It all started in 2016 with a bronze statue commemorating the tragic day in November 1963 when a giant octopus upended the Staten Island ferry, killing nearly 400 people in New York.
Wait, what — a giant octopus? Artist Joseph Reginella smiles. Yes, you read that right.
Last year, another statue appeared in Battery Park, at the lower tip of Manhattan — a monument to the Wall Street bankers trampled to death in October 1929 when circus impresario P.T. Barnum’s elephants broke into a panicked stampede while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. Hard to believe? Well, quite. A few months ago, strollers along the water’s edge in New York found a new statue dedicated to the six crew members of a tugboat who were abducted by aliens in July 1977.
Photo: AFP
The three memorials to three made-up tragedies sprung from the vivid imagination of Reginella, a 47-year-old sculptor and jokester who has made an art out of monuments commemorating non-existent victims.
Reginella — who makes his living building models and props for movies, amusement parks and department stores — realizes it’s rather a peculiar hobby. He makes the bronze sculptures in his spare time, in the basement of his Staten Island home.
His 2016 sculpture of the octopus sinking the ferry was such a popular hit that he decided to produce a new monument each year along the same lines — and following the same sophisticated sense of humor.
Photo: AFP
DOCUMENTS LEND CREDIBILITY
Reginella begins by choosing the date of the invented disaster with care — and having it coincide with a real tragedy.
The ferry “sank” on Nov. 22, 1963, the day president John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The elephant stampede took place on Oct. 29, 1929, the day of the massive Wall Street crash. The tugboat crew “vanished” on the night of July 13, 1977, when a huge blackout plunged New York into darkness.
Photo: AFP
The idea is that the enormity of the real events will make people think — maybe — that they somehow missed the other tragedy that he invented.
“That was my vehicle to kind of try to have people believe this,” he said. “And then I took the template — I had such great success with this, it really went crazy — that I continued the tradition.”
Each statue comes with a plaque explaining the event in earnest tones, designed to lend a whiff of authenticity.
The elephant stampede, for example, is described as “one of the most horrific land mammal tragedies in our nation’s history.”
And at a moment in America when everyone goes to Google to verify or look up information, Reginella pushes the joke onto the Internet, conjuring up a panoply of fake documentation, including newspaper articles and online documentaries to bolster the illusion.
For his latest piece on the tugboat alien abduction, there is even a tourist brochure offering boat tours to the site where the sailors were allegedly kidnapped. A curious observer can type “octopus” and “Staten Island ferry” into YouTube and find a black-and-white documentary featuring archival footage of putative wreckage, along with witnesses and experts talking about the disaster.
Each event has its own Web site with souvenirs on sale, including real t-shirts priced at US$25 each and reproductions of the original model for US$100 a piece.
Several thousand fans of Reginella’s work, who share his quirky sense of humor, have bought a piece of his alternate history, allowing him to finance new projects, which generally take him six to nine months to complete, with the help of his wife and friends.
Despite their size, the statues are easy to assemble and move, and Reginella unveils them in Battery Park on weekends or in his spare time.
NOT ‘FAKE NEWS’
With such a high degree of sophistication, Reginella could pass for a pioneer of the “fake news” that has taken over social media in recent years.
But he rejects the term — a catch phrase closely associated with President Donald Trump and his attacks on the media.
“Mine is much more for fun, it’s not malicious,” he said. “I am more like the carnival barker, showing you the sideshow attraction.”
Despite his growing profile, Reginella remains rather humble about it all, and sees himself as a purveyor of inoffensive “hoaxes” for entertainment purposes.
The artist revels in the amused reactions of passers-by who stop to take selfies with his sculptures, some of whom wonder aloud if the events actually occurred.
Of course, despite the fantastical details of the alleged events, some people actually believe they are true. But usually, that belief is quickly dispelled. If someone persists in their belief, Reginella is the first to regret it.
“Some people just look at it and they’re just like, ‘Huh, who knew?’” he laughed. “And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” “It did not really anger me, but it really got me thinking. It was kind of a letdown.”
He admits there is “a flip side to it. It’s definitely to show people, ‘Don’t take things at face value, do your due diligence.’”
Reginella remained coy about his next project, and said he may even take a break next year from his usual production of one sculpture a year.
“I really don’t want to say because... it’s like a magician not wanting to reveal his secrets,” he says.
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
On Facebook a friend posted a dashcam video of a vehicle driving through the ash-colored wasteland of what was once Taroko Gorge. A crane appears in the video, and suddenly it becomes clear: the video is in color, not black and white. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake’s destruction on April 3 around and above Taroko and its reverberations across an area heavily dependent on tourism have largely vanished from the international press discussions as the news cycle moves on, but local residents still live with its consequences every day. For example, with the damage to the road corridors between Yilan and
May 13 to May 19 While Taiwanese were eligible to take the Qing Dynasty imperial exams starting from 1686, it took more than a century for a locally-registered scholar to pass the highest levels and become a jinshi (進士). In 1823, Hsinchu City resident Cheng Yung-hsi (鄭用錫) traveled to Beijing and accomplished the feat, returning home in great glory. There were technically three Taiwan residents who did it before Cheng, but two were born in China and remained registered in their birthplaces, while historians generally discount the third as he changed his residency back to Fujian Province right after the exams.
Few scenes are more representative of rural Taiwan than a mountain slope covered in row upon row of carefully manicured tea plants. Like staring at the raked sand in a Zen garden, seeing these natural features in an unnaturally perfect arrangement of parallel lines has a certain calming effect. Snapping photos of the tea plantations blanketing Taiwan’s mountain is a favorite activity among tourists but, unfortunately, the experience is often rather superficial. As these tea fields are part of working farms, it’s not usually possible to walk amongst them or sample the teas they are producing, much less understand how the