Lorenz Klingebiel

14. xi. 2024

Dear Lorenz,
I was so eager to return home this evening to look at the zine but there was a heavy fog along the coast road which slowed me down. The locals call it sea fret.

The zine: where to begin? Blushes! L’Amoroso (2022) opposite a rose boy; I used to walk in the Rose Queen parades in Liverpool as a child. Then Rabit opposite that carpet whilst 18th century English pottery calcifies Brigitte Bardot. A centrefold with Pavel Tchelitchew’s portrait of Edith Sitwell hanging on the wall: she wanted sex and he didn’t. Her fret.

I was thinking about the stained Roman sculptures that you and Vanessa liked when I met her that day at Modern Art. I saw them so differently on Vanessa’s phone: they must have been hibernating before coming to life just as they were needed. I then suddenly remembered two books by Margaret Malamud – Ancient Rome and Modern America (2009) and African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition and Activism (2016) – in which she deftly traces the influence of the classics within American politics and activism. Could one of those Roman sculptures with their accompanying mantic stains act as a gatekeeper on the zine cover? There will be finally a retrospective of Ithell Colquhoun’s work at Tate St Ives in 2025, ten years after I saw her mantic stain works in a damp off-site shed in the grounds of a stately home. Damn the National Trust for neglecting her archive for so long! My fret.

I LOVE the magazine’s suggestion for the frieze cover! A friend gave me the ragged page. As ever, the model will no doubt be impossible to trace. Our fret.

— Linder