Let me fill you in on the highlight of my visit to London last week. The preserved house of Denis Severs is anything but a museum. Denis Severs, who died in 1999, has left behind a spatial series of historic atmospheres in what used to be his private home in London. The house is a poem, but also a riddle, a theatric piece, and even an artwork. It is fair to say that the experience is unequalled. What is the secret of Denis Severs’ “still life drama” at 18 Folgate street in Spitalfields?
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It could be said that heritage in the broadest sense (things, places, rituals, narratives), must have some capacity of continuity – otherwise it could never be presented to an audience in a stable way. In fact, so it is said, this stability is one of the most important assets of the museum object: It functions as ‘proof’ and at the same time does it present us with life lines to the ‘other’ that is in the past, but also far away, of unearthly beauty, or unimaginable altogether. Surely, museums must tame this chaotic and incomprehensible ‘otherness’, if they wish to snatch the ’spoils of history’ from transitoriness. How do museums usually arrive at this? Showcases, explanatory text, silence… Or more exact: lifelessness, distance and a focus on knowledge are among the techniques that are applied for distilling the desired eternal and cerebral knowledge from the fluid and fugitive here-and-now.
Not in the Denis Severs House. This series of spaces are not an instruction, they are an opportunity: a portal to a possible experience, also says the motto of the house: you either see it or you don’t. Here there are no historical objects radiating eternal truths, just a subtle invitation to the wandering mind to yield to a personal creation – one out of a million. Is the Severs House an artwork? Or a theatrical scene? I would say the ‘trick’ of the Severs House is in fact the core strength of any museum, any significant display. The house unveils an important thruth: encoded knowledge may be replicated in a (more or less) stable and reliable form, but an unpredictable experience is personal perse. It may be invoked or facilitated, but could never be rigidly replicated. Are museums society’s tools that must distribute measurable, replicable knowledge? The Denis Severs House contrasts this mission by confronting its visitor (or better: its guest) in a very corporeal manner. Its magic is not lingual but poetic; its whisper is far from rational, its scenery is the unseen image – just around the corner, outside the picture frame. The caller fails to understand and explain, but on the contrary, he is struck by an overwhelming ‘being there’.
These and more images are found on this page on Flicr. More on the Severs House is found on the website www.dennissevershouse.co.uk, or on this Wikipedia entry.
