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Suddenly they appear in the middle of nowhere. Uninvited and enigmatic. And as suddenly as they appear, they suddenly disappear. Three to four meter tall face metal “growing” from the Utah desert to Romania and from Germany and Spain to New Mexico.
They are the mysterious sculptures that since November 18, when they first appeared, have provoked some theories about their origin and the identity of their creator, they have been a pole of attraction for art lovers but also simply strange, they have starred in campaigns advertising. and now they tend to turn into mania, although, according to some more extreme opinions, a scourge. Perhaps because as the days pass and the landscape becomes cloudy, with the pretenders of the paternity of the idea on the rise and the imitators multiplying, the famous “monoliths” now lose the aura of mystery that originally surrounded them and has begun their scattering around the world. to sound like a battered joke.
It all started when a helicopter pilot and his occupants, officials with the Wildlife Conservation Service whose mission was to count horned sheep, located a strange object in an inaccessible area of the Utah desert. When they got closer, they found it to be an obelisk, a prismatic metal construction with a triangular cross section and about 4 m high, similar to the one in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: The Space Odyssey.” It took a while for the image to go public, and within hours social media caught fire, and when the construction evoked a sci-fi movie, the first theories of extraterrestrial intervention began to emerge.
The dead sculptor
The coolest ones, on the other hand, only saw an artistic intervention and opened their doors to discover what artist style the monolith coincided with. And they ended up with the minimalist sculptor John McCracken or someone who wanted to imitate him. The contradictory statements of the artist gallery owner -who passed away in 2011- who one day declared that it was not a work by McCracken and the next claimed its authenticity, complicated the case and finally left the specific setting up in the air, as the artist’s son claimed that his father had confessed that he would like to put the works in secluded places so that people could discover them later. However, this scenario also sounds problematic as Google Earth data shows that the project was placed on the site between 2015 and 2016, that is, about five years after McCracken’s death.
Meanwhile, a similar monolith, as it was established to be called, though not a stone construction, appeared eight days later in the Romanian town of Pietra Nemt, a stone’s throw from an ancient fortress and within a protected area, with the authorities taking hexapine. . Two days later, a total of ten since the obelisk was located in Utah, a photographer who had managed to locate it in the desert to photograph it witnessed its demolition. A group of men, according to their testimony published in the New York Times, equipped with shovels in 15 minutes tore down the sculpture, which turned out to be an empty plywood box lined with aluminum foil.
In order not to conflict with them but also because he agreed with the removal of the obelisk, the photographer did not immortalize the men who did not wear masks, but one of his associates took a few frames with his mobile phone. The men were heard calling the monolith “garbage” and being interested in leaving no traces. And after loading the dismantled construction onto a cart, they disappeared overnight. The following day, one of them posted a video on social media of the destruction of the monolith, while in a statement a member of the same group attributed the movement to ecological reasons, claiming that they wanted to protect the area so much from the invasion of the sculpture as of prospective visitors to a pristine area.
And although the first monolith after four years in the Utah desert disappeared ten days after its location was revealed, its (roughly) clones continue to appear like mushrooms in different parts of the world. Of less than or equal height and not necessarily triangular in section, monoliths like other dihedral axes – like statues that fall from the sky, according to the ancient Greeks – surprise passersby in Germany, Holland, Great Britain, Spain, Colombia, New Mexico, California and Las Vegas.
The plaintiffs
And as the monolithomania continues, scenarios arise about who is behind the sculptures, some of which are motivated by profit and others by the glory of those who invent and distribute them. The first to appear was the New Mexico art collective “The Most Famous Artist,” which not only claims to be behind the Utah monolith, but also sells copies for $ 45,000 each. His own contribution to the project – and in particular to the monolith that appeared in Atacadero, California – claims to have another group of four artists, who after becoming enthusiastic about the original work and then seeing its “copy” in Romania, concluded that it should have a third and decided to be the ones to create it. But they did not expect that one day they would place it and the next group of men would replace it with a wooden cross singing “Christ is the King”, broadcasting their action live over the Internet. The result was that they returned and installed a new version of their original monolith.
As time passes and the monoliths appear and disappear within a few twenty-four hours, the power of the mystery that surrounds them seems to evaporate. And from an act of provocation or resistance that may have been the original intention of the creators, it ends up being exhausted in the commercial exploitation of the image (since its meaning is unknown) by automobile and fast food companies that exploited the global interest around enigmatic constructions aimed at promoting their products.
Given that the theories about alien work could only survive for a few hours and the quality of the monoliths could not be compared to that of important works of landscape art (land art), the creator who envied his fame (and his earnings) Banksy A graffiti activist who wanted to pursue a similar career as a sculptor, he did not seem to achieve his goal. And as Jonathan Jones, art critic for the British Guardian newspaper points out, “The proliferation of monoliths around the world may be clever, but as art it is not primitive and is a kitschy parody of modernist sculpture.” As time draws to the end of 2020, will the solution to this mystery be found or will it be added to so many absurdities this year?
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