Princess Diana in Paradise
I like to drive down to Hudson and go into all of the antique stores there. I tend to be very methodical about my Hudson trips. I start at the beginning of Warren Street , up by the park, and proceed to go into every single shop on the south side. Often I will continue walking until I get to First Street, which is at the very end of Warren, just because I don’t want to miss any new venue that might have opened up down towards the poorest end of the street. There, the gentrification process is so palpable, you could shoot a movie about the process by setting up a camera on a street corner and letting it run for a few days.
When I reach the end of Warren , I cross over to the other side and then I go into all of the shops on that side of the street. I do not discriminate among the shops and consider them all to be equally interesting.
Ironically, I have never purchased any antiques, even though I have been making this trip to Hudson over and over again for fifteen years. Well, that may be an exaggeration; I think that once about five years ago I bought some spoons in one of the shops. Actually, my trips to the Hudson antique shops have nothing to do with antiques as such, rather they are undertaken in the same spirit and with the same attitude that I have when I go to New York and visit all of the galleries in Chelsea . I am not shopping for an Anthony Cara sculpture for my back yard if I happen to go into the Gagosian Gallery, and I am not shopping for a sideboard if I go into Vincent Mulford. The entire event is just an historical, artistic and aesthetic experience for me. I see no difference between my New York trips in which I visit galleries and my Hudson trips in which I visit antique shops. In fact, there is no difference except that Hudson ’s stores are about a thousand times more interesting than New York ’s galleries.
I know that visiting galleries in New York is a sacred contemporary experience, but, to tell the truth, I sometimes feel that the galleries are not doing their jobs very well. If I told you that I went to New York and saw a large room with tiles that had been laid out at equal intervals on the floor, you would believe me because you yourself have gone to New York and looked at tiles. If I said that I had seen huge brown and black paintings over which a text was scrawled by someone who perhaps had a broken arm and that the words were misspelled with backward letters, you would believe that too. In New York , we are always being asked to appreciate fake illiteracy.
Those poor gallery owners labor under such tight restrictions and established expectations of what shows should look like, it is amazing that anyone ever sees something like a Lucian Freud exhibit once in a while.
In Hudson however, it is nothing like that. There is no magnifying glass of critical opinion poised to burn one’s personal expression to cinders. Hudson ’s antique stores are a sort of living installation art that changes constantly, with no pretense or the emasculation of contemporary art usage.
At Gray Fish, which is located at 602 Warren Street , I came across some large scrims hung on the walls. I asked what they were.
“These scrims were created for the Sotheby’s auction of the contents of the home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor ”, was the answer.
“Did they fall on hard times and have to sell their furniture to pay off their debts?” I asked.
The furniture, it turned out, belonged to the father of Dodi Fayed, who was the boyfriend of Princess Diana. Fayed sold all of this furniture after Diana’s death. Apparently he had no further need of it – as he has plenty of money.
So here then, was perhaps an image of the rooms with the furniture in which Princess Diana might have lived if she had married Dodi. Certainly it was grand enough, but so excessively serious and formal. I imagine that to reside in such a setting would be like living in a very stiff tuxedo – so stiff in fact that a group of servants would have to wheel you around with a hand truck from place to place, and then set you up like a mannequin.
In any event, the scrim was very otherworldly and magical and, set in the antique store the way it was, created a very unusual visual effect. In the foreground, as you can see from my photograph, were the usual antique store objects: the back of a couch, an ottoman, an Asian planter and a stand, a little marble obelisk, a silver tray, a plaster dog, art books and a wine carafe, all the indispensable items of a contemporary home. These various objects were lit by a soft light which flowed in through the windows of the shop, and lit up all of the objects in that caressing way for which light is so famous.
What is more, the image you see is somewhat mysterious: the furniture of the scrim is also lit by a soft light, which also flows into the picture from the right, more or less at the same angle. It is an instance where it appears to the eye, or more to the imagination, that this is the boundary between the real world and the heavenly realm of the next life. As if you could step across the room and enter another world. You seem to be peeking right into Princess Diana’s apartment in Heaven.
Now, to my mind, this experience of going into this shop and looking into Princess Diana’s apartment in heaven meets all of my expectations regarding installation art. Granted there is no docent around to put any particular spin on it. I cannot rent earphones, as if in a museum, in order to listen to an explanation of its significance. It didn’t take eighty people six months to create it with fax instructions from Europe . Nevertheless, installation art it is, and like all good installations, it took up a place in my mind for the rest of the day as a riddle to be pondered, and for me, as part of a larger riddle of the city of Hudson itself.
For I must admit that it is not just the antique stores that draw me to Hudson , but there is something else, some powerful magnet that pulls me there; the scrim simply set me to thinking about what that could be. My pondering took the following form.
The living room of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is like all of those sumptuous, monstrous and expensive rooms that you might look at in the pages of Architectural Digest. Perhaps stage sets created to be back drops for the lives being lead by some high society couple. Is the setting so expensive because the performance is so fascinating, or, is it just the reverse?
Certainly, everyone has a macquette in their mind of the rooms and the furniture that might constitute the appropriate set in which to act out the chapters in their personal stories. Very recently, Paris Hilton was reading that part of her life where she gets to go to jail. The jail was the stage set. She wanted that scene to be cut out but everyone agrees that so far it is the most interesting one.
And what about newly weds? Don’t they invariably have notions of a love nest? Even if they have no money, their scene can be fleshed out for them at a local rent-to-own store. Domestic environment presumptions and expectations are practically innate. That is why movies can deliver absurd set-ups that our minds accept instantly. A waitress wants to be an actor in the city; she struggles to get along on her tips and wages, but nevertheless goes home to a five million dollar loft space. No one objects to this for everyone assumes that life is supposed to look like that, except perhaps for their own.
I too have had visions of the settings for marital bliss; I have had many such notions and I can remember very clearly my first. I was in love with a blonde girl named Cynthia. Blonde is the best description I can give because I never saw her close up. She sat in a seat the farthest from me: diagonally across the room in kindergarten.
Once, at a great distance, I followed her home, but not all the way to her door. After getting several blocks away from my usual path home I began to feel a rising panic and gave it up, but then, I was only five.
That same night I had a vivid dream about my new love. I dreamt that we were married and that we lived in a tree fort in the back yard of my house. When I awoke it was with a distinctly absurd feeling of stupidity and I wondered to myself, “How could I think that people could be married and live in a tree fort?” I felt that the dream indicated a certain level of stupidity on my part. But the blissful feeling of contented marital bliss, as I now know it is called, would not leave me. As a matter of fact, when I recall that dream I still can feel that delicious feeling of being in love with someone who I really do not yet know – set apart in some wild and strange place. We were like shipwrecked survivors on a deserted tropical island, for whom courtship, inquiry, fascination and consummation take place without the least possibility of interruption or competition and where even memory and fantasy are silent.
The very next morning I set about building a tree fort, with the restricted means of a five year old. Our backyard however presented a dismal prospect: a piece of dirt perhaps thirty feet square with a few strands of crab grass here and there. It was bordered with cinder block walls on three sides. One of these walls was the back part of a funeral parlor which had one window, its curtain always closed. Another wall was the back of an establishment that rented tuxedos. In the corner of this yard grew a lone sumac tree about seven feet tall with spindly branches and those long leaves that look like the remaining unkempt hair of some balding old man.
I spent a long time trying to nail a two-by-four into a branch in that sumac tree but with no success. I remember being stupefied by the problem of how to hold the hammer, the nail and the wood up in the air all at once and still, be able to strike with the hammer. Each time I would try the nails would fly off into the dirt of the yard someplace and I would have to hunt around for them. Finally, in desperation I resorted to rope. I tied several two-by-fours to the branches of the tree with the rope, and then, standing on a chair, I jumped upon them like mounting a startled horse by surprise. The various branches of the sumac tree all broke at once and everything ended up on the ground. I had murdered the sumac tree even though I had not meant it any harm. I was just like Lenny, in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.
My crime did not go unnoticed. Later that day my mother confronted me and asked, “Dicky, why did you break down the sumac tree?”
I explained, “I was trying to build a tree fort.”
“But why would you try to build a tree fort in a sumac tree?”
This second question she said more to herself than to me and did not really expect me to answer. Actually, to me, it sounded more like, “Dicky, why are you such a stupid little boy?” I couldn’t even face her apron but stared down at my shoes, the laces I still had not learned to tie.
Late in the afternoon I occupied myself with throwing stones at the mortuary wall until, as luck would have it, I broke their only window. After that I went inside, told my mother about it and said I would be in my room until the police came to take me away.
I am sure you are wondering at this point what all this could possibly have to do with Hudson and its antique stores, which this article seemed to be about at the start. It has everything to do with what, for me, is the purpose of the Hudson antique market. Personal archeological research, the digging up of my past.
My childhood was spent in a city just like Hudson . The backyard and the sumac tree were exactly like the backyards and sumac trees in those neighborhoods that press up against Warren Street from all sides. Many parts of Hudson ’s downtown seem unchanged for eighty years and for me, to walk around the city is like a trip in a time machine to Utica , New York , circa 1955.
If one’s life were like an aircraft, that at six hundred miles an hour had exploded into a million pieces, perhaps every one of those pieces could be found. In the corners, shelves and walls of Hudson ’s antique shops one is constantly stumbling across various lost fragments of ones’ life. They can never be reassembled, but it is very interesting to look at them again.
I like to drive down to Hudson and go into all of the antique stores there. I tend to be very methodical about my Hudson trips. I start at the beginning of Warren Street , up by the park, and proceed to go into every single shop on the south side. Often I will continue walking until I get to First Street, which is at the very end of Warren, just because I don’t want to miss any new venue that might have opened up down towards the poorest end of the street. There, the gentrification process is so palpable, you could shoot a movie about the process by setting up a camera on a street corner and letting it run for a few days.
When I reach the end of Warren , I cross over to the other side and then I go into all of the shops on that side of the street. I do not discriminate among the shops and consider them all to be equally interesting.
Ironically, I have never purchased any antiques, even though I have been making this trip to Hudson over and over again for fifteen years. Well, that may be an exaggeration; I think that once about five years ago I bought some spoons in one of the shops. Actually, my trips to the Hudson antique shops have nothing to do with antiques as such, rather they are undertaken in the same spirit and with the same attitude that I have when I go to New York and visit all of the galleries in Chelsea . I am not shopping for an Anthony Cara sculpture for my back yard if I happen to go into the Gagosian Gallery, and I am not shopping for a sideboard if I go into Vincent Mulford. The entire event is just an historical, artistic and aesthetic experience for me. I see no difference between my New York trips in which I visit galleries and my Hudson trips in which I visit antique shops. In fact, there is no difference except that Hudson ’s stores are about a thousand times more interesting than New York ’s galleries.
I know that visiting galleries in New York is a sacred contemporary experience, but, to tell the truth, I sometimes feel that the galleries are not doing their jobs very well. If I told you that I went to New York and saw a large room with tiles that had been laid out at equal intervals on the floor, you would believe me because you yourself have gone to New York and looked at tiles. If I said that I had seen huge brown and black paintings over which a text was scrawled by someone who perhaps had a broken arm and that the words were misspelled with backward letters, you would believe that too. In New York , we are always being asked to appreciate fake illiteracy.
Those poor gallery owners labor under such tight restrictions and established expectations of what shows should look like, it is amazing that anyone ever sees something like a Lucian Freud exhibit once in a while.
In Hudson however, it is nothing like that. There is no magnifying glass of critical opinion poised to burn one’s personal expression to cinders. Hudson ’s antique stores are a sort of living installation art that changes constantly, with no pretense or the emasculation of contemporary art usage.
At Gray Fish, which is located at 602 Warren Street , I came across some large scrims hung on the walls. I asked what they were.
“These scrims were created for the Sotheby’s auction of the contents of the home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor ”, was the answer.
“Did they fall on hard times and have to sell their furniture to pay off their debts?” I asked.
The furniture, it turned out, belonged to the father of Dodi Fayed, who was the boyfriend of Princess Diana. Fayed sold all of this furniture after Diana’s death. Apparently he had no further need of it – as he has plenty of money.
So here then, was perhaps an image of the rooms with the furniture in which Princess Diana might have lived if she had married Dodi. Certainly it was grand enough, but so excessively serious and formal. I imagine that to reside in such a setting would be like living in a very stiff tuxedo – so stiff in fact that a group of servants would have to wheel you around with a hand truck from place to place, and then set you up like a mannequin.
In any event, the scrim was very otherworldly and magical and, set in the antique store the way it was, created a very unusual visual effect. In the foreground, as you can see from my photograph, were the usual antique store objects: the back of a couch, an ottoman, an Asian planter and a stand, a little marble obelisk, a silver tray, a plaster dog, art books and a wine carafe, all the indispensable items of a contemporary home. These various objects were lit by a soft light which flowed in through the windows of the shop, and lit up all of the objects in that caressing way for which light is so famous.
What is more, the image you see is somewhat mysterious: the furniture of the scrim is also lit by a soft light, which also flows into the picture from the right, more or less at the same angle. It is an instance where it appears to the eye, or more to the imagination, that this is the boundary between the real world and the heavenly realm of the next life. As if you could step across the room and enter another world. You seem to be peeking right into Princess Diana’s apartment in Heaven.
Now, to my mind, this experience of going into this shop and looking into Princess Diana’s apartment in heaven meets all of my expectations regarding installation art. Granted there is no docent around to put any particular spin on it. I cannot rent earphones, as if in a museum, in order to listen to an explanation of its significance. It didn’t take eighty people six months to create it with fax instructions from Europe . Nevertheless, installation art it is, and like all good installations, it took up a place in my mind for the rest of the day as a riddle to be pondered, and for me, as part of a larger riddle of the city of Hudson itself.
For I must admit that it is not just the antique stores that draw me to Hudson , but there is something else, some powerful magnet that pulls me there; the scrim simply set me to thinking about what that could be. My pondering took the following form.
The living room of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor is like all of those sumptuous, monstrous and expensive rooms that you might look at in the pages of Architectural Digest. Perhaps stage sets created to be back drops for the lives being lead by some high society couple. Is the setting so expensive because the performance is so fascinating, or, is it just the reverse?
Certainly, everyone has a macquette in their mind of the rooms and the furniture that might constitute the appropriate set in which to act out the chapters in their personal stories. Very recently, Paris Hilton was reading that part of her life where she gets to go to jail. The jail was the stage set. She wanted that scene to be cut out but everyone agrees that so far it is the most interesting one.
And what about newly weds? Don’t they invariably have notions of a love nest? Even if they have no money, their scene can be fleshed out for them at a local rent-to-own store. Domestic environment presumptions and expectations are practically innate. That is why movies can deliver absurd set-ups that our minds accept instantly. A waitress wants to be an actor in the city; she struggles to get along on her tips and wages, but nevertheless goes home to a five million dollar loft space. No one objects to this for everyone assumes that life is supposed to look like that, except perhaps for their own.
I too have had visions of the settings for marital bliss; I have had many such notions and I can remember very clearly my first. I was in love with a blonde girl named Cynthia. Blonde is the best description I can give because I never saw her close up. She sat in a seat the farthest from me: diagonally across the room in kindergarten.
Once, at a great distance, I followed her home, but not all the way to her door. After getting several blocks away from my usual path home I began to feel a rising panic and gave it up, but then, I was only five.
That same night I had a vivid dream about my new love. I dreamt that we were married and that we lived in a tree fort in the back yard of my house. When I awoke it was with a distinctly absurd feeling of stupidity and I wondered to myself, “How could I think that people could be married and live in a tree fort?” I felt that the dream indicated a certain level of stupidity on my part. But the blissful feeling of contented marital bliss, as I now know it is called, would not leave me. As a matter of fact, when I recall that dream I still can feel that delicious feeling of being in love with someone who I really do not yet know – set apart in some wild and strange place. We were like shipwrecked survivors on a deserted tropical island, for whom courtship, inquiry, fascination and consummation take place without the least possibility of interruption or competition and where even memory and fantasy are silent.
The very next morning I set about building a tree fort, with the restricted means of a five year old. Our backyard however presented a dismal prospect: a piece of dirt perhaps thirty feet square with a few strands of crab grass here and there. It was bordered with cinder block walls on three sides. One of these walls was the back part of a funeral parlor which had one window, its curtain always closed. Another wall was the back of an establishment that rented tuxedos. In the corner of this yard grew a lone sumac tree about seven feet tall with spindly branches and those long leaves that look like the remaining unkempt hair of some balding old man.
I spent a long time trying to nail a two-by-four into a branch in that sumac tree but with no success. I remember being stupefied by the problem of how to hold the hammer, the nail and the wood up in the air all at once and still, be able to strike with the hammer. Each time I would try the nails would fly off into the dirt of the yard someplace and I would have to hunt around for them. Finally, in desperation I resorted to rope. I tied several two-by-fours to the branches of the tree with the rope, and then, standing on a chair, I jumped upon them like mounting a startled horse by surprise. The various branches of the sumac tree all broke at once and everything ended up on the ground. I had murdered the sumac tree even though I had not meant it any harm. I was just like Lenny, in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.
My crime did not go unnoticed. Later that day my mother confronted me and asked, “Dicky, why did you break down the sumac tree?”
I explained, “I was trying to build a tree fort.”
“But why would you try to build a tree fort in a sumac tree?”
This second question she said more to herself than to me and did not really expect me to answer. Actually, to me, it sounded more like, “Dicky, why are you such a stupid little boy?” I couldn’t even face her apron but stared down at my shoes, the laces I still had not learned to tie.
Late in the afternoon I occupied myself with throwing stones at the mortuary wall until, as luck would have it, I broke their only window. After that I went inside, told my mother about it and said I would be in my room until the police came to take me away.
I am sure you are wondering at this point what all this could possibly have to do with Hudson and its antique stores, which this article seemed to be about at the start. It has everything to do with what, for me, is the purpose of the Hudson antique market. Personal archeological research, the digging up of my past.
My childhood was spent in a city just like Hudson . The backyard and the sumac tree were exactly like the backyards and sumac trees in those neighborhoods that press up against Warren Street from all sides. Many parts of Hudson ’s downtown seem unchanged for eighty years and for me, to walk around the city is like a trip in a time machine to Utica , New York , circa 1955.
If one’s life were like an aircraft, that at six hundred miles an hour had exploded into a million pieces, perhaps every one of those pieces could be found. In the corners, shelves and walls of Hudson ’s antique shops one is constantly stumbling across various lost fragments of ones’ life. They can never be reassembled, but it is very interesting to look at them again.
Richard Britell Housatonic, Ma
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