I. Home Alone
I'm in the middle of 4 days, 5 nights staying off my hurt knee (from after work on Weds to Monday)--to give it a chance to heal. That means not even going to the basement to do laundry.
At first I felt frightened and tiny, but then thought, Hey, an enforced vacation–– to read and watch documentaries!
Luckily I'd recently been to the library and had a pile of DVDs.
Watched so far: PBS, Korea: The Never-Ending War (I had almost no idea what this war was about);
The Pulitzer at 100 (2017);
American Experience: Oklahoma City (about Ruby Ridge, Waco, white supremacy groups, and T McVeigh. We are seeing a metastasis.)
All good, but every novel I've started recently has been so disappointing I have put them all down.
Last night, I picked the short novel Utz off my Unread shelf, by Bruce Chatwin. It is so good--and a relief that it is.
Utz immediately reminded me of my work in thrift!
It's about collecting––and desire––specifically, it's about Kaspar Utz, a passionate collector of Meissen porcelain, a thousand pieces "all crammed into the tiny two-room flat."
II. "I want him."
Kaspar Utz's desire started as a boy, when...
"...a precocious child, standing on tiptoe before [his grandmother's] vitrine of antique porcelain, he found himself bewitched by a figure in Harlequin...
His taut frame was sheathed in a costume of multi-colored chevrons. ... Over his face was a leering orange mask.
'I want him,' said Kaspar."
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Below left: Meissen Harlequin; right: Bruce Chatwin at Sotheby's
Harlequin ^ listed on ebay for $5kI've never read Chatwin--I thought of him only as a travel writer--but before he went traveling, he'd worked with THINGS--physical objects--for Sotheby's in his twenties.
The objects were d’art, but his sounds like my work in thrift store Housewares! Researching and assigning value to stuff--including, he said, the time "spent valuing for probate the apartment of somebody recently dead."
Not that I do it for probate, but I handle a lot of donations from dead people--either because they left stuff to us, like the recent collection of owl statues and pictures (mostly I priced them $2.99) or because their surviving relatives swooped everything of theirs into black plastic trash bags and dropped them on us--false teeth in a basin and all.
On Chatwin, by his editor of In Patagonia, Susannah Clapp:
"For me, his great gift – on the page and in person – was visual generosity. He made you see different things and look at things differently. It was not works of art in galleries that interested him so much as objects, particularly those from which a story could be extracted."
And, "Every night, the author went home merrily to hack away his stuff: he
loved chucking out adjectives and anything that looked like a moody
reaction shot. "
Also, this:
"He wanted to give all his friends presents...."
I like this harlequin, below, better, with his stripey legs--and it's owned by the MIA here. I'm disappointed-- it's not on display.
collections.artsmia.org/art/34865/harlequin-with-jug-johann-joachim-kaendler
I'd recently written that I saw museums as sterile boxes.
Utz says,
"Ideally, museums should be looted every fifty years, and their collections returned to circulation...."
"'An object in a museum case', he wrote, 'must suffer the de-natured existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies--of suffocation and the public gaze--whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch.
...The passionate collector ...restores to the life-giving touch of its makers. The collector's enemy is the museum curator."
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STORY IDEA: Write an art-historical History of an Object in your own life, as if it were for Sotheby's; or a sign to go with the object in a Fine Art Museum.
"This saucepan..."
III. Unrelated
I wandered into this article with wonderful photos:
"Strange, surreal and sexy: 31 images that changed the way we see our bodies"--in today's Guardian (2/1/25): theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/feb/01/strange-surreal-and-sexy-31-images-that-changed-the-way-we-see-our-bodies
In it--some of photographer Angélica Daas's ongoing series matching skin tones to Pantone colors. She's done 4,000 humans so far.
Note the center 4 all match Pantone 58-7 C.
