Beneath Some Monuments is a Mound of Excrement
MyBallard lit up yesterday with the continuing saga of Edith Macefield's house. In the basic facts of the story, the house has been sold to Greg and Shauna Pinneo, owners of some shady outfit which combines real estate investment with "inspiration, motivation, ethics, and expertise"--if one is predisposed to believe the website.
The house is to be elevated both literally and figuratively, while Ms. Macefield's story is to be leveraged for self-advertising. The Pinneos plan to build a quasi-semi-public gathering space below. Preservation architects derisively refer to facadectomies or facadism, which constructs entirely new buildings behind the hollowed-out facades of existing buildings, removing all the original meaning and soul in the process. This strange twist is sort of a vertical version of that practice. It will take the unintentional, street-level symbolism of Macefield's story and move it quite literally out of reach of those idealists whom it inspired. The remaining void will be filled with a heap of dung.
Art critic Rosalind Krauss wrote about the importance of the pedestal in classical statues and monuments. The pedestal separates the deified representation of the statue itself from the actual site--in one respect a mediation between heavens and earth. Perhaps the Pinneos are attempting to subscribe to this monumental thinking. The problem is that they're doing it wrong: the thing memorialized is supposed to be a representation, not the actuality. This scheme takes the perfect charm and context of a run-down house at street level and makes it look like some hillbilly shack on a modern rooftop. (What is it about so many motivational speakers and their utter lack of aesthetics?) There's no dignity to this.
But wait, there's more!!! Mr. Pinneo, a scammer in a past life, would like to get you to give him $250 to $5000 to have your credo etched on a tile. Savvy miscreants and street artists alike routinely affix their credos in public with a $1.99 can of spray paint or some stickers costing a few bucks. And those expressions frequently have more soul than what this promises.
Really, the only winners in the end are Edith Macefield herself, who died holding on to the house she loved and is beyond the petty arguments of this saga, and Barry Martin, the contractor who inherited the house and will use the money to put his kids through college. Good for both of them.
