive, or be driven.
With temperatures that can approach 45 C in a country that hasn’t developed much outside its one city’s limits, the trek out and the walk around can be an adventure itself.
It’s in the middle of nowhere, and visitors have to leave the road and just start crossing raw desert long before the sculpture comes into view. But once it does, visitors will see what Serra spoke about when he said his work can “create places.” This is now a place that didn’t exist before.
An employee of Qatar Airways was there for the first time, and eager to see what everyone had been talking about. She asked a driver what directions someone would have to give to get here in a taxi, for instance. The answer was everyone knows where the desert sculpture is. Its sheer remoteness is part of the attraction.
The bases of the slabs may be covered in graffiti scratched out with chalky rocks, erasable with a thumb, yet East-West/West-East is truly one of the planet’s greatest sculptural works. Bert Archer travelled as a guest of Qatar Airways, which didn’t review or approve this story.