Last night of the urinals

It is the final night for our monument to the spectre of conceptual art. Of all the concerns raised during our investigation of the public amenities riots of 1932, none were more pressing than the threat of an imminent breakdown of the fabric of society itself.

While Marcel Duchamp's fountain opened up the art halls of the continent to the idea of utilitarian objects possessing qualities of meaning as valuable as the mythological associations generally carried by great works of art- it was an idea that could only be introduced with a great deal of provocation at the time.

The mood was similar in Wellington nearly twenty years after the first unveiling of the fountain. When the Academy of Fine Arts refused to exhibit the fountain it was because they considered it a threat to what was valued as art at the time, although they may have thought it a boring and impish piece of imitation lacking in originality. Regardless of the mindset of the curators of the day, the fountain was refused. Not only that but several members of the Avant-Garde who had argued vigorously in favour of its inclusion were made to feel foolish for their support of progressive notions of social and cultural activity. It is strange that the backlash which this authoritarian attitude engendered, resulted in the wholesale and enthusiastic damaging of public utilities, by the Avant Garde, in an attempt to acquire their own works of art. Thus, sadly for the progressive idealists of the time the very source of their inspiration, the fountain from which great possibilities seemed to flow, became the target of misguided vandalism and acquisitiveness.

"Even in the most closed cultures men believe they are free and open to the universal; their differential character makes the narrowest cultural fields seem inexhaustible from within. Anything that compromises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to persecution. This tendency always takes the same direction, it is embodied by the same stereotypes and always responds to the same threat. Despite what is said around us persecutors are never obsessed by difference but rather by its unutterable contrary, the lack of difference."

Rene Girard The scapegoat