East-West/West-East is a new sculpture by Richard Serra commissioned by Sheikha al-Mayassa al-Thani of Qatar; it is located in the Brouq Nature Reserve in the western portion of this tiny state in the Gulf enriched by its holdings of gas and oil. To arrive at the desert site, you drive west from Doha for forty miles (almost the width of the country), passing one construction site after another on a vast freeway, and then, suddenly, the landscape becomes almost lunar in its vacancy. Exiting via Camel Underpass No. 7, you travel seven or eight more miles on a makeshift road until the sculpture appears in the distance. Depending on the time of day and year, you are likely to be alone.
East-West/West-East consists of four steel plates arrayed vertically at irregular intervals in a straight line about a half mile in length along the compass points of the title. Anchored by supports of steel and concrete set below the level of the hard sand (it is actually a gritty gypsum), all the plates are thirteen feet wide, but the two outer ones are fifty-five feet high while the two inner are forty-eight feet. These height differences adjust for terrain changes, as the tops of the slabs are calibrated to be exactly even with one another and roughly level with the low plateaus that, formed long ago by the sea, frame the piece to the north and the south. As you walk from east to west and back again (rendering literal the first meaning of the title), you register the line of the plates and sense the evenness of the tops. You also perceive that the middle interval, between the second and third slabs, is greater than the others (the middle section is 450 yards, while the first is 173 and the third 301); this is so because the plates are positioned not with an eye toward even spacing, but at precisely those points in the landscape that allow the tops to be level.