thesis, anithesis, synthesis

Michael Kane

The opposite of camp is earnest. The varieties of camp are numerous.

Surrealism is camp, cubism is earnest. The fusion of the two produces great art ( Chagall, Beckman, Morandi, Chirico, Grosz ).

Corbusier is camp, Mies is earnest. The Goulding Pavilion is earnest, the site is camp. Basil Goulding was camp. He wrote surrealist annual reports to his shareholders which he published as advertisements in the daily papers.

The purpose of the pavilion was to facilitate the campery of his friends. It's hard to say if the fusion of camp and earnest takes place with the creation of the pavilion. The site betrays the backwardness of the Goulding vision, the building seems to suggest the progressive. The thatched mansion across the river from the pavilion is wholly backward with a backwardness typical of the aboriginal -the cabin, the bog, the work of Seamus Heaney, the ideal of Sean 6 Faolain -as opposed to the backwardness of the choice of site for the pavilion which is that of the colonial, -the artificial landscape, the contrived garden, the babbling brook, the cosy, the wholly cut-off from social and economic reality. Wordsworth was chased across a lake by a lowering mountain: Basil Goulding and the colonial project are being chased out of their Eden by the monstrous cottage of the aboriginal imagination.

Michael Kane is an artist based in Dublin.