The Cultural Desert
Rumour and hearsay buzz around Dubai like flies in a jam jar. Speculation, once what developers did, is now what people there do about developers. Answers to the questions, however, that visitors here seem unanimously to be asking – ‘Is it true? Is it over? Has the project failed?’ – are nowhere to be found.
This is perhaps to be expected. We’ve seen again and again the contagious and corrosive power that lapses of confidence can have in financial enterprises around the world, and it is not surprising that people here are keeping their cards close to their chests. Many of the businesses here are owned or controlled by tight-ranked Arab families, who keep considerable distance from the wagging tongues of the cocktail party crowd. Nevertheless, they cannot disguise the fact that, while perhaps half of the buildings in Dubai seem to be unfinished, very little work appears to be going on. Cranes are rarely seen to move. Someone told me that half of the immigrant work force has left the country.
The most conspicuous development is taking place along the Sheikh Zayed Road, a 12-lane highway through the city on each side of which rows of many coloured, many shaped mirrored-glass skyscrapers line up. Driving along the road, it is easy to see that this development is only one block thick – beyond, the buildings are mostly four or five storeys instead of 40 or 50. A taxi driver told me that 20 years ago he remembers playing cricket on this road, the teams only occasionally having to stop play when a car approached through the desert. Now the rush hour traffic is dense and crawling. The half-completed Burj Dubai – for the moment, the tallest building in the world – rises nearby. Further south, past the indoor ski-slope, the Burj al Arab hotel is a landmark, looming out of the sea by Jumeirah Beach (Burj means ‘tower’ in Arabic). One rumour I heard is that it is forbidden to photograph it from the sea, owing to the unfortunate fact that while from land it resembles the billowing spinnaker of a ship, from the water it takes the shape of a massive crucifix. (Forbidden by whom exactly? Enforced how? And who are all these aquatic photographers anyway? The first page of a Google image search reveals this story, like so many here, to be apocryphal.)
Down the road a bit, one reaches the two iconic Palm resorts which pour out into the sea – the second even larger than the first. Still uncompleted and mostly uninhabited, I’m euphemistically told that they’re at their best seen from above, from a distance of a few thousand feet. Other areas try less hard to be flamboyant – particularly around the creek where the city began as a trading port in the 19th century – but throughout, the abundance of empty, sandy lots between buildings are reminders that the city was recently a desert and that, during its planning, the economy of space was never a consideration. There is no pedestrian infrastructure; a car is essential in order to travel between isolated complexes and buildings, which, as Shumon Basar has observed, very often have names that include the words village, city, land or world. Along with a huge number of beery expats, I spent a mercifully brief part of St Patrick’s day in Dubai’s ‘Irish Village’. Everywhere is the smell of high-strength adhesive and quick-drying emulsion.
For those who have never visited Dubai, this description may sound far fetched; for those who know the city however, I’m sure it sounds pedestrian and unimaginative. Also flapping around in the jam jar, however, along with the rumours and hearsay, are big fat clichés. It is clichés, rather than truths, on which the city builds its self-image. Dubai makes such good copy that the same lines get repeated through the international press ad infinitum. Here are three newspaper stories, published within a week of each other, which use almost identical phraseology to describe the notorious abandoned sports cars at Dubai’s airport, with ‘maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield’: The Times ; The New York Times ; The Guardian. For the record, while numbers are impossible to confirm, this phenomenon seems to be true. One brand new Mini Cooper was parked outside my hotel, caked in thick desert dust.
Rem Koolhaas, speaking on the opening day of the March Sessions, the talks programme of the Sharjah Biennial, suggested that the West’s eagerness to announce the failure of Dubai is premature. He admits deep ambivalence about the United Arab Emirates in general; but while he acknowledges its many imperfections, especially the construction industry’s exploitation of thousands of immigrant workers on very low wages, he is drawn to the sense of possibility created by a country with vast wealth and ambition, and an appetite for the new. Mike Davis’ description, in his book Evil Paradises, of Dubai as ‘Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the shores of Araby’, he finds simplistic. Koolhaas looks instead to the city’s reflection of officially sanctioned contemporary architecture – either through second-rate knock-offs of major new buildings around the world, or through a kind of ‘diffusion line’ version by the architect of the original. The result he sees simply as a mirror held up to the West – and hence, however decadent, hubristic or grotesque we may find it, impossible to ignore or dismiss.
Of course, despite this semblance of critical objectivity, Koolhaas is already highly invested in the area. His company, The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has plans to open a branch in Dubai. While one proposal of his – to create a huge, neutral oblong of a building to counter Dubai’s chaotic skyline – was not accepted, Koolhaas has spent a vast amount of his time and energy surveying the city, and analyzing its possible future directions. OMA’s hugely ambitious mixed-use development, Waterfront City, designed to stand on a 1.5-billion-square-foot rectangle of reclaimed land connected by bridges to the mainland, is said to be currently paused.
Also apparently on the shelf is the company’s involvement in the expansion of the Sharjah Art Museum; someone told me that the initial plan was to build ‘the biggest museum in the world’. All the Emirates now seem to be competing with Abu Dhabi, where the museums on the mixed-use Saadiyat Island development include a franchised Louvre (designed by Jean Nouvel), a new Guggenheim (by Frank Gehry) and Norman Foster’s Sheikh Zayed National Museum (Zayed was president of the UAE from its inception in 1971 to 2004). All are currently due to open in 2014. There is a whisper on the wind however that Doha, the capital city of Qatar, is planning to follow up the opening of I.M. Pei’s spectacular Museum of Islamic Art last November with the announcement of a slew of new museums that would eclipse even Abu Dhabi’s. Dubai’s own bid to compete in this game of museum Top Trumps – the Universal Museums project, a multi-disciplinary cultural zone sharing collections with institutions in Germany – is also currently shrouded in secrecy, many people concluding that it too has been halted by the crisis.
Naturally, the concern has been raised that one Guggenheim does not an art world make. On these grounds, the curators of the Sharjah Biennial, the Middle East’s best-established biennial whose host city is unique in the area for having a developed network of practicing cultural producers, decided this year to spend much of their generous budget on new commissions, and a talks and live events programme. Jack Persekian, the biennial’s artistic director, stated that the important thing for him was not so much the exhibition as everything that happened around it. The Dubai Art Fair, which coincided with the opening of the biennial, aims to cultivate Dubai’s rapidly growing art market (there are already around 50 commercial galleries in the city, of widely varying quality and ambition). Despite the expanding market, the dearth of state funding for the arts and high cost of living makes the city an extremely difficult place in which to work professionally as an artist. This year, for the first time, the United Arab Emirates will host a pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Its curator, Tirdad Zolghadr, says he is drawing on the model of a World’s Fair to create a display which aims to present the best of the UAE: a solo exhibition by the Dubai-born photographer Lamya Gargash, a ‘showcase’ of work by major artists from the country, architectural models, videos and text panels.
Not dissimilar is a splinter project by Catherine David for Venice that is being termed the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) Platform. David however will spread her net across the entire gulf region, concentrating not solely on UAE artists, let alone practitioners from Abu Dhabi, in order to create what she terms a ‘dispositive’ of Arab art. Despite emphatic denials from all concerned, it is not hard to see these parallel enterprises as reflecting the historical and economic rivalry between Abu Dhabi, which is rich in natural oil reserves and which has one eye firmly on its long term future, and Dubai, which relies hugely on foreign investment to fund its frantic expansion. David is dismissive of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island development, stating that we have entered a ‘post museum culture’. She is far more excited about her own involvement in the planning of an interdisciplinary cultural centre in Qasr al Hosn, an ancient fort in the historical heart of Abu Dhabi. This project will, she hopes, like the Abu Dhabi Platform for Art, directly benefit the cultural production of the area. Unlike the steroid-swollen initiatives in Dubai, this seems a far more organic, prudent and far-sighted way to press forward toward the horizon of the future.
Rumour and hearsay buzz around Dubai like flies in a jam jar. Speculation, once what developers did, is now what people there do about developers. Answers to the questions, however, that visitors here seem unanimously to be asking – ‘Is it true? Is it over? Has the project failed?’ – are nowhere to be found.
This is perhaps to be expected. We’ve seen again and again the contagious and corrosive power that lapses of confidence can have in financial enterprises around the world, and it is not surprising that people here are keeping their cards close to their chests. Many of the businesses here are owned or controlled by tight-ranked Arab families, who keep considerable distance from the wagging tongues of the cocktail party crowd. Nevertheless, they cannot disguise the fact that, while perhaps half of the buildings in Dubai seem to be unfinished, very little work appears to be going on. Cranes are rarely seen to move. Someone told me that half of the immigrant work force has left the country.
The most conspicuous development is taking place along the Sheikh Zayed Road, a 12-lane highway through the city on each side of which rows of many coloured, many shaped mirrored-glass skyscrapers line up. Driving along the road, it is easy to see that this development is only one block thick – beyond, the buildings are mostly four or five storeys instead of 40 or 50. A taxi driver told me that 20 years ago he remembers playing cricket on this road, the teams only occasionally having to stop play when a car approached through the desert. Now the rush hour traffic is dense and crawling. The half-completed Burj Dubai – for the moment, the tallest building in the world – rises nearby. Further south, past the indoor ski-slope, the Burj al Arab hotel is a landmark, looming out of the sea by Jumeirah Beach (Burj means ‘tower’ in Arabic). One rumour I heard is that it is forbidden to photograph it from the sea, owing to the unfortunate fact that while from land it resembles the billowing spinnaker of a ship, from the water it takes the shape of a massive crucifix. (Forbidden by whom exactly? Enforced how? And who are all these aquatic photographers anyway? The first page of a Google image search reveals this story, like so many here, to be apocryphal.)
Down the road a bit, one reaches the two iconic Palm resorts which pour out into the sea – the second even larger than the first. Still uncompleted and mostly uninhabited, I’m euphemistically told that they’re at their best seen from above, from a distance of a few thousand feet. Other areas try less hard to be flamboyant – particularly around the creek where the city began as a trading port in the 19th century – but throughout, the abundance of empty, sandy lots between buildings are reminders that the city was recently a desert and that, during its planning, the economy of space was never a consideration. There is no pedestrian infrastructure; a car is essential in order to travel between isolated complexes and buildings, which, as Shumon Basar has observed, very often have names that include the words village, city, land or world. Along with a huge number of beery expats, I spent a mercifully brief part of St Patrick’s day in Dubai’s ‘Irish Village’. Everywhere is the smell of high-strength adhesive and quick-drying emulsion.
For those who have never visited Dubai, this description may sound far fetched; for those who know the city however, I’m sure it sounds pedestrian and unimaginative. Also flapping around in the jam jar, however, along with the rumours and hearsay, are big fat clichés. It is clichés, rather than truths, on which the city builds its self-image. Dubai makes such good copy that the same lines get repeated through the international press ad infinitum. Here are three newspaper stories, published within a week of each other, which use almost identical phraseology to describe the notorious abandoned sports cars at Dubai’s airport, with ‘maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield’: The Times ; The New York Times ; The Guardian. For the record, while numbers are impossible to confirm, this phenomenon seems to be true. One brand new Mini Cooper was parked outside my hotel, caked in thick desert dust.
Rem Koolhaas, speaking on the opening day of the March Sessions, the talks programme of the Sharjah Biennial, suggested that the West’s eagerness to announce the failure of Dubai is premature. He admits deep ambivalence about the United Arab Emirates in general; but while he acknowledges its many imperfections, especially the construction industry’s exploitation of thousands of immigrant workers on very low wages, he is drawn to the sense of possibility created by a country with vast wealth and ambition, and an appetite for the new. Mike Davis’ description, in his book Evil Paradises, of Dubai as ‘Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the shores of Araby’, he finds simplistic. Koolhaas looks instead to the city’s reflection of officially sanctioned contemporary architecture – either through second-rate knock-offs of major new buildings around the world, or through a kind of ‘diffusion line’ version by the architect of the original. The result he sees simply as a mirror held up to the West – and hence, however decadent, hubristic or grotesque we may find it, impossible to ignore or dismiss.
Of course, despite this semblance of critical objectivity, Koolhaas is already highly invested in the area. His company, The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has plans to open a branch in Dubai. While one proposal of his – to create a huge, neutral oblong of a building to counter Dubai’s chaotic skyline – was not accepted, Koolhaas has spent a vast amount of his time and energy surveying the city, and analyzing its possible future directions. OMA’s hugely ambitious mixed-use development, Waterfront City, designed to stand on a 1.5-billion-square-foot rectangle of reclaimed land connected by bridges to the mainland, is said to be currently paused.
Also apparently on the shelf is the company’s involvement in the expansion of the Sharjah Art Museum; someone told me that the initial plan was to build ‘the biggest museum in the world’. All the Emirates now seem to be competing with Abu Dhabi, where the museums on the mixed-use Saadiyat Island development include a franchised Louvre (designed by Jean Nouvel), a new Guggenheim (by Frank Gehry) and Norman Foster’s Sheikh Zayed National Museum (Zayed was president of the UAE from its inception in 1971 to 2004). All are currently due to open in 2014. There is a whisper on the wind however that Doha, the capital city of Qatar, is planning to follow up the opening of I.M. Pei’s spectacular Museum of Islamic Art last November with the announcement of a slew of new museums that would eclipse even Abu Dhabi’s. Dubai’s own bid to compete in this game of museum Top Trumps – the Universal Museums project, a multi-disciplinary cultural zone sharing collections with institutions in Germany – is also currently shrouded in secrecy, many people concluding that it too has been halted by the crisis.
Naturally, the concern has been raised that one Guggenheim does not an art world make. On these grounds, the curators of the Sharjah Biennial, the Middle East’s best-established biennial whose host city is unique in the area for having a developed network of practicing cultural producers, decided this year to spend much of their generous budget on new commissions, and a talks and live events programme. Jack Persekian, the biennial’s artistic director, stated that the important thing for him was not so much the exhibition as everything that happened around it. The Dubai Art Fair, which coincided with the opening of the biennial, aims to cultivate Dubai’s rapidly growing art market (there are already around 50 commercial galleries in the city, of widely varying quality and ambition). Despite the expanding market, the dearth of state funding for the arts and high cost of living makes the city an extremely difficult place in which to work professionally as an artist. This year, for the first time, the United Arab Emirates will host a pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Its curator, Tirdad Zolghadr, says he is drawing on the model of a World’s Fair to create a display which aims to present the best of the UAE: a solo exhibition by the Dubai-born photographer Lamya Gargash, a ‘showcase’ of work by major artists from the country, architectural models, videos and text panels.
Not dissimilar is a splinter project by Catherine David for Venice that is being termed the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) Platform. David however will spread her net across the entire gulf region, concentrating not solely on UAE artists, let alone practitioners from Abu Dhabi, in order to create what she terms a ‘dispositive’ of Arab art. Despite emphatic denials from all concerned, it is not hard to see these parallel enterprises as reflecting the historical and economic rivalry between Abu Dhabi, which is rich in natural oil reserves and which has one eye firmly on its long term future, and Dubai, which relies hugely on foreign investment to fund its frantic expansion. David is dismissive of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island development, stating that we have entered a ‘post museum culture’. She is far more excited about her own involvement in the planning of an interdisciplinary cultural centre in Qasr al Hosn, an ancient fort in the historical heart of Abu Dhabi. This project will, she hopes, like the Abu Dhabi Platform for Art, directly benefit the cultural production of the area. Unlike the steroid-swollen initiatives in Dubai, this seems a far more organic, prudent and far-sighted way to press forward toward the horizon of the future.
