The mysterious monolith — is it art?
By: James Biber
Tags: Ts, Design, Art, Creativity, UX

The mysterious monolith — is it art?

A Weird Monolith is Found in Utah Desert: “It’s probably art” officials say. [And now it’s gone]

“Weird Monolith, probably art”

That is the headline of a November 24 New York Times story.

Update: now that the ‘mysterious monolith’ has been removed, its conventionality has been revealed. And its lack of depth (in both senses of the word) is about the only surprise. It doesn’t change what I wrote, but it is a nicely wrapped up conclusion. My only question is why leave that single steel triangle?

Updated Update: this is why writing about current news is problematic…now that a number of these have appeared, disappeared, been replaced by wooden crosses or whatever ‘art criticism’ is next, the monolith(s) are becoming a lot less mysterious. They are now political/social/crowd-sourced/interactive/participatory but they are also, ironically, less ‘art’ (in my view) than when originally discovered.

They are now a brawl, and very little of that brawl is artful. They also used to be fun, and funny, but now are simply a headline that won’t go away!

Fortunately, this article isn’t just about the monolith(s) so it is still worth a read!

To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I may not know what art is (or even what is art) but I know it when I see it.” [Stewart was talking about defining pornography, but it seems to work when talking about art.]

Apparently we don’t know when something is art or not…This is definitely art. So why doesn’t everyone get that part right away?

a) People are visually and artistically illiterate

b) All they can think of is 2001: A Space Odyssey

c) It’s more fun to imagine this is an alien probe deep in the earth’s crust

d) They don’t think it’s art because they don’t like it

e) All of the above

It is an unmistakable nod to Stanley Kubrick’s black monolith, that appeared in seemingly Neolithic times, freaking out the monkeys and turning bones into weapons. So doesn’t that put it firmly in the ‘yes, art’ category? Apparently not quite.

2001: A Space Odyssey image of mysterious monolith surrounded by primates

Of all filmmakers, it is incontrovertible (and an unremarkable observation) that Kubrick made art. LACMA’s landmark exhibition (and it is, you know, an ART museum) should have put any doubts to rest, but maybe the mere popularity of the films injects some doubt into the proposition. But why? Art can’t be popular? Films are not art? Inscrutable parts of films are too challenging to be art?

The exhibition dedicated a set of rooms for each film he made, and some he didn’t make but planned. One planned but unmade film I discovered at the exhibition was ‘Aryan Papers’ based on Louis Begley’s book “Wartime Lies”, written while the then international lawyer was transforming himself into a respected and awarded author. He wrote the book living in a house I designed in the Hamptons (and still lives there, part time, after 40 years), something he was kind enough to write a short essay about for a book 13 years later.

The exhibition, in addition to being a remarkable and remarkably dense retrospective on Kubrick’s work, included an app that I sorely miss now that it has disappeared from my phone. The app included documents, images, letters, and other resources that didn’t just distill the show into an abbreviated format, but actually became its own exhibition, continuing years after the exhibit closed.

Kubrick’s correspondence alone form an exhibition unto itself, including letters:

Kubrick just checking…

Asking IBM for permission to use their brand as part of the invented computers. Not noted, after they declined, is the myth that HAL, the eventual name for the computer, is simply the letters in the alphabet that precede (H) I (A) B (L) M .

(H) (A) (L) . Asking a studio for some monstrous Mitchell BNC cameras ‘for sentimental reasons’ (when he actually used them to fit the huge Zeiss Planar lenses commissioned by NASA needed to shoot Barry Lyndon scenes in candlelight.)

Saul Bass sucking up to Kubrick praising 2001. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but Saul won’t be contradicting me, so I’m going with it.

Plus such gems like pics of the typewriter from The Shining, with an ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ sheet still in the platen. And the light blue dresses the twin sisters wore in those terrifying hotel interior scenes.

But enough reminiscing.

[as an aside, my wife grew up with her intellectually and developmentally disabled brother Richard. One day in 1968 Richard, who watched a LOT of TV, kept announcing that Kennedy had been shot. Carin told him to “stop reminiscing”…until she realized he was reporting on RFK’s assassination, not reminiscing about JFK’s!]

It is natural to make the connection to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but bizarre to discount the stainless steel pylon as not definitely art, but just ‘probably art’. It is art. Period.

It’s hard to get a detailed view of the Utah piece, but what we know is that it is, in form, an extruded triangle, not a four-sided but a three-sided volume, like a prism on end (a triangular prism, to be exact). The material and shape reference the St. Louis Arch as much as Stanley Kubrick.

One edge is pointing, like an arrow if you looked at it from above, to a vertical crevice in the massive rock formation behind it. It appears to be made of sheets riveted to a frame or bolted to the other panels. It is about 10’ high and its perfectly flat surface (no visible ‘oilcanning’ or buckling of the surface) belies a very carefully considered design and fabrication. It also fits perfectly, as some of the modern primates climbing around it note (not knowing how deep it goes!) into a pocket cut in the stone below, and that reinforces the idea that this was no amateur artist.

John McCracken, undated photo, with mini-monolith

David Zwirner, whose gallery represents John McCracken (who died in 2011) and believes this is definitely McCracken’s work. It’s not just the form, but informed by the artist’s belief in UFOs, time travel and extraterrestrial beings. That pretty much sealed it for me, but some in Zwirner’s gallery believe it is an homage to McCracken by an admiring artist.

McCracken work in polished metal

[n.b. a McCracken exhibition is scheduled for Spring 2021]

Lt. Nick Street, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety in Utah said the authorities were confident that “it’s somebody’s art installation, or an attempt at that” notes The New York Times.

So, now Department of Public safety officials are art critics? Is there anything that Americans won’t opine on, despite their obvious ignorance on a topic? A friend, a design writer, likes nothing more than to discuss movies she hasn’t seen, and we are all in on the joke. But this is something else.

“A resonance deflector”, a “satellite beacon” and an object “dropped by aliens” are just some of the alternative facts; as with other self-evident truths there is no lack of contrarians to firmly deny reality.

A majority of Republicans believe that Trump won the 2020 election, while less than 1/3 of all Americans believe in evolution. The percentage of Americans accepting Darwin decreases the more one attends church, until only 1% of weekly church attendees believe in evolution. Evolution. A theory as sound as Newton’s laws of motion (and as subject to continual refinement) is dismissed by 2/3 of Americans while accepted by 95%-99.9% of scientists (depending on the survey). And the list of denials of reality is endless; the Holocaust, AIDS, Climate Change, GMO’s, Vaccines, Covid-19. The list of false beliefs is equally bottomless; QAnon, Big Foot, Pizzagate, Flat Earth, Chem Trails, 5G, Birtherism, et. al.

Why?

Much has been written on the precise mechanisms that drive the acceptance of patently false information. Confirmation bias, belief perseverance, tribal identity and algorithms that tend to push online viewers to more and more extreme inputs, all conspire to reinforce a view, no matter its relationship to reality.

Pew Research graphic on international wealth vs prayer frequency

The US is an outlier in the global trend that the higher the per capita GDP the lower the frequency of daily prayer; we are alone in both wealth and high incidence of religious devotion. The US population also embraces, to an astonishing degree, the notion of American Individualism; the belief that the individual is the primary locus of agency.

Responsibility to a larger collective, and the collective’s responsibility to the individual, is less evident in the American psyche. I live, these days, in a small upstate New York town that is pretty evenly divided politically, and elections are routinely won and lost by fewer than 100 votes. One election in a nearby town was won by 1 vote. If anything reinforces the primacy of the individual an election won by a single vote would be it!

Our town has just tipped last year, for the very first time, to a Democratic party dominated town board. On the way out of office the departing Republicans passed, in secret, a 60% tax cut, crippling the tiny town’s finances. At a contentious town board meeting my neighbor, from across our small road, stood up to ask why everyone was so upset about a tax cut! Shouldn’t we all be happy to have a bit more money in our pockets? The town taxes are so minuscule that my ‘savings’ amounted to about $185. That is 60% of my total town tax (and just so you don’t gasp, other property taxes amount to something closer to $10,000).

An individual (and not a poor one by any means) was so dominated by his own greed that even the $185 that he had paid for years was too much to contribute to the common good. In a town that for most of the last 225 years has banded together to build schools, roads, recreational centers, and parks, at the direct expense of its citizens, has now devolved to the point where it takes 10 years to privately raise the money to build a new library. Town residents were once happy to assess themselves for the good of the town, but now even funding the town’s minimal services is less important than a few extra dollars of one’s own.