paint me like one of your Rone girls!

My colleague L and I drove up into the hills, this evening after work, to join the 26,000+ people who've now visited the 'Empire' exhibition at Burnham Beeches. Link, because I don't trust myself to explain the scenario, if you don't grasp it already. Not without contaminating the description with cynicism and carping. I mean, those things are fine and necessary, but strategically you should say some nice (or at least neutral) things first, to dispel any suspicions that you can only be a sniffy little bitch about things that other people like and find to be good. I've fucked this up already, haven't I. It's been a long day. Along with all the other normal workplace fires that needed putting out today it wasn't even ten o'clock before I found myself giving an impromptu tour to a group of public servants who turned up un/expectedly from the Premier's department because I could not find a volunteer to do it and I also had to stack up ALL the furniture in the three teaching rooms at work so the carpets can be steam cleaned over the weekend. Well, anyhow, Burnham Beeches. I've wanted to get inside this house since I first saw it (I think that might've been in Leonard's first winter, we went to walk in the Alfred Nicholas Gardens up there in Sherbrooke and there it was, this huge beautiful empty neglected inexplicable house rearing up out of the cold wet trees) and that is what happened and I was not disappointed, it is an extremely lovely building and the stuff with which it is currently decorated does not interfere with what the house has to say about how to raise a structure of concrete, steel, glass, plaster and wood in a clearing amongst trees so as to live for ever in complete happiness.

You know, my job is essentially identical to the task which I gather was given by the building's current owner, filthy rich chef Shannon Bennett, to Tyrone Wright, the artist who led the project. Explain this 1930s building and park to a public that has total and complete collective amnesia about anything that happened before its own childhood, but despite this - or because of this - rushes to sacralise any story, or object or place which seems to open a door to a forgotten past.  

And also, I might not sound like it sometimes, but I really love the essence of my job. Like every other kind of work, the secondary things get in the way and are frustrating and sometimes they drag me right down, but the main game is good, worthwhile, stimulating and interesting work. So I understand and have sympathy with what I take to be the spirit of the exhibition. The enigmatic inner life, or memories, of this wonderful house needs unpacking. 

Other times when I've been in places that have this abandoned quality they produce this feeling of almost desperate longing to see something of the richness of texture I imagine they used to have. The exhibition is trying for that richness, without denying that the building is no longer inhabited or habitable. 

Cheesy

But I just have to say, I thought the way this was done is uber-kitsch. It's Trechikoff for millennials - ruin-porn style. As we walked through the rooms L and I talked about what we thought could be done with the building that might keep it alive without ruining it. We didn't come up with much. I would really hate to see it municipalised or even worse, museumed in some way. One quite good thing about the exhibition was the total absence of signs of curatorial interventions, or worse, explanations.

They didn't need to try so hard. I think a lot more could have been done with a lot less. The sound, for instance,  was extra-highly First Year Art School. I've spent most of the previous two days listening to a new record from On Diamond and as I walked round the house I though how much better a soundtrack that would've been, straight out of the box. Reaching too hard for significance comes out dorkier when the medium is sound than in almost any other medium.

The fabric of the house looks terribly fragile, especially on the upper floor where water damage to the roof is extensive and severe. I didn't really enjoy seeing this legacy of neglect and decay romanticised. I hope the house survives.

  

After exploring the house and some of the park we got back in L's car and drove to Belgrave. Google Maps gave us a bum steer and also a fire truck made us take a detour, so it was forty minutes of winding mountain roads in the dark and I soon became more carsick than I've been for decades. It was absolutely miserably awful. My head was heavy with hot nausea, hands and feet were throbbing, I assume because somehow my blood pressure became elevated? Eventually we got to the main drag of Belgrave which remains the interesting and cool street I remember from early childhood, and we got pizza and had a long and intense Woman conversation which is not relevant to the present discussion. And then I waited forty minutes on a cold platform for a train, and ultimately arrived home after almost three hours, incredibly, of chilly PT reverie.