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Days after the discovery and rapid disappearance of two gleaming metallic monoliths half a world away, another towering structure has appeared, this time at the pinnacle of a trail in Southern California.
A monolith sits on the side of a hill in Stadium Park in Atascadero, California. Source: Associated Press
Its straight sides and height are similar to one discovered in the Utah desert and another found in Romania. Like those structures, the origin of the California building is also mysterious.
It’s on the top of a hill in Atascadero, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, KEYT-TV reported yesterday.
The tall, silver structure attracted hikers to the area after photos were posted on social media.
Another monolith discovered two weeks ago in the unearthly red rock country of Utah became a beacon of fascination around the world as it evoked the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” and drew hundreds of people to the remote location.
Two extreme sports athletes said they were part of a group that brought down the hollow metal structure because they were concerned about the damage the crowds of visitors were causing to the relatively intact site.
Authorities said the visitors razed the plants with their cars and left behind human waste.
A structure that appeared last week in Romania also disappeared.
Utah’s creation evoked famous pieces of land-art that dot the West. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is an earthmoving along the Great Salt Lake and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels are huge pieces of concrete in the desert.
Like those pieces, the monolith was fascinating in part because of its context in the landscape, said Whitney Tassie, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
“That’s a big, big part of land art in general, it’s this idea of an experience, of a journey,” he said.
The intense social media reaction to the monolith in the context of the punishing pandemic, along with the piece’s rapid disappearance, has become part of its history, he said. Police have said that the dismantling may not be illegal, as no one has claimed the structure as their own.
The still anonymous creator of the Utah monument did not follow in the footsteps of the land artists of the 1970s to obtain permission to do his works. Visits to these remote sites are now managed and monitored to avoid too much stress on the environment. Utah state and federal officials had also raised concerns about the encroachment of the area around the monolith.
“It’s good to think about our relationship with the land, which is ultimately what these kinds of projects do,” Tassie said. “Man’s impact on the environment front and center”.
