AS the cool desert night fades to reveal a twilit landscape of chalky gypsum plateaus and gravelly sand, a shape materializes out of the gloom: a monolith, elemental and mysterious. The rectangle of weathered steel looms 14 meters above the ground, its preternatural presence exerting an irresistible pull. Gazing upward, it’s impossible not to think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as the swiftly rising sun casts the metal slab in sharp silhouette, I can almost hear the triumphant fanfare of Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” (you know the one — Duh … Duh … Duh … Duh-duh!).
The monolith is one of four standing steel plates that make up , a major site-specific installation by American sculptor Richard Serra located in the Brouq Nature Reserve of western Qatar, about 70 kilometers (almost the width of the peninsular country) outside Doha, the capital. It’s an astonishing feat of art and engineering. Shipped over from Germany and craned into place in 2014, the 80-ton plates are planted in a straight line across a one-kilometer stretch of ancient desert sea, their tops level with the adjacent plateaus, anomalies of pure verticality in a horizontal wilderness. Like Serra’s other monumental works, the installation is meant to challenge the viewer’s concept of space and proportion. And though they appear inert and immutable, the
