Our three monuments

Over the past weeks our three monuments have stood as testament to events which may have been overlooked. We would like to reproduce here an image of these monumental moments along with the accompanying text from the plaques which this bulletin has elaborated on. In the coming weeks we will be turning out outer eye to other events across the municipality while our inner eye searches for new moments in the psychic ocean. With that we declare the close of our virtual Arcadias, we hope it was a meaningfull experience. Please stay attuned.

Walter the Tireless 1853-1882

Walter Jarry was the brother of the famous absurdist
playwright Alfred Jarry. Walter emigrated to New Zealand
in 1876. He shared with his brother an enthusiasm for
bicycles – preferring off-roading to riding around and
around in circles, which his brother Alfred loved to do.
Walter became known among the artistic avant-garde of the
time as ‘The Pastoral Flaneur’.
He died tragically in 1882 while swearing to avoid a curb.


The Spectre of Conceptual Art

Few Wellingtonians would remember the public amenities
riots of 1932. Many newly constructed conveniences were
closed for several months due to an epidemic of missing
urinals which swept through the city. This was finally
attributed to the removal of Marcel Duchamp's ‘Fountain’
from the Academy of Fine Arts.
The subsequent serial theft of urinals perpetrated by overly
enthusiastic conceptual artists rocked the capital and caused
considerable inconvenience. Thankfully we have come a
long way since those darktimes, and yet the threat of our readymade past lingers on.

Slow progress

It is rumored that Jules Verne, author of the epic nineteenth
century underwater adventure Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea, visited Wellington as a young man. He was
enthralled by the tale of Kupe's battle with the giant wheke.
In French literature of the time a Giant Octopus or Squid
often symbolised the struggle of workers against capitalism.
Verne also envisaged the first submarine known as the
Nautilus. Whether he chose to name his submarine after a
humble seashell is a riddle unanswered. However, being
composed of calcium carbonate, the seashell is a repository
of greenhouse gas – a mystery of the ocean and more of a science fact than a science fiction, a hidden player in our climb toward a radiant future.

The monstrous snail of the idiocracy

Our final monument is now weathering the return of the northerly winds. It seems as though time is running out. The monsterous snail is in its last days of suspension along the seawall. It perches there reaching up to its slab of marble, as a reminder of the slowness of our evolution, but even more so of the sucking and dragging back that this great earth performs on us daily as we attempt to alienate ourselves from her limitations.

We would like to mention more on the subject of Jules Verne's visit to Wellington as a young man, but that moment now has become so shrouded in the past that it may well have taken on the guise of mythology. It is true however that our wit has perhaps run its course, and that the monstrous inaction that sits just out of sight, the abject and unthinkable other is coming now to meet us bearing with it the symbol of the vortex from which all things commenced.

"There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of god. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever."

Herman Melville Moby Dick

from the fountain to the sea

Perched on the seawall to the north of the band rotunda, along the promenade of Oriental Parade, our final monument of the current festival has been installed. After the initial gale force winds tested the strength of our intervention, curious locals are venturing out for a peep over the edge.

"The most famous part of the novel, the battle against the school of giant squid, begins when a crewman opens the hatch of the boat and gets caught by one of the monsters. As he is being pulled away by the tentacle that has grabbed him, he yells "Help!" in French. At the beginning of the next chapter, concerning the battle, Arronax states that: "To convey such sights, it would take the pen of our most famous poet, Victor Hugo, author of The Toilers of the Sea." The Toilers of the Sea also contains an episode where a worker fights a giant octopus; and there, the octopus symbolizes the Industrial Revolution. It is probable that Verne borrowed the symbol, but used it to allude to the Revolutions of 1848 as well: After all, the first man to stand against "the monster" and the first to be defeated by it is a Frenchman."