Thrift Store Serendipity

I went in to work early yesterday, worked like a bandit, and got out of work early so that I might make my desired thrift store peregrinations in the pretty wisps of snow that starting falling around 1 pm. It might as well not have bothered snowing. It had no covering power. Everything looked dirty even with the new snow falling, after a day of cars sloshing this around, and nature had adopted an "Ashcan" school aesthetic. It only looks pretty when nature completely wins and covers the black and grey splash and splutter. Nature knows how to modulate the greys in the undersides of tree branches and such. Cars just fuck up the visual beauty. At my thrift stores, I had fun as usual. Later I stopped off at home to refuel with a snack, and Lee joined me for another two stores and then home.

I found a few eccentric items for myself, the house, and family members and a shitload of stuff that's going right to Ebay.

One of the items I found which I really love is this little monograph/catalogue for the show "Made to Scale: Staircase Masterpieces (The Eugene & Clare Thaw Gift). This is a wonderful little monograph with some gorgeous plate art of the titular subjects photographed to perfection; it's great but I have to admit I was surprised to see this already going for fifty bucks online. I paid forty-nine cents for it...ninety percent of thrift store items I buy are priced under a dollar, and the remaining ten percent is usually five dollars or under. Some finds in the past year include a rare print from the esteemed and widely-collected Japanese ukiyo-e master Nakayama (a very prescient piece anticipating the anime aesthetic) from the fifties, and a large beautifully-framed pastel portrait by H. Marcus Moran. Both of these are worth several thousand dollars. I paid 2.99 for the Nakayama and 6.99 for the Moran at thrift stores. This is a very affluent country, and people die all the time without telling people what their possessions are worth. Many of these end up in thrift stores...due to this breakdown in information I suppose. Or maybe the collectors who owned these are old and alone and simply don't care where the art ends up anymore. Or maybe they want it to reach someone randomly, so they cast it into the sea of people. Who knows. Yes, I did check the registry of stolen art on these. Stolen art rarely ends up in thrift stores, however. The individuals who stole the art know the worth obviously, and they fence it one way or another. They don't give it away. Robin Hood is a myth, a legend, Dear Children.

I envy those of you who got to see this show at Cooper-Hewitt. It just ended on June third of 2007 and started in October so I'm imagining many millions of people stopped in and enjoyed these little masterpieces.

These are miniature staircases which were initially collected by the Thaws themselves on a few trips to Europe, and thereafter largely through the agency of friends scouting for them here and abroad.

The dreamlike nature and visual poetry of these structures is entrancing. The fact that they are stairways to nowhere is perhaps a large part of the weird fascination
they hold. Sarah D. Coffin is the author of the micro-essay included here, "History of Staircase Models." She begins, "The staircase model reached its zenith as an art form in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, thanks to a formalized guild system known as compagnonnage (society, or guild, of companions) that existed in France, parts of Germany, and western Switzerland. With origins in the medieval era, the compagnonnage movement grew into a significant force in the seventeenth century."

Eugene Thaw writes of how aesthetics--and not history--was the motivating interesting for his wife and him: "We learned much later about the history of staircase models--that they were pieces de maitrise, or masterworks, which were made as a part of becoming a master and being accepted into a guild. These staircase models show careful craftsmanship, a mastery of geometric principles, and fine woodworking skills. However, I am less interested in the technical side of staircase models than in their aesthetics. I still look at these models as works of art: Are they pleasing to the eye? Do they possess a sweep, a kind of flare? Thay can be displayed as art, without need of any special skill or historical knowlege."

Amen to that. And Amen to rich people going around the world and collecting works of exquisite beauty and giving them to the public, the old philanthropy here...a wonderful bequest from the private to the public sphere. (P.S. Dear Thaws, should you like to write me a check to stay home this coming year and write all year, I'll give you a full dedication in my next book! You can be my Medicis, or something like that. Wink wink nudge nudge.)

I'll reproduce a few of my favorite staircases here. Wasn't there an artist who did life-size staircases that went nowhere like these as sculpture? I seem to remember seeing something along those lines. I think that's pretty cool, especially if they are placed out in the middle of an empty field or something. But one could always argue that they are belvederes then. Did anyone ever build a lifesize mindfuck Escher belvedere? I mean I know that's an "impossible" structure, but it could be built in a way to fool the eye from several angles. I think that would be awesome. Or if someone just did a supertall cochlear staircase that swept up to a frightening height and with a low winding caracole rail the entire way up til you felt as though you were entering the clouds on days of low cloud ceiling. The trick would be to anchor it deep in the earth, so it would be more stable than it appeared....maybe have little compartments of hartshorn for the inevitable fainters on this great archaicism...