The Cosmic House stands intimidatingly grand in a row of seemingly identical pristine, white houses. Its exterior is a facade, hiding its beguiling interior under a cloak of homogeneity. One foot inside and The Cosmic House immediately disorientates, encircling me with mirrors. It beckons to be played with for hours on end, a lifetime even.
Designed collaboratively by Charles and Maggie Jencks as a manifesto to post-modernism, the home-turned-museum contains four floors worth of ideas, metaphors and symbols, all connected by a spiral staircase that represents both the double helix of the human DNA and the solar system. Every element is whimsically dedicated to the human body and the higher cosmos.
Beginning my explorations in the basement, I encountered The World to Me Was A Secret: Caesious, Zinnober, Celadon, and Virescent, a multidisciplinary installation by Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani. Created during her residency at The Cosmic House, Shani invites us to interpret her work as an ‘exquisite corpse’ – a term borrowed from the Parisian surrealists’ collaborative technique of creating hybrid, monstrous creatures. The exhibition title references Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, drawing a parallel between Shani’s sculpture, paintings and text and Shelley’s stitched-together monster. This dual influence, artistic and literary, sets the stage for an encounter that oscillates between beauty and unease.
While weaving in and around each of the sculptural fragments that symbolise the body to an experimental pop score, the basement transforms into a dissection room. Someone (Shani) has been playing creator and has run away from the scene of the crime. Iridescent spheres glint in rose and turquoise, while two fish tanks pulsate gently to sustain blue shrimp, signaling the experimental process of creating life and art. As I try to piece together the bodily equivalents of each object, I feel an impulse to reconstruct the dismembered forms: I could free the skull with a banana for an eye and pearls for teeth from its glass vitrine or untether the kitsch balloon-like heart from its chain. But that would be an act of destruction, not creation.
Ascending the spiral staircase, I move through the house as an investigator, searching for connections between Shani’s dark, fantastical world-building and the aesthetics and consciousness of The Cosmic House itself. In the kitchen, amidst teapots with too many spouts, I find divine goddesses with multiple limbs; there are echoes of an intoxicating painting by Shani’s aunt, Ariela Widzer, displayed within the installation. In the Architectural Library, a magpie-like treasure trove of coral and crystals resonates with Shani’s underwater sculptures. Further upwards, a surrealist sculpture stops me in my tracks. This dismembered female torso with coral for a head and clock in place of legs is stripped of movement – a fragmentary counterpart to the Monster hidden in the basement.
The Cosmic House and The World to Me Was A Secret exist in a symbiotic dialogue, each amplifying the other’s fascination with the body, the cosmos and acts of creation. Shani has channeled the House’s allure into an eerily enchanting exhibition that lingers like a siren’s call.
Written by Rachel Ashenden, co-founder of The Debutante. Rachel is a freelance arts writer, editor and curator based in Edinburgh.
Comments