If you like grand designs, you should see the Cosmic House. Beginning in 1978, the postmodernist theorist Charles Jencks and garden designer Maggie Keswick transformed their family home into a vision of the cosmic order at the scale of a Victorian townhouse. A “solar stair” with 52 steps, to give you a flavour, spirals from a “black hole” at its base through four floors with discrete symbolic themes, while the kitchen remixes classical Indian architecture to make a pun about late summer. In a basement dedicated to sun worship is a 25-minute film by Isaac Julien that is likewise wildly excessive, unrepentantly intellectual, thoroughly kitsch and, if you’re prepared to meet it halfway, rather glorious.
Displayed on a single screen at the heart of a kaleidoscope of standing mirrors, the film features Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie as science-fiction deities who meander through a Renaissance palazzo, a modernist glass home, and the Cosmic House in the course of a conversation about the end of the world, the possibility of time travel and the nature of God. For reasons that are not immediately clear, they have meaningful encounters with cyborg starfish and conjure up gleaming spaceships. Firestorms leap across the surface of the sun and bioluminescent sea creatures waggle neon tentacles. If you are allergic to pretension, you can stop reading here because this is not the work of art for you.
