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.
Hoffman Ma of Shanghai travelled to New York to buy Michael Jackson’s sequined glove for a quarter of a million pounds.
In October 1976, asked to name three books he had been reading, Nabakov listed: a translation of Dante’s Inferno, an illustrated guide to North American butterflies and a book of his own, “The not-quite-finished manuscript of a novel”
Recovering from illness he had, in his febrile state been reading his not-quite-finished book aloud to an audience of:
“peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible”.
Last Tuesday the not-quite-finished novel was published.
Out of a Swiss vault. Thirty years after his deathly plea to his wife Vera to destroy it.The Original of Laura has been assembled from 138 index cards. Penguin has printed the book including the index cards which are covered in , scribbles, food stains, tea cup marks and Nabakovs greasy fingerprints.
This image is of Rue de Sebastopol in paris. I dumped someone elses objects and watched as people took things from the pile.
Agnes Varda in her film The Gleaners and I documents the french tradition of gleaning. In wine regions of France, where a limited number of grapes must be used to classify wine, the leftover grapes are cut off and left on the ground; birds, wild boars and human gleaners pick them up. These fallen grapes ar called ‘conscripts’. Benjamin describes a collector as a prince who rescues a beautiful girl; perhaps Litnianski can be seen in this light as a saviour in possession of these objects.
In an interview with Raw Vision magazine in 1994, Litnianski said he chose shells firstly because they are beautiful and secondly he had never been to the sea. All of the objects in his garden were, he said, shells.
Benjamin again on interior trace remarks
The original way of living was not in a house, but in a shell that carried the imprint of its inhabitants
