Build an 83-foot concrete tree in the middle of a desert, and you're probably going to have a few detractors.
"I was renting a car at Budget last year," recalls sculptor Karl Momen, "and the woman said to me: `You're not the Momen who did that ugly tree!' "Karl Momen is philosophical about criticsm of The Tree of Utah, the abstract sculpture - topped with what looks like tennis balls - that he constructed alongside I-80 a decade ago. Here's how the Iranian-born Swedish sculptor explains it: "When you put something very unusual in a very unusual place, I'm going to be a fool to think everyone will embrace it."
Environmentalists have blasted it for spoiling the desert landscape. A University of Utah art professor once called the sculpture "a prelude to what to expect in Wendover."
Still, the Tree of Utah is arguably Utah's most visible - and internationally well-known - piece of art. At least 15 million people have viewed it since 1986. (Although, of course, they were all going at least 70 mph at the time.)
Now Momen has another idea for drive-by art: an "international sculpture garden" at the same Salt-Flats site.
He's hoping that the accessibility and odd beauty of the site will lure other artists to participate. Already, he says, he has found a dozen sculptors - two of them "very famous" - to donate ideas to the project. The identity of the sculptors will remain a secret, he says, until invitations go out for the "grand opening," possibly next fall.
All this is news to the State of Utah.
"We would resist that immensely," says Jack Quintana, program director for the state Division of Facilities and Construction Management, about Momen's idea for a sculpture garden on the 3-acre site. The state is worried, says Quintana, about liability issues now that Utah officially owns the tree that bears its name.
"Your dream is nothing more than a dream," Quintana told Momen at the official ceremony last week marking Momen's donation of the tree, which he built at his own expense ("much more" than $1 million, says the artist) on land donated by local landowner Khosrow Semnani.
On other hand, if Momen gets Semnani to donate another parcel, "I don't know how successful we would be in blocking" the sculpture garden, adds Quintana.
Certainly Momen is no stranger to official rebuffs and opposition. It took 10 years for him to convince the state to take the tree. Funding for maintenance will come from a nonprofit foundation, using proceeds from the sale of Tree of Utah postcards and posters.
If the tree falls into such disrepair that it becomes a hazard, however, the state has the option to remove or move it.
Now that the state owns the tree and he can no longer be accused of trying to make money off it, says Momen, "it's going to be marketing time." He will finally be able to answer those calls from Hollywood asking to use the tree as a backdrop in commercials.
Forget plastic Tree of Utah keychains, though, he says.
Momen expects his proposed Salt Flats International Sculpture Garden to include sculptures ranging from 8 to 25 feet tall, costing $10,000 to $25,000 each.
He is now looking for corporations to pay for the construction and installation of the sculptures.
"It will be the largest international sculpture garden in the world," says Momen, who is aiming for 12 pieces in place by next fall and 50 by 2002.
Already, he says, a New York publisher has expressed interest in producing a coffee table book about the sculpture garden. Momen long ago learned that if you've got a wild idea you've got to work all the promotional angles.
The unveiling of the 12 sculptures will be "an international event, hopefully," he says. "They'll want to be treated majestically. Not like me." And then he adds: "The first one always gets kicked."
Maybe it was a mistake, he says, not to seek the blessing of environmentalists and other Utah artists before creating, building and erecting his abstract concrete tree a decade ago.
"If I had said, `It's a symbol to keep the forests untouched,"' muses Momen. "Or I could have humbled myself to other artists. But that is not my way.
"I do what I like. I'm very happy if they like it. If they don't like it, I respect very much but I don't care."
Born in Iran, educated in architecture in Germany, employed by the Shah of Iran and later famous as an architect, painter and sculptor in Sweden, the 61-year-old Momen now lives in Santa Rosa, Calif.
His sculptures - often geometric and stark - can be found in such disparate venues as Monte Carlo, Dallas and Brigham Young University. He will have two major museum shows of his paintings and smaller sculptures, in Hamburg and South Korea, in the next two years.
In the meantime, his Tree of Utah gets 7,000 viewers a day on their bleary-eyed way across the West Desert. It continues to draw stares and grumbles, as well as compliments from those who find its symbolism (the struggle between nature and industry) profound and who note that great artists are often misunderstood and overlooked during their lifetimes.
"It's like Easter Island," noted a local art collector at a ceremony in the Governor's Board Room last week marking the state's acceptance of the tree.
"What do we know about their government? All we know is their art." Thousands of years from now, he added, all we may have left in Utah "is Karl Momen's tree."