It was, by most standards, a short stay. The Pop up metal monolith It became the focus of international attention after it was spotted in a remote area of the Utah Desert on November 18th It was dismantled after only 10 days. Government officials continued to insist on Monday that they had no information about the installation or removal – and potential theft – of the piece, which had been placed on public land.
The San Juan County Mayor’s office initially announced that it had refused to investigate the case in the absence of complaints about property loss. To underscore this point, she uploaded the “Most Wanted” sticker on her website, or rather a funny version of one of the stickers that The suspects’ faces were replaced by nine large-eyed aliens. But by the end of Monday, the mayor’s office reversed its stance and announced that it plans to conduct a joint investigation with the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency.
It was left to adventure photographer, Ross Bernards, to uncover the evidence On Instagram. Mr. Bernards, 34, from Edwards, Colorado, was visiting the Monarchy on Friday night when, he said, four men arrived as if they were out of nowhere to dismantle the statue. Mr. Bernards drove for six hours to get a chance to drive around the statue and take dramatic photos of it. Using high-end Lume Cube lights attached to a drone, he produced a series of glowing moonlit images in which the mole gleaming over the deep red and blue slopes of the night sky.
Suddenly, around 8:40 p.m., he said, the men arrived and their voices echoed in the valley. Working in two groups, with a clear sense of purpose, they gave off the solid stacked beams, and began to lean toward the ground. Then they pushed it in the opposite direction, trying to uproot it.
“This is why you don’t leave litter in the desert,” said one of them, noting that he viewed the menthol as being ugly to the eye and polluting the landscape, according to Mr. Bernards.
The statue popped out and fell to the ground with force. Then the men dismantled it and transported it in a wheelbarrow.
“As they were walking with the pieces, one of them said, ‘Leave no trace,’ ” recalls Mr. Bernards in a telephone interview.
He did not photograph the men who took down the statue, saying that he feared confrontation with them and feared that they would be armed. But his friend who accompanied him on the trip, Michael James Newlands, 38, from Denver, took some quick pictures with his mobile phone.
He told the New York Times, “It should have been 10 or 15 minutes at most for them to knock on and pull out the Mule.” “We didn’t know who they were, and we’re not going to do anything to stop them.” “They just came there to implement and were saying, ‘This is our mission,'” he added.
Photos are blurry, but great nonetheless. Here are pictures of several men working under cover of darkness, wearing gloves but not masks, standing on the fallen platform. We can see the exposed insides. It turned out to be a hollow structure with rebar made of plywood.
The photographs are the only known photographs of the perpetrators who removed the statue; They might not have been the same people who installed it in the first place. Lt. Nick Street, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Public Safety, said last week that the Monarch has fused into the rock.
In the past few days, artists have been casually speculating that whoever puts the statue likely removed it as soon as it was discovered, as if aspiring to be an artist-unknown activists, Banksy of the Desert.
But the art world’s speculation has not yielded many facts. In the beginning, it was interconnected, interconnected John McCrackenCalifornia-born artist who died in 2011 with a taste for science fiction. David Zwerner, a New York art dealer who represents the artist’s property and was first identified as a purebred McCracker, came on Monday to tell The Times that he had studied pictures of it and had no idea who made it.
Almien Risch, who represents the artist in her galleries in Paris and Brussels, also contacted a reporter to deny that she was a monolith of the desert McCracken.
And news stories spread about seeing a mock-up monolith in the Romanian hills.
All this leaves us no iota closer to solving the mystery of the Utah statue.
On the plus side, the compact loneliness that captured the country over the past week, and then vanished as quickly as it entered public consciousness, still offers a gentle sense of uncertainty. Would it lose its aura and strength if we knew who created it?
