Mysterious desert obelisk: Art or ‘glorified vandalism’?
The BLM won’t be “hasty” in determining the future of the illegally
installed pillar, an official says, citing the joy it has brought to people.
Several years ago — likely sometime in 2016 — one or more artists carrying
well over 100 pounds of stainless steel hiked into a remote alcove in San
Juan County, expertly cut a hole into the sandstone with a rock saw and
erected a three-sided obelisk beneath a narrow pour-off.
The sculpture was carefully placed away from roads and out of sight from any
distant vantage point in an obscure canyon, which, in December 2016, would
become part of Bears Ears National Monument until President Donald Trump
shrank its boundaries. For four years it sat. If a few wandering hikers or
cowboys happened to stumble across it, they kept the discovery to
themselves.
A nearly 10-foot-tall steel sculpture that was discovered in a remote canyon
in San Juan County in mid-November has drawn attention from around the
world.
That all changed last week when biologists doing a bighorn sheep survey for
the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources spotted the shining structure from a
helicopter and filmed the crew circling the perfectly plumb construction
tucked into its redrock alcove. The photos were posted online Monday by the
Utah Department of Public Safety — complete with an extraterrestrial tease —
and speculation about the object soon became a global internet sensation.
The discovery has been covered in publications from the South China Morning
Post to The New York Times to Al-Jazeera and has drawn comments from all
corners, including Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show.” Many noted the object’s
resemblance to the monolith in the famous opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s
“2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“What could it mean? Is it aliens making first contact? Is it a
site-specific art installation that examines the dynamic tension between man
and nature?” Colbert said in a recent opening monologue. “Or is it a really
poorly installed stainless steel backsplash. Utah is the ultimate open
concept kitchen.”
On Tuesday, a host from the Discovery Channel’s “Diesel Brothers” show flew
a helicopter to the site in Lockhart Basin, speculating on camera that he
could be the first to reach the sculpture since the biologists. When he
landed, however, others had already beat him to it — some 30 people
throughout the day — who had arrived by ATV, e-bike, Jeep and dirt bike.
On Wednesday, a similar-sized crowd congregated at the structure. Ryan
Quiggle and Elliott Evans, two students at Brigham Young University, drove
for a dozen hours to reach the obelisk and make it back to their graveyard
shift at the Missionary Training Center in Provo. “ It was definitely
aliens,” Quiggle joked, rapping on the stainless steel with his knuckles to
produce a sound that indicated there was foam inside.
The sculpture measures 9 feet, 7 inches from the custom-cut hole in the rock
to its top. The three sides are just under 2 feet wide and joined with
rivets. A ribbon of silicon caulk runs around its base.
“It looks like it could have been assembled by a single person,” said Brad
Zercoe, a 30-year-old engineer from San Jose, Calif., who was on vacation in
the area when he saw the news about the sculpture and decided to go find it.
“Each of the pieces could have been carried in separately.”
Bureau of Land Management officials say the piece was illegally installed,
but they have no plans to remove it in the near future.
“I can assure the public that we aren’t going to be hasty in our decision
about the future of the structure,” said BLM spokeswoman Kimberly Finch. ”We
also are enjoying the conversations, the inspiration, the fun that people
are having with it. We completely encourage that. So we hope people will
continue to have fun with it and to be safe as far as accessing the site.”
The agency is investigating how the obelisk got there. Ordinarily, any
moving of earth or placing fixtures on public land requires a review under
the National Environmental Policy Act. Last summer, someone illegally
erected a political flag over U.S. Highway 40, which the BLM took down
promptly, according to Finch. Even if the obelisk qualifies as art, the BLM
doesn’t want to see similar installations elsewhere without proper approval.
“We don’t want people to be inspired to do this on their own,” Finch said.
“There’s a process. It has to be safe.”
While some critics of the sculpture have called it “litter” and “glorified
vandalism,” multiple visitors Wednesday worried the obelisk itself would be
marked up by graffiti. Others made too many bad alien jokes about being
probed.
Eye of the beholder?
Humor aside, however, historian Patricia Limerick believes the object is art
that should be taken seriously. To her, it fits into Utah’s tradition of
land art that began with ancient Native American rock art and culminated
with Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” on the Great Salt Lake’s north shore.
“Art doesn’t always have to be in the control of museums. You can do things
that are art that are way, way beyond the boundaries of a gallery,” said
Limerick, who directs the University
of Colorado’s Center of the American West. “That’s one of the things I have
enjoyed about the rise of land art in the 1960s.”
But how do you know when an object installed in nature is art?
“Welcome to the question that the humanities have struggled with for
centuries,” Limerick said. To her, the apparent deliberateness of the
obelisk’s construction and placement on the landscape qualify it as a piece
of art.
The object is assembled from precision-milled stainless steel, but it bears
no inscriptions or other identifying features, according to Lt. Nick Street
of the Utah Department of Public Safety.
“Somebody would have had to really do some planning,” he said, “and have the
will and desire to carry all this stuff, along with some pretty precise
cutting equipment that they used to cut out the rock base.”
The triangular hole cut in the rock perfectly matches the dimension of the
obelisk.
“As sturdy as the thing is, I would guess that it would have to have at
least a foot and a half, if not more, of the monolith down inside of it,”
Street said. “The other thing is it’s perfectly plumbed. It’s exactly 90
degrees to the surface and perfectly level on top.”
These indicators are more in line with art than a mere stunt, according to
Limerick.
“It’s not just something thrown together, accidental, or done in a
distracted moment. The way it’s embedded in the rock is the furthest thing
away from that,” she said. “There is really an enormously powerful dialogue
between a person looking at it and thinking, ‘Which one of my fellow human
beings did this and what is it the person was thinking, feeling, dreaming,
aspiring, and what message are we receiving from this?’ That is a pretty
exciting trip to go on if you buy the ticket for that.”
One theory gaining traction is that the obelisk is the work of the sculptor
John McCracken or one of his students, who may have installed it after the
artist’s death in 2011. David Zwirner, a prominent New York City art dealer
who represents McCracken, suspects the object is connected to the artist who
lived in Santa Fe, N.M., at the end of his life.
“The gallery is divided on this. I believe this is definitely by John,”
Zwirner said in a statement. “Who would have known that 2020 had yet another
surprise for us? Just when we thought we had seen it all. Let’s go see it.”
The California-born McCracken was famous for minimalist sculptures of
geometrical precision. After the release of Kubrick’s famous film, it was
widely though incorrectly assumed that McCracken designed the monolith
worshipped by apelike pre-humans in the opening scene, according to his
obituary.
(Although the Utah sculpture has been most commonly called a “monolith” in
news coverage, Utah’s former state archaeologist Kevin Jones has pointed out
that’s a misnomer; monoliths are cut from a single piece of stone.) If the
object’s discovery accomplishes anything, Limerick observed, at least it
provides a diversion from the Trump presidency, the pandemic and the
faltering economy. During times of global trouble, the obelisk is a reminder
the world is still full of wonder.
“Whoever the artist is, we are in that person’s debt for saying, ‘Think
about something else, folks. Why don’t you think about something else?’” she
said. “This is really great that I turn a page [of the newspaper] and I’m
asked to think about something that has nothing to do with the usual stuff
we are going around in circles on.”
‘Bring Windex’
If it was harder to imagine the object beamed down by a UFO while standing
beside it, several visitors noted the care that went into its placement and
construction: the precise alignment with the watercourse, the aesthetically
pleasing contrast of metal and rock, and its hidden location that brings the
piece into the realm of performance art. “It’s surreal to see it,” said JP
Baker, Zercoe’s friend. “I’m glad I got here before the T-shirt stand was
installed.”
In just a few days, visitors had already left more than a few marks on the
sculpture. The top two rivets on one side were snapped off in an apparent
attempt to peer inside.
Its surface was marked with fingerprint smears and a streak of blood,
possibly left by someone who cut themselves on the sharp metal edges while
trying to climb on top.
“Bring Windex if you want to get a great photo,” advised Mark Trunzo, a
guide from a nearby town who approached the site Wednesday by ATV.
Aside from who put the object in the desert, the big question is what will
the BLM decide to do with the sculpture, which was embedded illegally into
publicly owned land. The law and policies point toward its eventual removal.
Yet it can be seen standing in that remote alcove in a satellite image dated
to October 2016, causing no known harm before it became an internet
fixation, so what would be the point of extracting it?
While officials ponder how to proceed, they are cautioning people against
visiting the object out of concern they could get stranded in a remote spot
while searching for it or could damage the land if they come in large
numbers. A tow truck was already in the area Wednesday.
“This is not an improved site. There’s no restrooms, there’s no trail signs.
It has the potential for people to get into trouble,” Finch said. “You have
a situation where something’s gone internationally viral and then you have a
large impact of people going out on a site that is not prepared for that
kind of visitation.”
Limerick hopes the BLM allows it to remain to continue challenging the
public’s imagination.
“This is refreshing in ways that art is supposed to be,” she said. “It’s not
shouting, it’s not saying, ‘Look at me.’ It doesn’t seem to be bragging.
What I’m liking about it more and more and more is, this is historic. It is
not just an event, a thing you take a picture and move on. It’s a dynamic
story in which we are all invited to participate.”
Limerick said it reminds her of the rock towers stacked by anonymous artists
in the desert, a practice federal land managers frown upon. But unlike the
rock stacks that can be scattered back on the ground, the obelisk is drilled
into the landscape; removing it will leave a hole, both physically and
metaphorically.
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