THE SETUP
In 2005, Jim Sanborn gave a lecture at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, USA. During the lecture he spoke about how rude many CIA employees had been to him in 1989 while he was installing the Kryptos sculpture; in particular the slabs of granite at the New Headquarters Building entrance.
From what I gather from comments Jim has made over the years, there were two factions in the CIA – let’s call them a) The Old Boys, and b) The New Boys. The Old Boys wanted to retain power and keep the agency in the past with institutional green painted hallways and a healthy disdain for any human touches involving the dirty three letter word: “art”. The New Boys were more modern thinkers and wanted the agency to change with the times and lighten up its public image. William Webster, CIA Director at the time when Kryptos was commissioned and installed, typified this change in attitude and was a proponent and champion of improving the aesthetics of the Agency grounds with the appropriate use of art.
These high level management factions trickled down to the low level CIA employees and this friction became a political movement of sorts within the Agency. There is an FOIA document that shows some employees actively opposed the installation of Jim Sanborn’s artwork. So much so that they sent an opposition letter to management signed by about a dozen CIA employees. This anti-art movement went nowhere, but the negative comments did effect Jim Sanborn, and as I will propose, possibly the Kryptos artwork.
Jim has spoken about the CIA’s hostile-to-art work environment a few times during interviews, but in 2005, Jim provided details on the topic during his Hirshhorn Museum lecture. During the lecture, Jim mentioned a derisive comment from American politician Patrick Buchanan about “dinosaur feces”.
THE SPEECH
For those not familiar with American politics in the early 1990s, Patrick Buchanan was a right wing religious fascist who ran for the Office of the President of The United States in 1992. On 1992-04-28, Buchanan gave a campaign speech at Duke University in North Carolina, and he focused on the “barbarianism” of multicultural art on college campuses. The speech basically affirmed that Buchanan was a white supremacist with a weak mind easily offended by modern art. The contemporary term for him would be ‘snowflake’. Inbetween protesters calling him out for being an arse, Buchanan specifically described an artwork he found objectionable: “And you passed these two huge stones, it looked like petrified dinosaur feces. Outside the building is the junk they’re putting out for Art.”
Buchanan Campaign Speech Video – See timestamp 10:56
https://www.c-span.org/video/?25930-1/buchanan-campaign-speech
The 1992 date of this quote by Buchanan is after the time when Kryptos was dedicated in November 1990, and therefore the project was completed by that time. But there is evidence that Buchanan used the same quote leading up to his campaign, and it appears that Jim Sanborn became aware of the quote at some point during the installation of Kryptos – probably sometime in late 1989.
For those not familiar with the Kryptos sculptural elements, there are two large stone groups (strata) located outside the CIA New Headquarters Building entrance. There is a third stone off to the right side, but its much less obvious in comparison to the two large strata.
THE LECTURE
On 2005-09-23, Jim Sanborn gave a lecture at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. The following is a quote from that lecture.
Jim Sanborn: “…when I first built the project at the agency, when I first started working out there, the vast majority of people that were walking around the piece to go into the main building derided what I was doing. And then I wrote an open letter to the agency [1989-12-15] explaining exactly what I was doing to try to clear up the misconceptions and things like that. And various politicos, I guess Patrick Buchanan referred to it as a pile of dinosaur feces. So I wanted to be sure that I had used a coprolite in my project, and I had.”
Hirshhorn Museum lecture Recording
https://web.archive.org/web/20150309201448/http://kryptosrevisited.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/hirshhorn.mp3
Hirshhorn Museum lecture Transcript
https://web.archive.org/web/20150227034248/http://kryptosrevisited.com/transcript/2005-09-23-hirshhorn-museum-talk
Paleontologists use the term Coprolite (literally, Dung Stone) to refer to petrified dinosaur feces. Coprolites are surprisingly abundant in certain areas of the world, and were once mined as a source of calcium phosphate in England. Jim Sanborn who studied Archeology, most notably at Oxford, would osmotically have picked up a few Paleontology terms.
The lecture quote can be plainly interpreted: Jim Sanborn was aware of Patrick Buchanan’s derisive comment about an artwork with two large stones at the entrance to a building. This came at a time when the Kryptos installation was being mocked by CIA employees on a daily basis. Jim mistakenly thought this derisive political comment was about Kryptos, and therefore Jim presumably chose to incorporate a coprolite(a piece of petrified dinosaur feces) somewhere within the Kryptos artwork site.
The location of the alleged coprolite is speculation, as is the lecture quote interpretation, but since the K2 plaintext mentions something “buried out there”, it would be logical in light of the lecture quote to consider the buried object to be a coprolite.
Jim has spoken in interviews about how the CIA sent technicians out to “neutron X-ray scan” his art and the ground looking for ‘bugs’. But since a coprolite is a fossilized rock-like chunk of minerals, if the CIA used a neutron X-ray scanner on the ground disturbed by the Kryptos earthworks, then they would have only detected a rock. I’m not sure there is such a thing as a neutron x-ray scanner, and I suspect the CIA was using ground penetrating radar.
To argue against my own assertion, that the buried object was/is a coprolite, a recent Kryptos related Youtube video mentions a private conversation from 2013 where Jim Sanborn stated that the buried object he mentioned in the K2 plaintext was in fact a US Geodesic Disc, which had since been removed from the Kryptos site. This however does not negate the possibility that Jim Sanborn also buried a coprolite.
THE ROCK
The famous “Precious” coprolite pictured below looks a bit like a rock, and if I *wasn’t* told it was a coprolite, I’m not so sure that I would have recognized it as a coprolite. An inexperienced person could easily see it or pick it up and think it was nothing but a weird rock. Imagine that it is also coated with dirt. A similar object buried on the CIA grounds might have been dug up and not recognized as a coprolite.
With the same rock logic, Jim Sanborn could have smuggled a coprolite onto the CIA grounds in a work bucket of dirt and the CIA guards would have seen a rock in a bucket of dirt. Who would question seeing Jim dump a random bucket of dirt into a seemingly random hole near the entrance strata at the K2 PT sky coordinate LYRA-Strata overlay point? [The sky what? … That is another paper.]
THE PUNCHLINE
Buchanan was *not* referring to Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos strata at the entrance to the CIA New Headquarters Building when he spoke about “two huge stones … like petrified dinosaur feces.” Buchanan was referring to an artwork by Henry Moore called ‘Knife Edge Mirror Two Piece’. The location of that sculpture is outside the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
We know this was the intended art reference because there was an article published in 1993 in the LA Times which related that Buchanan had repeatedly mentioned this artwork and called it a pile of dinosaur feces. Like all politically minded simpletons, Buchanan found a topic he could use as a weapon and repeatedly used the same line again and again. This gives more weight to Jim having heard of Buchanan’s dinosaur feces comment in 1989 during the Kryptos installation process.
1993-05-28 – LA Times article quote:
“And he[Buchanan] took the occasion once more to pronounce the National Gallery’s outdoor sculptor[sic] by the late, internationally acclaimed artist Henry Moore ‘petrified dinosaur feces.'”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-05-28-ca-40741-story.html
THE POLITICAL LEGACY OF PATRICK BUCHANAN
In conclusion, if Jim Sanborn did include a coprolite in the Kryptos installation due to Buchanan’s comment, Jim did so due to a misunderstanding. Buchanan’s comment was never intended to refer to the Kryptos front entrance strata.
Therefore, I think that Jim Sanborn made an assumption that the comment was aimed at Kryptos, and in an age when facts could not easily be confirmed with an internet search, Jim acted on that assumption.
But even if there was a misunderstanding about which artwork was being attacked, and even if a coprolite was included in the Kryptos installation due to a perceived political attack, the decision to include it was Jim Sanborn’s to make. Jim has used fossils in other artworks in the past. And one of the Kryptos themes is the palimpsest of layers going back in time. The buildings, the strata, something allegedly buried over time.
A dinosaur related fossil is aligned with the Kryptos sculpture’s theme of layers of strata built up over time. And since dinosaurs roamed all over North America 66+ million years ago, there could very well be naturally-occurring coprolites buried beneath the CIA Headquarters buildings.
Besides, eventually there will be no CIA, and no CIA buildings. Even the Kryptos sculpture will succumb to the passage of time. Eventually our present world will be one more layer of strata on the dung heap of evolution.
But hopefully, somewhere, underground, in an unknown location, on land once owned by a defunct government long forgotten, where government buildings with institutionally green hallways once stood, there will be a buried rock that-is-not-a-rock.
And maybe, in some far distant future, a more evolved creature will unearth this rock… and hold it up into the sunlight – a slightly different colored older sun – and revel… in the thrill of discovery.
And perhaps the more evolved creature will name the rock that-is-not-a-rock… Patrick.
