Looks to me, amor, more like the head of a tortoise...
Looks to me, amor, more like the head of a tortoise...
Maybe I have a lack of imagination, but I still can't see it. I even looked through the video I posted above your comment.
Yes, we know the following! :)
- Everyone and his dog now knows exactly where it is.
- One side (or vertex?) is aligned precisely to magnetic north.
- It has rivets, so it appears to be hollow.
- One YouTube comment said: "From the sound of him hitting on it, it sounds about like 18 gauge sheet metal, maybe 12 gauge."
- There's speculation that there may be others.
COULD THIS BE THE ANSWER ?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fq1wks21Dc8
Credit to "STRANGE UNIVERSE YOUTUBE CHANNEL"
John Harvey McCracken was a minimalist artist. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and New York. Died in April 2011. This may have been his creation waiting for others to discover it.
To answer Le Chat: The head does look similar to a Tortoise; however, the top shell is missing and you cannot see the RIBS of a Tortoise and its legs are entirely different to the one the lizard has. Also, the Video I saw has been altered and chopped up. WHY?
There were other interesting looking, possibly animal heads, all jumbled up around the lizard. This is common in such sites. It is as if some disaster tumbled them all together with mud and rocks. Sorry to interject another topic here, but it was a perfect opportunity to bring prehistoric earth happenings to people's attention.
https://heise.cloudimg.io/width/2896...19dc5635af.jpg
The Canyon May 2015 (left) und October 2016 (right).
So put up pretty recently.
Thanks for that clarification, uzn. I did wonder if the object was visible from Google Earth, or whatever is used for such views.
I wonder how close and whether there is any connection to the Skinwalker Ranch?
John Harvey McCracken (December 9, 1934 – April 8, 2011) obituary:
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/atta...chmentid=45277
Minimalist artist whose bold, shiny creations reflected their surroundings
Bright, 2006, a stainless-steel work by John McCracken. Photograph: David Zwirner, New York
It is sometimes said that Stanley Kubrick derived the mysterious monolith in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey from the steles – upright stones, slabs or columns – in the art of the American west coast minimalist John McCracken, who has died aged 76. The leitmotif of the 1968 film was the portentous theme of Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra; of McCracken's work, the hip music of the Beach Boys would be about right. The colour of the monolith in 2001 was louring black; McCracken did black too, but glowing with good health in the same spirit as his bubblegum pinks.
McCracken said that surfboards were in the back of his mind while he worked pigment on to what he called his planks (which they frequently were) until he attained the high-gloss finish of an automobile. His aim was the polar opposite of Frank Lloyd Wright and the American arts and crafts movement: instead of humanising mass production, he laboured as a craftsman to reproduce the finish of mass-produced articles.
"What you see is what you get," although an early maxim of advanced design software, was often heard from the mouths of minimalists as well. The solemn breed of critic who gravitates towards minimal art argues that by standing on the floor, but leaning against the wall, the planks bridge the gap between sculpture and painting, an observation that everyone else recognises as piffle.
The planks do something, but the something is intrinsic to the qualities McCracken invests them with, beautiful colour and a high shine. What happens next is a happy conjunction with the space they are placed in, and they are at their best when the space combines clean lines, white walls, pale grey floors and top lighting – such as David Zwirner's gallery in Manhattan, where McCracken had the last of a series of shows in September 2010 and where the highly buffed shine picked up the geometry of floor and wall, as much in the candy colours as in the mirrored steel and the glowing blacks.
The reflections on the steles and poles and cubes standing in series or leaning against the wall always make the work seem transparent, a disconcerting quality that is a street's distance from the severe sequences of boxes by Donald Judd or the inert bricks of Carl Andre.
You would imagine that there are easier ways of making a living than all this drudgery, but perhaps McCracken picked up this gene from his father who, when he was not a cattle rancher, was an engineer in Berkeley, California, where John was born.
He grew up in northern California, where he graduated from high school before serving for four years with the US navy. He then studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. There, he married his first wife, with whom he had two sons, David and Patrick.
https://vimeo.com/437970097
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-...ormat&fit=max&
McCracken was lean and good-looking, with a touch of Clint Eastwood about him. Photograph: Joe Goode/David Zwirner, New YorkIt was the 1950s, so the obligatory style was abstract expressionism, but McCracken worked his way backwards to the example of Stuart Davis, the American modernist whose most famous painting was Lucky Strike (1921), a precursor of Claes Oldenburg's pop art. Pop was the area where McCracken made his next raid, not for the content but for an abstraction from it, the bold configuration and the comic-book colours; an abstraction that he finally adapted to work in relief.
When he had a highly popular exhibition at the Edinburgh festival in 2009, McCracken was asked to describe his show in five words. He replied: "Minimal, maximal, 3D, colour, space." Four of those categories are common to a lot of post-second world war art; maximal referred to the paintings that McCracken made intermittently – surfaces of intricate devices based, he said, on Hindu mandalas (circular designs symbolising the universe).
McCracken was lean and good-looking, with a touch of Clint Eastwood about him, and his gait was like a film star's playing a cowboy. Maybe that came from his father. As he became successful on both the west and east coasts (not to mention London, where the Lisson Gallery has spaces as sympathetic to McCracken's art as Zwirner's in Manhattan), he lived alternately in New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He is survived by his second wife, Gail Barringer, who is also an artist; his sons, David and Patrick; a stepdaughter, Suzanne; his sisters, Margaret and Pamela; and three step-grandchildren.
• John Harvey McCracken, artist, born 9 December 1934; died 8 April 2011
November 20, 2014 By Jay
Reflections on the Monolith: Kubrick, McCracken, Zeppelin, Nothing
https://www.zinzin.com/wp-content/up...olith-apes.jpg
https://www.zinzin.com/wp-content/up...ank-viewer.jpg
https://www.zinzin.com/wp-content/up...ence-cover.jpg
Images from top to bottom: 1) Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Monolith with apes; 2) John McCracken, Nine Planks IV (1974), with viewer; 3) Led Zeppelin, Presence (1976) album cover;
The artist John McCracken (1934–2011), who I had the privilege to know and work with as an undergraduate art student, began making his famous leaning “plank” sculptures and freestanding “monoliths” in the mid-1960s, before Stanley Kubrick’s famous monolith appeared in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). McCracken apparently didn’t care for the connection, as noted here in this William Poundstone review of the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), November 1, 2012–June 30, 2013, which made the connection by including one of McCracken’s iconic planks:LACMA has added a few more generally related works by better-known artists. A John McCracken plank sculpture, Nine Planks IV (1974) appears in the 2001 gallery in lieu of a monolith. McCracken produced his first planks at just about the time that Kubrick and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke were adapting Clarke’s 1951 story, “The Sentinel,” into the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. In Clarke’s original story, the alien artifact is a tetrahedron. In the screenplay it became a black monolith of 1:4:9 proportions. It’s unlikely that Kubrick/Clarke knew of McCracken, or vice-versa. For years afterward, McCracken was annoyed by comparisons of his art to the 2001 monolith. He was not the first L.A. artist to feel steamrollered by the movie business.He may have been annoyed with the 2001 monolith comparison, but McCracken was very much into such topics as space and time travel, extra-terrestrial beings, and psychic phenomena. In his 2011 obituary of John McCracken, the art critic Jerry Saltz wrote:
[McCracken’s] remarkable exhibition at David Zwirner in 2006 consisted of tall, black, shiny columns that had the presence of sentinels or guideposts and seemed to mark some kind of landing strip for extraterrestrials or UFOs, both of which he spoke of often. These almost-perfect freestanding keepers-of-metaphysical-secrets and celestial-navigation devices made Chelsea slip away and other worlds seem possible, even probable, as I entered a blessed-out dimension where these obdurate things, with the bearing of basalt Egyptian columns, became abstract angels in the architecture. I thought of Wallace Stevens’s writing about “a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that also exists.” A physical fullness filled the almost empty room.Eight years after 2001 came the Led Zeppelin album Presence, with a cover by Hipgnosis, the art-design collective that created the cover art for many rock albums from 1968-1982, including the Pink Floyd’s iconic Dark Side of the Moon album. The Wikipedia page for the Presence album tells the story of the album design and the mysterious “object” featured in multiple tongue-in-cheek photographs:
McCracken kept what he called a diary of “Remote Viewing & Psychic Traveling,” in which he recorded contacting “aliens,” “high-minded beings,” “the ghost of my grandfather,” and of being “in a spaceship with a female copilot…approaching earth,” seeing “huge, spider-like creatures.” He concluded that these creatures were “expressions of fear coming from the human race.” All this, he wrote, had “the feeling of home, a good feeling.” It’s no wonder that many thought that the monolith featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey was a McCracken sculpture.
The cover and inside sleeve of this album, created by Hipgnosis, features various images of people interacting with a black obelisk-shaped object. Inside the album sleeve, the item is referred to simply as “The Object.” It was intended to represent the “force and presence” of Led Zeppelin. In the liner notes of the first Led Zeppelin boxed set, Page explained:https://www.zinzin.com/wp-content/up...th-bedroom.jpg
There was no working title for the album. The record-jacket designer said ‘When I think of the group, I always think of power and force. There’s a definite presence there.’ That was it. He wanted to call it Obelisk. To me, it was more important what was behind the obelisk. The cover is very tongue-in-cheek, to be quite honest. Sort of a joke on [the film] 2001. I think it’s quite amusing.
The background used in the cover photograph is of an artificial marina that was installed inside London’s Earl’s Court Arena for the annual Earl’s Court Boat Show that was held in the winter of 1974–75. This was the same venue where the band played a series of concerts a few months after the boat show, in May 1975.
In 1977 Hipgnosis and George Hardie were nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of best album package.
Ultimately, this scenic detour into the world of the monolith arrives at Nothing, a smallish, nicely-finished black rectangular block of sculpture, with a perfect name. The promise of presence has arrived at the evocation of absence, of Nothing.
Let’s conclude this journey with another Kubrick-McCracken pairing. Top: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Monolith in the Louis XVI-style bedroom in space; Bottom: John McCracken, three column sculptures, from left to right: Luster (2006), Stardust (2006), and Ring (2006), installation view of the 2009 solo exhibition John McCracken at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; image courtesy David Zwirner gallery.
https://www.zinzin.com/wp-content/up...ck-columns.jpg
John McCracken's ART
View highlights of this Artist Talk in which Nan Curtis discusses John McCracken's Black Box, 1965.
We Found The (Alleged) "Alien" Monolith In The Utah Desert!
source
UPDATE: No, It’s Not McCracken Art. Metallic Monolith Still A Mystery in Southern Utah Rocky Wilderness.
November 27, 2020 Albuquerque, New Mexico – In the past 24 hours, a Reddit post appeared with latitude/longitude information of the exact location of the tall, silver monolith that was recently found by Utah state wildlife and public safety officers on November 18, 2020, when they were counting bighorn sheep in the rugged, reddish rocks of southern Utah. The Reddit user, Tim Slane, who posted the coordinates, said he found them by tracking the UtahDPS helicopter until it went off radar. Slane concluded the helicopter had landed and posted the location at Reddit.
Now, a 33-year-old former U. S. Army infantry officer, who saw the new Reddit location information, also found aerial map comparisons of the lat/long one year apart from August 2015 when there was NO monolith — to October 2016 when there WAS the monolith.
This means that the artist some insisted was the answer, John Harvey McCracken, could not be responsible because he died on April 8, 2011, five years before the October 2016 photo, which allegedly is the first factual evidence of the silver monolith’s appearance at the southern Utah site.
CONTINUE: https://www.earthfiles.com/2020/11/2...ky-wilderness/
Looks like the monolith disappeared was removed during the night of the 27th:
https://ksltv.com/449932/blm-utah-mo...of%20Nov.%2027.
How odd............
...and it's gone !
...and it's back!!!.... this time in Romania...
https://www.ladbible.com/news/news-m...ZZxJ993qW7zbmEQuote:
Mysterious Monolith Similar To One Found In Utah Appears On Romanian Hillside
JESS HARDIMAN
Last updated 14:34, Monday 30 November 2020 GMT
A metal monolith identical to the one recently found in Utah has appeared on a hillside in Romania, just metres away from a historic fortress.
https://images.ladbible.com/resize?t...9&extend=white
The structure was found on BatcaDoamnei Hill in the city of Piatra Neamt, which is situated in Romania's north-eastern Neamt County, on 26 November.
Officials say they still do not know who the monolith belongs to, and have launched an investigation into why it's there.
The monolith - which has a height of around four metres - was discovered close to the Petrodava Dacian Fortress, a well-known archaeological landmark.
The fortress is the oldest historical monument in Piatra Neamt, and is believed to have been destroyed by the Romans in the 2nd Century AD - although the remains can still be seen today in the form of parts of the city wall.
The shiny monolith has appeared just metres away, with one side facing Mount Ceahlau, known locally as the Holy Mountain.
It is one of the country's most famous mountains, and is also listed as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Romania.
Neamt Culture and Heritage official Rocsana Josanu said: "We have started looking into the strange appearance of the monolith.
"It is on private property, but we still don't know who the monolith's owner is yet. It is in a protected area on an archaeological site."
She added: "Before installing something there, they needed permission from our institution, one that must then be approved by the Ministry of Culture."
The mysterious monolith is similar to one recently found in the desert in Utah.
That one has now actually disappeared, according to the state's Bureau of Land Management, which said it had received 'credible reports' the object had been removed by 'an unknown party'.
In a statement posted on Facebook, the Bureau said: "We have received credible reports that the illegally installed structure, referred to as the 'monolith', has been removed from Bureau of Land Management (BLM) public lands by an unknown party.
"The BLM did not remove the structure which is considered private property. We do not investigate crimes involving private property which are handled by the local sheriff's office.
"The structure has received international and national attention and we received reports that a person or group removed it on the evening of Nov. 27."
The origins of the four-metre (12ft) high metal block are still unclear.
more here about it reappearing in Romania - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...shed-Utah.html
http://https://gizadeathstar.com/202...olith-in-utah/
ANTARCTIC STRANGENESS, “CRASHED” SATELLITES, & THAT ...
November 30, 2020 By JOSEPH P. FARRELL
Here's what happened to the monolith:
If you’re interested in what exactly happened to the monolith keep reading because I was literally there. On Friday, 3 friends and myself drove the 6 hours down to the middle of nowhere in Utah and got to the “trailhead” around 7 PM after passing a sea of cars on our way in.
We passed one group as we hiked towards the mysterious monolith, while another group was there when we arrived, and they left pretty quick after we got there. For the next hour and 40 minutes we had the place to ourselves.
I had just finished taking some photos of the monolith under the moonlight and was taking a break, thinking about settings I needed to change for my last battery of drone flight when we heard some voices coming up the canyon. We were contemplating packing up our things as they walked up, so they could enjoy it for themselves like we did. At this point I looked down at my watch and it was 8:40 PM.
4 guys rounded the corner and 2 of them walked forward. They gave a couple of pushes on the monolith and one of them said “You better have got your pictures.” He then gave it a big push, and it went over, leaning to one side. He yelled back to his other friends that they didn’t need the tools. The other guy with him at the monolith then said “this is why you don’t leave trash in the desert.”
Then all four of them came up and pushed it almost to the ground on one side, before they decided push it back the other when it then popped out and landed on the ground with a loud bang. They quickly broke it apart and as they were carrying to the wheelbarrow that they had brought one of them looked back at us all and said “Leave no trace.” That was at 8:48.
If you’re asking why we didn’t stop them well, they were right to take it out. We stayed the night and the next day hiked to a hill top overlooking the area where we saw at least 70 different cars (and a plane) in and out. Cars parking everywhere in the delicate desert landscape.
Nobody following a path or each other. We could literally see people trying to approach it from every direction to try and reach it, permanently altering the untouched landscape. Mother Nature is an artist, it’s best to leave the art in the wild to her.