the dennis severs house is rich and layered, a great fat cake of visual detail, of dense narrative, decades in the making, overwhelming by design. david hockney called the experience of it ‘one of the world’s great operas’. for concentrated passion and sensory intensity, for high rococo-cuckoo, operatic seems about right.
the house is jam-packed, not only with objects, but also with object lessons. naming and claiming those lessons, in the face of such ‘too-much-ness’, is a tall order. luckily, i know how to tackle a cake: let’s take just one slice, and learn from dennis severs as host.
