Alien visitors or avant-garde installation? Mysterious monolith discovered in the Utah desert
A mysterious object resembling the freestanding plank sculptures of the late Minimalist artist John McCracken—or the alien-built monoliths in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey—has been discovered in a remote area of the Utah desert, prompting theories ranging from extraterrestrial visitation to avant-garde installation. ...
No artist has come forth to claim credit for the monolith yet, and David Zwirner, which represents McCracken, did respond to a request for comment at the time of this writing. There is no known record of the artist's work installed in the Utah desert, although McCracken did live in-between nearby northern New Mexico and New York until his death in 2011.
The wilderness of the Southwestern US has a rich and storied history of Land Art and especially for works that retain their magic and mystery by being largely inaccessible or challenging to locate, from Robert Smithson’s 1970 magnum opus Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake to Michael Heizer’s 1969 Double Negative near the Utah border in Nevada.