The interpreter who accompanied me to the garden is over six foot tall, he could see above the wall, so I thin that the dimensions are roughly Vitruvian, fitting the proportions of Litnianski’s body.
Like the windows of the Edwardian school where I live, designed to be above the child’s height, so that students would not be distracted by the view outside. The main dioramas of small objects are at eye level. In the Poetics of Space, Bachelard describes the interior as an intimate space and the outside a void. Litnianski’s garden in this sense is an interior space and looking at it even when he was alive gave me, at least, the impression of entering something private and forbidden. Litninianski (or in my case his son) used to invite the visitor to follow him into the space, where you would remain enclosed until he let you out.
On first sight of the house, it has the appearance of a modern hermitage. The hermitage was designed to look as though built by the hermit himself, with his surrounding objects. Looking more carefully, one can see the house is tiny and hidden within these rocky columns. It is more lie Saint-Pol Roux’s home, a fisherman’s cottage encased in a manor house. Litnianski began collecting things that had become useless, dirty, broken, empty, unfashionable or perhaps embarrassing.
Bodhan Litnisansi came from Russia to France as a teenager in the 1930s. He fought in the Second World War, was captured and spent five years in a prison camp. After the war he was repatriated to Viry-Noureuil, where he bought a house that was cheap and dilapidated. Reconstructing his house, he started to collect shells from the local restuarants wich he used to decorate the walls. Litnianski also started his daily visit to the local tip, hoarding his finds in a slag heap at the back of his house. Out of this encyclopedic collection of Viry-Noureuil’s stuff, grew a garden of jumbled chronological stratas; a mythical map of the village.
This wall is the side of Litniansi’s house and is not just rendered with these objects but made out of them. These, he told the local newspaper, were among his favourite objects, because of the stories they told.
Fontana’s table of value
(according to Sotheby’s& Christies)
Red & Gold (most expensive)
Silver
White
Orange
pink
green
brown
Werner’s Nomencalture of Colours:
Published in 1821. It lists 110 colours with examples of animals, vegetables and minerals that share the same tone. Another book, Cercles chromatiques de M.E. Chevreul from 1861, consists of a sequence of 11 colour wheels. The first is divided into 72 pure colours. In the subsequent wheels, 10 per cent black is added until the last wheel is completely dark, colourless
When I graduated from college, my grandfather insisted I have a briefcase. His gift was incredibly sweet and thoughtful but I never had much use for a briefcase, especially such a traditional style. I kept the briefcase for a few years, but when I was getting ready to move from California to Boston, the briefcase joined the garage-sized pile of other objects I had to trash, sell, or give away. The briefcase was donated, among many other things, to the Salvation Army, where I hoped it would make its way to someone who would actually have use for it. That was almost two years ago. My grandfather died recently and all I can think about is that briefcase.
I’m interested in the irrational affection we feel towards inanimate objects as well as the narrative and meaning that get attached to this otherwise mundane stuff over time, thanks to who we got the object from, or who we were with when we purchased or found it, what our life was like at the time, what it’s like now, and where we’ve been in between, all of which is carried on in the object, regardless of whether it still exists or not. Creating a virtual memorial for my lost briefcase is the least I can do to honor my grandfather’s gift, while, to some extent, confessing my guilt over getting rid of it.
Ghosts represent my biggest fear. When I was little I would wake myself up all through the night thinking there would be a ghost looking at me. Somebody since suggested to me it’s a fear transferred.
My mother used to tell us about a house she lived in when she was young. It had been one of Henry the VIII’s hunting lodges and was panelled with dark wood and had a gallery. Her brother once dropped a junior hack saw from the gallery onto her head down below in the sitting room. Her father used to drop down Fox’s Glacier mints to her.
On Christmas Eve 1953 a man dressed as Father Christmas stood at the end of her bed. He smiled and he walked out of the room, down the corridor to the locked baize-covered servants doors.
In the morning my mother told her brother as she was already too old to believe in Father Christmas.
Her brother remarked that the man would regularly sit on the wicker nursery chair in his room and look past him crying.
My mother is convinced the ghost was John Cobb the land speed record champion who had conducted an affair with his mistress in the house, to a tragic conclusion.
