Stardust Memories

Continued… To enter The Encyclopedic Palace in the Giardini: I walk through the atrium of paintings by Carl Jung. Facsimiles of his drawings with greasy fingerprints intact, rather like the new publication of Nabakov’s coffee ringed manuscripts.The paintings are displayed in a sort of Masonic circle with the original album perspex-encased, untouchable, looking like the a lunatic shaman’s Book of Kells. It’s like a passage from ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. A beautiful model village is ferociously minded by an emasculated-looking Venetian guard. These card houses were found by Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser in 1993 in a junk shop in Austria. They were made by an insurance clerk called Peter Fritz. Not much is known about Fritz other than his profession, and the two Oliver’s assume that he copied existing buildings. I wondered if, like the creator of the ‘Walberswick Scroll’, John Doman Turner, he had modelled an entire town. Around the edges of the room are meticulously drawn and carefully considered imaginary buildings. Achilles G. Rizzoli is the creator, we learn from the small information plaque which everyone is photographing instead of reading. Rizzoli is a man who in another lifetime might have had a Joseph Cornell-like existence. He lived with his mother his whole life in San Francisco. He was an architectural draughtsman who secretly made dedications to his mother with these fanciful buildings, ‘Mother Symbolically Represented/The Kathedral’ (1935) and the ‘The Tower of Jewels’ and other titles that sound like F.Scott Fitzgerald short stories. So we have entered via Jung’s paintings into our collective subconscious. Is there a suggestion here that ‘Outsider Art’ is more truthful, a more direct common communication of creativity, a leveller a salve? I email Roger Cardinal to ask what he thinks of the inclusion of so much Outsider Art. The recent show, ‘Souzou’ at the Wellcome, enlightened me that there wasn’t really a concept of Outsider Art, the creations exhibited were seen more in the context of work as a means to good mental and physical health. The ceramics of Ron Nagle are fun, glossy, labial figurines that remind me of the wonderful porcelains of Annie Attridge and a little of Memphis design. Hilma af Klint I know of through my friend Hayley Lock, who recently travelled to Sweden to see her paintings. Hayley has asked me to lick one for her. My partner Alex stops me. He knows I would. I kissed an Ermine moth at a train station once just to appal him. Klint made her work in a trance and coughed her unconscious beautifully onto canvas and graph paper in sublime liquid colours. I’m creating my own Wunderkammer whilst in Venice. Today I’m going to Padova (Pa Dover) as Alex is calling it as it is one of his favourite habitats. Tomorrow I hope to see all of the superior Manet’s which were missing from the RA show, Bedwyr Williams, Cattelan , Arsenale ‘Encyclopedic Palace’ and the ‘Museum of Everything’ and if there’s time I’ll swim in the Lido like Tadzio in a sailor suit about to enter the primeval swamp.

The Encyclopaedia of Palaces When Versailles was built, this ridiculously grand palace, with acres of looking glass, gold and malachite had no water closet and King and servant alike often shat on the Pavonazza marble stairs. For me Venice is a chimera, a city of over two hundred, 15th century palaces, aching with glittering, cut-glass chandeliers, floating on a milky lagoon that percolates with rotting vegetal matter. In a Venetian carnival, the fool is king for the day and the king is a fool. Literature has acknowledged the disquieting beauty of Venice, the liquorice slug that trickles down the forehead of Gustav von Aschenbach, dying as his lust devours him amid the stench of cholera, the red anorak of the longed for daughter, and murderous dwarf, the bloodthirsty Shylock. Meeting my father after an absence of twenty years, he regaled me with stories of his new identity rooted in his love of Venice. A decorative trifle on the putrefying past he constructed, submerged again now, a ghost in the narrow stone walls of the city. Thomas Mann was staying at the Grand H

My new flat is around the corner from the derelict irnmongers Martin & Newby that for a time housed in it’s lavatory the world’s oldest light bulb which burnt for 109 years.

I’ve just bought a Reader’s Digest Atlas on eBay. It was one of the things I used to look at in my father’s study. I would look at the photographs of the rocks and minerals on black velvet backgrounds. Topaz on silk reminsiscent of a net gown worn by Princess Margaret on the beaches of Mustique, or an amethyst concertina babydoll in Liz Taylor’s mirrored wardrobe.

Back to the drab vegan dinners of the kitchen in my Liverpool house: The Overstrand, The Esplanade.

I am not sure I have bought the right edition of the Atlas.It is being posted to me at the moment.

‘:-) Never done it before, but I’ve just been into paypal and requested a payment of £13.50 which (apparently) they will request from you. Once you’ve paid it let me know (they may – I’m not sure) & I’ll mark it as paid and post to you. I hope you get a lot of use from the book, it was my sons, he was killed in an accident 9½ years ago aged 24. :-(‘

Brighton pavillion was built for the Prince Regent so that he could dip his gouty foot into the sea and get pissed on gin in the garden. During the First World war the pavilion was again used for recuperation and served as a military hospital for Indian Corps troops The Sikh and Hindu soldiers who died were cremated on the Downs to the north of Brighton. The Muslim fatalities were buried in a specially constructed cemetery in Woking, Surrey: at this time, Woking contained the only purpose-built Mosque in England. Although the Indian Military Hospital closed in early 1916, it reopened as a military hospital for limbless British soldiers. It did not return to civic ownership until 1920.