Virtual Arcadia

We are delighted that the installation of our second monument proceeded in a discreet and trouble-free way. We feel something of its benign yet disconcertingly conceptual gaze fall upon us as we cross over the isthmus between two roads.
Already moss, branches and ferns have leaned gently over our spectral sprite as if it had always been there in that place. Clearly the great water-pump of the city and the smaller fountains of gas, water and air which make up the breath of the trees that hang over the amenity, remind us of a time when nature and man lived together in harmony.
Wishing to pause for a moments relief and clinging briefly in our mind to the image of this idyll, we must move now to the subject of the public amenities riots of 1932, this and some of the questions posed by the querulous Marcel Duchamp will comprise the substance of our next bulletin.

" His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. "

Tom Hodgkinson Jan 21 The Guardian