Art: Christo in the UAE (38 years and counting)

After 38 years, is time finally running for the 81-year-old environmental artist and proposal to create The Masataba, the world’s largest sculpture in the UAE desert?

Even though many of Christo’s memories may be cherished, not every anniversary is a cause for celebration.

“I am not a masochist, I don’t like to spend 38 years working on this project,” says the white-haired artist who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin, as he reflects on his proposal for the world’s largest sculpture, The Mastaba.

A brightly-coloured ziggurat made from 410,000 250-litre steel barrels, Christo has designed The Mastaba to measure 150 metres high, 225 metres deep and 300 metres wide, creating an edifice that would dwarf even the largest of Egypt’s ancient pyramids after which it is named.

The 81-year-old has been pitching the project to the authorities in Abu Dhabi since he first came to the country in 1979, which is a record even by his own prodigious standards.

The Gates, the Central Park project that Christo and his collaborator and wife, Jeanne-Claude, executed in Manhattan in 2005, was the product of 26 years of preparation and negotiations; Wrapped Reichstag took 24.

The experience of bringing these works into being have made Christo a man of seemingly endless optimism and patience, determined to pursue the realisation of The Mastaba despite his advancing years.

His resolve, he insists, was strengthened further in January when he decided to walk away from the Colorado-based Over the River, a project that had been in preparation for 25 years and had already cost the artist US$15 million (Dh55m) in research, testing and planning.

As with the rest of his projects, Christo had funded Over the River through sales of his smaller artworks, the paintings and mixed-media collages sold to private collectors and museums that will be his only permanent legacy unless his plans for The Mastaba are realised. Now, for the first time in decades, the Abu Dhabi project represents Christo’s sole sculptural ambition.

“Each project has its own story and now this is the only project I have in mind and in one way that offers a kind of relief,” he says. “The Mastaba has been pushed to one side on several occasions but now I want to dedicate all my time to it because it’s my longest-living project.”

The UAE chapter of The Mastaba epic began in February 1979, when Christo, Jeanne-Claude and their long-term collaborator, the German photographer Wolfgang Volz, came to the Emirates for the first time in search of a location.

“At that time, from 1972 to ‘79, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had already realised the Valley Curtain in Colorado, Running Fence in California and Wrapped Walk Ways in Kansas City, Missouri, and on the first trip we travelled through all the emirates,” Volz says.

“One of the amazing things that surprised me about Abu Dhabi at the time was that the cityscape was still very much sand. You would suddenly come across a little piece of desert in the middle of the city because the development then was still very uneven.”

The trio arrived as guests of the French government – all visitors to the UAE at that time required an official sponsor and invitation – but Christo and Jeanne-Claude had spent a decade exploring possible sites for a sculpture in the Netherlands and Texas, but in this rapidly modernising new nation they found an option that was a very different proposition.

“I didn’t put my finger on a map and discover Abu Dhabi,” Christo says, delving into The Mastaba’s pre-history, an extraordinary stop-start story of chance, circumstance, friendship and art history.

“From the late 1950s, I had been working with barrels and then we did the rue Visconti in Paris, [Wall of Oil Barrels – The Iron Curtain, 1962] and then, in the mid 1960s I did a small sculpture in Milan and for the first time we stacked the barrels horizontally and created The Mastaba.”

After a brief period of activity in the mid-1960s, when Christo and Jeanne-Claude explored sites around Houston with John and Dominique de Menil, art collectors, patrons and heirs to the Schlumberger oil dynasty. The project was paused only to be restarted in 1972, when the couple were visited by Louis de Guiringaud, an art collector and friend of Jeanne-Claude’s father who was then serving as France’s permanent representative to the United Nations in New York.

Seeing Christo’s study drawings for the unrealised mastabas in Texas and Holland, Mr de Guiringaud told the artist about a new nation, the United Arab Emirates, where such a project might be more openly received.

“‘Christo’, he told me, ‘Just a year ago a new nation was created in the Arabian Gulf called the United Arab Emirates by an adventurous Bedouin from the desert, Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan, who is imaginative and this might be the chance to move this project to a new place’.”

On the election of Valery Giscard d’Estaing as the president of France in 1976, Mr de Guiringaud became the French minister of foreign affairs and it was in this capacity that the politician arranged for Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first UAE visit. “I didn’t have the slightest idea about Abu Dhabi,” the artist remembers. “And all of the maps in the bookstores still mentioned the Trucial States. But it was then, in the mid-1970s, that I first began to consider the desert as a possible location.”

From 1979 until 1984, a period when Christo and Jeanne-Claude were also working on the preparations for wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris and the project known as Surrounded Islands, which involved the artists wrapping 11 islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, they also visited the UAE repeatedly and thought they had found a possible site south of Al Ain.

Thanks, however, to the demands made by the planning and execution of projects such as The Umbrellas, which was mounted simultaneously in Japan and California in 1991, Berlin’s Wrapped Reichstag, which took place in 1995, and The Gates in New York’s Central Park, the couple did not revisit The Mastaba until 2005 when their negotiations with authorities in the US appeared to have reached a deadlock and the future of Over the River appeared to be in doubt.

As Christo remembers, it was then that Jeanne-Claude suggested a return to Abu Dhabi, a journey that not only led to a change in the proposed location for The Mastaba – Christo now wants to build it in the dunes on a site between Al Ain and Hameem – but also persuaded the couple to take the project a stage further by conducting the research that would turn their sculptural vision into a buildable reality. To do this, Christo and Jeanne-Claude hired the services of four of the world’s most prestigious engineering schools.

“By 1979, the project was aesthetically totally defined. We knew how many barrels and what colours they should be but we only had a concept for how it might be built,” Christo says.

Hired with no knowledge of each other’s participation, teams from engineering faculties in Cambridge, Zurich, Milan and Tokyo set about devising detailed proposals for the project’s design and construction. Once these were submitted, a winning proposal was selected by an independent expert who chose the Japanese scheme.

Since 2007, Christo and his team, including Volz and Jeanne-Claude until her death in 2009, have visited the UAE at least once a year, giving interviews, lectures and public appearances. In 2012, the annual Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award was established, presented by NYU Abu Dhabi under the patronage of Sheikha Shamsa bint Hamdan Al Nahyan, in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation with the aim of fostering emerging, UAE-based artistic talent.

But despite the ongoing charm offensive, The Mastaba remains stalled in what the artist describes as the “software period”, a phase where the project exists only in his sketches, in engineering proposals and in the minds of the people who support him. Christo, however, is an artist who is used to getting his own way, even if it does take decades, and despite his advancing years he refuses to be anything other than positive.

“Each project has its time, it’s own moment and its own journey. It took 10 years to realise the Pont Neuf and 26 for The Gates, but this project is what it is and I hope it will be realised,” he insists.

“It will give Abu Dhabi something that nobody else will have, something truly unique, and the value of that is something that cannot be measured.”

Is it time for UAE gardeners to think beyond plants?

Martha Schwartz Bagel Garden (courtesy of Martha Schwartz Partners)

Now is time for UAE gardeners to take matters into their own hands and develop an authentic new gardening aesthetic better suited to the region.

I will never forget my first formal lesson in garden design. The tutor showed the class a slide show of gardens and quotes from their designers, each of which embodied wildly different definitions of what a garden is, could and should be.

The assembly of budding designers, who desperately wanted to appear sophisticated in front of their tutor, made appreciative noises, but many were unable to disguise their disdain for one image in particular, of the very first garden created by the London-based, American landscape architect Martha Schwartz.

Schwartz started her career in 1979 by decorating her front yard in Boston with bright purple gravel and neat rows of bagels. The bagel, she quipped, was the perfect gardening material because you didn’t need to water it, and it did well in the shade.

Since the creation of her bagel garden, Schwartz has become one of the world’s most celebrated landscape architects, but her work still divides opinion, even within the design profession. Gardening and garden design have experienced something of a renaissance, enjoying a profile and popularity not seen since the 18th and 19th centuries. Garden makeover programmes now dominate television schedules in North America and Europe, glossy garden titles take up ever increasing space on newsstands and garden design courses have become a favourite among ladies who lunch and those seeking a career change.

Given this mania for all things horticultural, what international trends are emerging in garden design to inspire gardeners here in the UAE?

With its extreme weather conditions, limited palette of available ornamental plants and large, transient population, the UAE remains largely unaffected by international trends in garden design, but thiscould be about to change. More and more designers have identified a broader set of issues that are set to transform gardens in the near future. Most vocal among these is Andrew Wilson, a British designer, author, chief assessor for the Royal Horticultural Society and director of the London College of Garden Design.

One of the key shifts Wilson identifies is a move away from the plant-focused aesthetic that has dominated garden design for the past 300 years: “I refer to it… as the ‘horticultural hijack’. Because of our old empire, we travelled the world, found all sorts of amazing plants, brought them back to the UK and they would grow. This richness of planting developed the horticultural sense of what a garden should be.”

For Wilson, the contemporary alternative is to take notice of issues such as climate change, which make the plant-focused approach to gardens increasingly unsustainable, and to go back to the future, to a time when the experiences and sensations experienced in a garden were as important as its plants.

“If you went back to Renaissance gardens, they were all about fun, enjoyment, entertainment, the sensory experience of a garden, and I think that’s what gardens are going back to being.”

Wilson is in illustrious company. In a 2008 debate with the architect Will Alsop, Schwartz also called for designers to understand the bigger picture. “Everybody loves gardens, but they don’t understand the issues of the wider landscape. The romantic notion of what landscape is gets completely in the way… We need to do everything we can to reverse the great environmental damage that we’ve done and create spaces of great beauty and meaning.”

For Anne Wareham, a UK-based gardener, journalist, and author, the contemporary garden should be set free from the grip of “plantaholics”, and be transformed into a space governed by ideas, debate and by deeper forms of artistic expression.

Wilson is just as convinced about the need for gardeners and garden designers to lift their heads from the minutiae of horticulture: “What garden designers have to do is to confront this sense of a garden as an exciting, sensory experience of outdoor space, rather than it being a gardening experience or a horticultural experience or a collecting experience. Many gardens are actually just a collection of ‘stuff’ really… from a design perspective that flies in the face of everything that design is about in terms of coherence and structure and some kind of order.”

If spaces based on conceptual principles, sustainability, an experiential sense of the garden and elegant contemporary design are the future, there is no reason why designers and gardeners in the UAE cannot join this international process of change straightaway, even with the limitations of the local market and challenging climatic conditions. Functional, experiential elements such as lighting, swimming pools, water features, barbecues and jacuzzis already tend to dominate designed gardens in the UAE. The secret now is to rebalance this emphasis with a more environmentally sensitive approach and to move beyond the cliched stylistic tropes of the Islamic, Mediterranean and jungle garden.

Twenty-five years ago, gardeners in the American Southwest faced a similar set of challenges to the ones that we do now. The market was dominated by thirsty, exotic plants unsuited to local conditions, water reserves were dwindling and declining in quality, and unsustainable water treatment was on the rise. The response was a shift in gardening and irrigation practices that culminated in a move away from the use of colourful and exotic annuals, biennials and short-lived perennials towards the development of a new, distinctive plant palette based on previously uncultivated and unloved local species.

The result was xeriscaping, a system of gardening, irrigation and landscape design that minimises water use. As well as providing the American Southwest with its own, distinctive gardening style, it helped to create a garden philosophy, industry and aesthetic that is now being used in arid regions across the world, including the UAE.

When the next generation of Abu Dhabi’s landscapes, parks and open spaces starts to emerge, guided by sustainable principles, it will become clear that these wider issues have already been influencing design in the public realm for quite some time. Now it is time for private gardeners in the UAE to take these lessons on board, to transform the local market through their purchasing power and, in doing so, create a truly contemporary style of native gardening that will make as distinctive a contribution to the gardening world as its classical Islamic predecessor.

This article originally appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi

Andrew Wilson’s most recent book is Contemporary Colour in the Garden: Top Designers, Inspiring ideas, New Combinations (Timber Press, 2011). He is a Director of Wilson McWilliam Studio and specialises in designing fine gardens and landscapes, garden design education, and garden writing. He is a judge for the RHS specialising in show gardens at Chelsea, Hampton Court, and Tatton and also assesses Bloom in Dublin.

Anne Wareham is the author of The Bad Tempered Gardener (Frances Lincoln, 2011). With her partner, Charles Hawes, she created Veddw House Garden in Monmouthshire, Wales. For more of her writing and information on her approach to gardens and gardening, see thinkingardens

Desert Watch: ‘voluntourism’ at the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve

There is a technique for driving a 2.5 tonne Land Rover up and over particularly steep dunes. Apparently, it involves accelerating only to the point at which the car’s momentum carries it over the dune’s crest, but no further. As our car sits, nose in the sand, vibrating from the shock of impact, it’s clear that our technique may need a little polish. Alarmingly, my seatbelt creaks. It is the only thing holding me in place on the back seat. “Is the car OK?” asks Anne Crauser, our driver, audibly shaken. “Don’t worry,” replies Greg Simkins, conservation manager of the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve (DDCR), and our guide for the day. “We are driving well within the operational limits of the vehicle.”

I begin to wonder about my own operational limits, but there is simply too much else to see and learn for anybody in the car to dwell on the incident. I have joined a group of six international “voluntourists”, each of whom has paid £980 (Dh5,650) for the privilege, on the first UAE project organised by Biosphere Expeditions, a UK-based not-for-profit company that organises international conservation holidays. They provide cash-rich, time-poor “voluntourists” with the opportunity to “give something back” by contributing their cash, time, and labour toward serious scientific research in the field. My group has come to the DDCR to help observe three of Arabia’s most endangered desert species: Gordon’s wildcat, the Arabian oryx, and Macqueen’s Bustard.

For the past few weeks, a steady stream of emails has been populating my inbox. These outline the logistical nightmare of setting up a base camp in the middle of the desert and are accompanied by a dizzying array of manuals, work schedules, data entry sheets and a dossier that includes sections entitled “Read this now and start getting ready” and “Get fit, kit yourself out, and do some preparatory reading”. It’s little wonder then that I feel neither prepared, ready nor fit by the time I arrive – late – at the expedition’s initial rendezvous in Dubai’s Silicon Oasis.

My first meeting there, with Dr Matthias Hammer, MA (Oxford), PhD (Cambridge), Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, former paratrooper and international rower, triathlete, divemaster, mountain leader, survival skills instructor, wilderness medical officer, and founder and executive director of Biosphere Expeditions, does nothing to dispel this sense of trepidation.

“You are late!” he booms. The Teutonic accent is laid on thick and the phrasing is arch. “I’m terribly sorry.” I offer, weakly. “You will be,” he continues, in perfect Oxbridge English and it is only as he shakes my hand that there is even the vaguest hint of a smile. I decide that now is not the time to confess that I’ve arrived without the sleeping bag, rucksack, walking boots or head torch that were listed as essential items of personal equipment in the expedition dossier.

But only 50km later, my city-dweller angst is momentarily forgotten as we spot our first oryx within minutes of heading into the reserve. It is a strange sensation to come so close, so quickly, to the main object of our expedition and an iconic animal more normally associated with corporate identities and logos. Other Biosphere Expeditions – tracking Arabian leopards in Oman, wolves in Slovakia and snow leopards in the Siberian Altai – are known to pass for weeks without actual sightings, but here the oryx are, close enough to touch with their brilliant white hides, long, gracefully tapering horns and distinctive facial markings.

We drive on and the terrain becomes even more challenging until we suddenly reach our base camp in a welcoming grove of shady Ghaf trees that nestle among tall, rampart-like dunes. A Biosphere Expeditions flag flies piratically from a homemade but expert-looking flagpole; an Omani wedding tent, khaki drab on the outside but colourfully appliquéd within, serves as our meeting and mess tent, along with an ingenious toilet and shower block constructed from arish panels, recycled palettes and scaffolding poles. Our first task is to pitch our own tents and, thankfully, these are of the easy-to-use, high street variety. Putting mine up isn’t a problem but, unfortunately, having the common sense necessary to place it in the shade of a tree is. After 15 minutes mine is the only dome that stands shining in the midday sun. Mercifully, Biosphere has provided spare sleeping bags and mats and I quietly help myself to these when nobody else is looking. Not for the first time I’m reminded of how ill equipped I am for this trip, and how glad I am that we’re in the relatively benign surroundings of the DDCR.

Introductions reveal an international group of volunteers from France, Germany, Australia and the US, as well as Evelyn Brey, an Austrian osteopath and long-term resident of Dubai, who leapt at the opportunity of being able to holiday so differently while staying so close to home: “When I read about this expedition I thought, this is fantastic! I don’t have to travel anywhere, I get to experience the desert, and I’m going to learn something in the process.”

The group’s experience is equally varied but most are already well travelled. Tess Sansome, an insurance broker from San Francisco, is a Biosphere veteran from a previous leopard-spotting expedition in Oman while Vanhan Nguyen, a Vietnamese IT administrator, makes regular trips to the wilderness. “I live in Paris. I am not stressed, I do yoga, but I cannot live in big cities all year round.”

Our first day is spent learning about the skills, tools, and techniques we’ll need to identify, locate and record the wildlife we’ll be encountering in the field. We start gently with compasses, rangefinders, and a GPS before moving on to the more complex procedures for setting the motion cameras, bait and live traps that will hopefully provide us with data on Gordon’s wildcat, the most elusive of our target species. Nothing is too good for these kitties, and even though Biosphere policy confines us volunteers to a vegetarian diet, we’ll be using tinned, chilli-flavoured sardines, frozen quail entrails and cat-intoxicating valerian spray as bait in our attempt to get a closer look at this species whose survival is threatened with extinction in the wild.

By the end of the afternoon, I’m dizzy from the day’s vertiginous learning curve and it’s clear that I’m not the only person incapable of absorbing any more information. As if on cue, Simkins ends the session with some timely words of encouragement for the week ahead. “We are all trailblazers on this project because we haven’t done an intensive survey of our oryx before. Gather as much data as you can, come back each evening, we’ll chat about it and see how we can improve our survey technique as we go along.”

Our first evening’s camping introduces us to some of the reserve’s shyer nocturnal residents. Steve, a DDCR biologist with an ultraviolet torch, walks around the campsite shining the light over seemingly empty and innocuous patches of sand. This reveals small, fingernail-sized purple flecks of light that on closer inspection turn out to be baby scorpions. They are harmless and look like the kind of child’s toy that might come free in a packet of cornflakes, but are quite unlike their 15cm-long mother whom we find later the same evening, nestling at the base of a toilet. Thankfully, fatigue is a powerful thing and the sighting is a source of interest rather than alarm. I am careful to prop my shoes upright when I crawl inside my tent but nothing interferes with my much-needed sleep.

The pattern of our days quickly establishes itself. Dr Hammer wakes us the following morning by banging saucepan lids together and we eat breakfast, gather our equipment, and pack lunch before heading out into the reserve in small groups in our Land Rovers. Each morning the live traps will be checked to see if we have caught anything – Gordon’s wildcat, feral cats, desert foxes or otherwise – and each evening we’ll reset these with fresh bait and spray. During the intervening hours we’ll observe the oryx, record any other species we come across, and try not to get stuck in the sand. My first day is near perfect, but it sets a precedent that’s impossible to sustain. After an intensive training session on using the Land Rovers in the desert, we head into the southern sector of the reserve. We are in the best company – Simkins has spent the past 13 years at the DDCR – and we encounter species so often that we are soon forced to omit sightings from our species encounter sheets to achieve our main goal of the day. Our challenge is to set seven live traps and five camera traps before sundown.

We manage this, just, but in the meantime, we also see oryx, desert foxes, hares and even bustard, an animal I’ve only ever previously seen stuffed.

Simkins is a keen birdwatcher, and at one point, he sprints off across the dunes toward our Land Rover as a very large bird takes to the sky. As Simkins trains his camera on the target, the excitement in his voice is contagious. The bird is a juvenile golden eagle, this is maybe only the 14th sighting of the species in the UAE, and I have rarely felt so privileged. Unfortunately, not every day is so glorious and many are defined by the more mundane realities of expedition life. By the end of the week, the group has spent considerable time stuck in the sand, GPS devices have malfunctioned and some of the live traps have proved impossible to relocate. However, more than a month’s invaluable data has been collected and on the night after the group leaves, a Gordon’s wildcat is finally captured in one of the traps that we have set.

To the untrained eye, the landscape on either side of the DDCR’s 92km long chain-link fence seems almost identical, as both are sides are defined by steeply undulating dunes, baked gravel plains and patches of scrub, but in reality the truth could not be more different. To spend time inside the reserve, volunteering, is to take a trip through the looking-glass, from a landscape depopulated and degraded by hunting, urbanisation, overgrazing and reckless off-road driving, to one that sustains fragile desert habitats and wildlife in comparative abundance. The more I look the more I see and I’m not quite sure if this is an image of the desert as it was, never was, or how it might be, but I know I will never be able to look at it in quite the same way again. Maybe I am overtired, but the effect feels like an epiphany and, as I leave, I vow that this is an experience I will have to repeat.

The camp

Biosphere Expeditions will be running two week-long projects in conjunction with the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve in 2013. “Ways of the Desert: conserving Arabian oryx, Gordon’s wildcat and other species of the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve”, will run next year from January 12 to January 19 and January 20 to 27. A place on either project costs £980 (Dh5,710) per person for seven nights.

The contribution covers direct field costs such as transport, board and lodging as well as the post-expedition publication of research results. Six to 12 months after an expedition comes to an end, volunteers will receive a report with full details on how their contribution supported the programme and research work, as well the resulting scientific findings. Visit www.biosphere-expeditions.org/emirates for more information

This article originally appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.