ARTISTS TALKING

# 92 [15 December 2009]

> Hello! I thought you'd given up all
> hope as I hadn't heard from you.
> Unfortunately mum passed away in April this year so her
> memories have
> gone with her.But if I can help in any way I will.
> Margaret.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: annabel dover [mailto:annabeldover@yahoo.co.uk]
>
> Sent: 08 November 2007 13:27
> To: Watchman, Margaret - Ipswich
> Subject: Melton old school former pupils
>
> Dear Margaret,
> It has been a very long time since you sent me your
> fantastic email which mentioned your mother working in
> the kitchens.
>
> I am still going ahead with the project. I am waiting
> to hear from the Arts Council who are taking an age to
> respond.
>
> I will contact you again when I hear from them. I hope
> you are well.
>
> All the very best,
> Annabel Dover
>

# 91 [7 December 2009]

Dear Colleagues,

Barry Sewell has had left on his desk (which is opposite the stationery cabinet in North cluster) a set of keys. The keys are on a SNC chain and consist of 3 gold keys.

If you believe they are yours please would you come and see me.

Regards

# 90 [7 December 2009]

The man wore a beige SAS beret and 21 military medals and badges, including the Military Cross, as he walked alongside 600 genuine war heroes.

 He had medals from campaigns including the Second World War, Korea, the Falklands, awards for both officers and privates and even a foreign medal.

Military experts have confirmed it would be impossible for one man to have been awarded all the decorations.

The man was confronted by Jim Nicholson, who helped organise the march in Bedworth, Warickshire, on November 11 and admitted being a fake before disappearing.

Members of the Bedworth Armistice Day Parade committee and servicemen have now launched an appeal to name and shame the man they call a ''cowardly Walter Mitty''.

 ''We have had idiots like this try to join in a few times and we tell them to get lost.

The Bedworth Parade is the biggest in the country outside London and follows a three quarter of a mile route from All Saints Church in the centre to the Cenotaph.

This year the families of four Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers killed in Afghanistan attended to lay wreaths in memory of their loved ones.

Mr Owen, who has a UN medal and Korean Veterans medal, said: ''There are men and women on that parade that went through hell.

The man wore the winged dagger of the SAS on his beret, poppy and tie-pin, as well as a veteran's badge on his lapel.

On his left breast he wore a rack of 17 medals starting with the Military Cross (MC), and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).

On the MC he has a bar signifying the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service, while on the DSO there is a bar for Mentioned In Dispatches. Neither bar is ever worn with those medals.

Next comes a foreign cross, thought to be Polish, which should only be worn after all the British medals.

Then is the Queen's Commendation Medal, the Military Medal, the rank version of the Military Cross for privates, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Meritous Service Medal and the Campaign Service Medal.

On the row underneath he has a South Atlantic Medal for the Falklands, a Gulf Medal for the first Gulf War, and an Accumulated Service Medal - worn back to front.

Then comes the Saudi Arabian Medal for the liberation of Kuwait, the Kuwaiti Liberation Medal and four more unknown foreign medals.

''To start with you never wear two rows of medal, you wear one long row overlapping," he said. ''The real outrage is over the gallantry awards - if anyone was awarded this many they would have got the Victoria Cross.

''The Queen never gave permission for the Gulf war medals to be worn on uniform and the entire order is wrong.

The man, who probably bought his collection online or from antique shops, is technically committing a criminal offence and in theory could be prosecuted.

# 89 [5 December 2009]

Otto Frank preferred the annex empty.

"Everything was hauled away during the war and I prefer it stays that way."

# 88 [5 December 2009]

Today we found a freedom pass on the train table. It belonged to Mr R.A. Gillies of Kensington and Chelsea. In our excitement my beloved left his bag on the train. It had two executive 1970s pens in one silver and one solid gold. I coveted the last. The pens belonged to his accountant father and had signed a cheque for 50 million dollars. They were nestled in a red leather pencil case I had bought for him-because it reminded me of the inner silk lining of dracula's cloak and he likes vampires.

# 87 [28 November 2009]

Queen Victoria and later Freud asked their staff to make an inventory of their belongings; Freud had his maid reposition his objects exactly on his arrival from Vienna, to Hampstead. Queen Victoria had her objects photographed from every angle, and these photographs were put into albums for her to look at. She would no doubt be pleased to know that on the carpet at Osborne House, a plaque marks the place where she fell to her death. Originally I started out with the thought that I would make a visual inventory of the objects of the garden individually on a white background, suggesting the diagrams of the pacific voyage of Captain Cook that Nicholas Thomas has evaluated recently in the book: The Culture of collecting. This method will no doubt change as I hear more of the stories associated with the objects.
Susan Stewart writes on this signifying use of fragment for whole:

The set of objects a museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a representational universe.”

# 86 [27 November 2009]

All but a few stretches of the Berlin Wall were torn down in the first heady months after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.). Yet some east Germans still cling to memories of the 40 years they lived under communist rule — memories that have grown more affectionate with time. Speciality shops and some websites offer east German board games, 15-packs of the infamously rough Cabinet cigarettes, Be Ready condoms, even cans of Trabi Duft — fumes from the iconic Trabant car — and the very brand of hair gel preferred by former east German leader Erich Honecker. Young Berliners still gather at "authentic" G.D.R. parties, where guests don the uniforms of state organizations, swill Little Red Riding Hood sparkling wine and dance to ballads like In the East, which sold 300,000 copies a few years ago. This phenomenon of nostalgia for the lost east is dubbed Ostalgie.

# 85 [27 November 2009]

Berlin's Memorial Mile

Groups representing both the homosexuals and the Gypsies began many years ago to plan for their own plot on Berlin's memorial mile. But they were both stalled, not only by long processes to secure land and funding, but also by contentious infighting over what the memorials should look like and to whom, precisely, they should be dedicated.

For the Sinti and Roma, the dispute has been raging for years, with construction of the fountain to commemorate the 500,000 Sinti and Roma who died in the Holocaust originally set for 2004. But two separate groups representing Gypsies in Germany could not agree on the inscription, and the project stalled -- transforming a rickety wooden sign marking the spot across the street from the German parliament building as an unintended monument to bitter infighting. Even the 2006 agreement by the German government to provide funding failed to resolve the stalemate.

The design calls for a fountain conceived by Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan, inscribed with a poem called "Auschwitz" by Italian poet Santino Spinelli. A triangular pillar will jut out of the fountain with a rose placed on the top of it. Once a day, the pillar will sink down into the fountain and the flower will be replaced. The project is expected to cost €2 million ($2.95 million). Construction is now set to begin in February.

Plans for a monument to homosexual Holocaust victims (the Nazis imprisoned 54,000 homosexuals and some 7,000 died in concentration and work camps) were delayed by a similar dispute. In 2003, the German government approved plans for a €600,000 memorial, but some advocacy groups objected to one facet of the design: a video of two men kissing that would play on an endless loop at one end of the monument. The video, they argued, did not recognize the suffering of lesbians as well as gay men. In the final design, a video of two women kissing will rotate every two years with the video of a male couple.

# 84 [27 November 2009]

Curator Renaud Proche co-curated a series of archives of stuff in an artists studio:

 http://the-backroom.org

When visiting an artist Renaud's started to notice the things on an artists fridge door, the postcards on the walls and the tat that they had collected. He felt that by noticing these things he was starting to take in the things that were at the back of an artists mind.

As a visitor to the archives you were free to go through the artists stuff with no curatorial input.

Manilla files, archive boxes, sectioned filing cabinets, magazine racks, covered walls with cardboard with a selection of stuff.on, a TV hooked up and a sound station.

Renaud felt it was important to show this collection of culturally interesting and relevant things that might not get out into the world.  

With each exhibition the material shown was different-relevant to the place where it was being shown (like a Medieval storyteller moving from town to town and adapting the stories) making it more live and alive.

# 83 [26 November 2009]

This is an image of the clutter that Ursula Goldfinger argued with her husband, Erno about. Perhaps in the way that Daniel Miller in his essay,

Possessions’ talks about the residents of the modernist flats of the Lark Estate, who use ornamentation to express their individuality in an environment not of their choosing.

In its present state the garden looks abandoned: Manderlay at the beginning of Rebecca, encased in brambles, nettles and roses, it fulfils the romantic requirements of a sham ruin, where the cultivated growth of ivy symbolised authenticity and elevated the status of the ruin. If the garden is a narrative, it is at its haunting end. Or perhaps it is suspended in a sleeping-beauty state, a remembrance of something that no longer exists.

Yet it has always been this, and now it is a museum within a museum. Bodhan died five years ago and he is no longer to be found encased in this labyrinthine shell. The gate is locked and the new voice of the garden is his neighbour, Odette. Like the film, the Go-between’ which is set in 1900, written I 1952 but has the overwhelming look of 1970 when it was made; of the different eras that the garden commemorated, it seems to be set at 2005 the year that Litnianski died.