Tons of muck flows into the canals each day, and gives the crumbling back-quarters of Venice the peculiar stink-half drainage, half rotting stone-that so repels the queasy tourist, but gives the Venetian amateur a perverse and reluctant pleasure. Add to this the dust, vegetable peel, animal matter and ash that pours into every waterway, in defiance of the law, over balconies and down the back steps, and it is easy to conceive how thickly the canal-beds are coated with refuse. If you look down from a terrace when the tide is low, you can see an extraordinary variety of rubble and wreckage beneath the water, gleaming with spurious mystery through the green; and it is horrible to observe how squashily the poles go in, when a pile-driver begins its hammering in a canal.
Jan Morris, VENICE
I have seen an aqua alta but never quite this bad. The Academia still not finished (sale?) after 5&6-after 3years-so I could not see my favourites, Bellini, Mantegna and Piero de la F. However the weather is fine and warm and the food is great and prosecco is cool. Went to the 500 years of palladio at Vicenza (main reason for trip)-fantastic exhibition. Will reply to your email on my return. So sorry for delay but I was caught by all sorts of conflicting emotions and I hate e-mails except for business. Must try harder!! A presso. Father
I don’t remember any of the art in Peggy Guggenheim’s museum in Venice but I still remember the names of her dogs.
Duchamp’s grave reads:
“Besides, it’s always other people who die.”
Peggy’s grave reads:
‘Here lies Peggy Guggenheim
1898-1979
Congratulations on being selected for The Threadneedle Prize exhibition.We need 25 words from you on your work (i.e. on inspiration/ subject matter/ artistic technique).
Best wishes,
Emma Healey
This reminded me of Marcel Duchamp responding to a question saying: “I will take 1 minute 48 seconds to respond to you”
Dear Emma,
“When a wild creature dies it’s an opportunity to marvel at its beauty. When a pet dies the unspoken communication between owner and pet dies too.”
Annabel
Ctd from last post…
I am still watching the film: images of Hamburger puffing on a cigar, being served food by his wife Anne Beresford, filmed behind wobbly glass…I am also looking up angina on my phone-as my beloved has sent me a message that his mother is ill and in hospital-there are so many different types:
# Angina pectoris,
# Abdominal angina,
# Ludwig’s angina,
# Prinzmetal’s angina,
# Vincent’s angina,
# Angina tonsillaris,
I like the description of Dean’s ‘Michael Hamburger 2007
“As with the Linaean system Hamburger employs the basic principles of taxonomy or systems of classification as a means through which to bring order to the world. Yet his descriptions about where apples have come from and the careful cross-breeding, unlocks ideas of memory and history and becomes a metaphor for missing autobiographical detail”
A few years ago a sound artist came to St Martins and played some of the sounds he had collected. He played a deer barking and one man in the row in front of me ( and of course I) knew what it was. I lived in Suffolk in a boat shed in the woods at the time. Later the sound artist asked us to write down our favourite sound and our favourite sight of London: mine were the sound of an Ambulance and the sight of a mouse on the tracks on the underground. After living in the countryside isolated and without parents present from adolescence I had felt comforted by the sound of city sirens when I went to stay with one of my sisters in Edinburgh-she said too that the sound of an ambulance reminded her that she was not alone in a village but in the epicentre of a world where other people were present alive and dying.
I went to Transition gallery yesterday to see Alli Sharma’s bat paintings(in a brilliant show called Bad Animals) Alli was there and we talked about the discrete presence of nature in the city. On the underground at Bethnal Green I made myself late intentionally missing four trains. I realised that the coal covered mice come out just after the train has left and I wanted to take a photo of them-I had to run after them-they move very fast.
The person I was late for was Sara Angel Guerrero-Rippberger at Chelsea college of Art . She is curating a show with research students, she described the show as having the look of a planetarium-which are things I have found very exciting-ever since seeing Annie Hall as a child. It’s something I talked to my beloved about recently..he described it as a false and beautiful narrative and I love the word too.
I went to see the ‘Classified’ show in the Tate opposite and liked Mark Dion’s Thames Dig and Tacita Dean’s ‘Michael Hamburger’ 16mm film which shows the poet in Suffolk talking about apples including the dark purple apple Ted Hughes had given him and …
” Royal Russett and Orleans Reinette. These he propagated not from the normal method of grafting, but from pips, once triumphantly producing a particularly dark specimen from a core harvested in Ted Hughes’s garden.” (Times Obituary Michael Hamburger 2007)
the sound of the wind in the orchard was overwhelming and I was reminded of a love affair in Switzerland-which started after a storm tha had blown all of the school windows open (where I was working) and something that my mother had told me that when she lived in Switzerland and France: the mistrals caused people to have asthma attacks and feel panic- I thought of Mimei Thompson describing her fear of nature…Pan and panic. I also thought of Angela Bartram’s fantastic ‘Licking dogs’ video which is in EAST-the sight of Angela kissing an Alsation was very Little Red Riding Hood…
Continued on next post
