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From: Ben Zanoe Category: Art Date: 30 November 2009 Time: 07:05 AM Review: The Freud Museum is reassuringly solid red brick house off the Finchley Road in one of London's pleasant, somewhat rareified bastions of the real middle classes, the allusion is to the real Labour Party or New Labour, the New Middle Classes is EVERBODY particularly the voiciferous "I'm from working class, me". (Julie Burchill vs Stephen Berkoff circa 1990) The beautiful duck egg blue door of the Freud Museum is the first whiff that grabs the critical mind, the door looks ordinary from afar, suburban, on closer inspection it's a wide fat solid door, it does'nt need to repel borders or resist a visit from the anti terrorist suspicion force's battering equipment at 5.a.m. but if it had to it would put up a better fight than the tacky little version of the same door on sale at Homebase imported from somewhere impoverished by low waged tax exiles only too willing to crush a rainforest into something potable. The Freud Museum is really just a frickin house where some particularly eminent personages dwelled - one of these personages was not Matt Collishaw. In the bit where you might wipe your feet on the door mat, hang your gabardine macintosh, let's call it the porch (not the car that the nazi's helped Ferdinand Porsche build fercrisakes....) In the porch is a desk which I for one naturally assumed I would either pay , donate or be welcomed o'er (rustic poetic allusion) the threshold, but no, the porch is the nerve centre of security, a lady is screwing up her lovely foundation as she squints into the quadruple split screen cctv, she beckons me go through to the shop and entrance, to get there I almost traverse the rest of the "museum", there we are now in a downstairs reception room over looking (o'er looking) a proper old garden and a half, lawn, sheds and tree's wi birds inem. Six quid a pop, entrance fee paid, I'm now free to biffle about, read the little signs and reassure myself that my prime purpose is to see the art of Matt Collishaw, an artist who I admire for his ability to present anihalistic beauty without (so far) resorting to crass hyperbole. So I'm rebuking myself constantly for carping at the oasis like atmosphere that exists in this museum. Collishaws exhibition is titled Hysteria which automatically sets a rather dull prescribed genderbabble educational gosh how marvellous no you must come round to ours type of agenda. Be that as it may, Collishaws beautiful stroboscopic animated construction added liquidity to the six quid mugging at the door, quantative easing was also acrued hither and tither. Just go and see that thing working, I saw his other creation at the Haunch o' Venison, well this is smaller, browner but more subversive, makes Nick Park look like ...nick park. I watched the footage of B&W home movies featuring Sigmund Freuds ensemble of family and house maids enter Paris, playing with dogs in the garden (Freud Museum Garden), lovely summery summary, homely stuff, up stairs is Anna Freuds weaving loom used as she listened to her patients unravel their cares and deepest secrets. Was property cheap then? asked a fellow visitor to the exhibition, hmmm, she's thinking how the Freuds ever got sponsored to up-stick's and travel o'er land to Paris and to Britain and buy a lovely house off the Finchley Road, a somewhat juxtaposed situation to the contemporary immigrant fleeing from some blood bath or cashing in their Europort EC advantages. An element that construes the various facets of Hysteria is the very Homely Britishness of this place, if you have watched the vintage T.V. Prisoner series you will perhaps experience something familiar about this exhibition in this location. My point is , that you need to see this with as few reminders of the current world visible as possible. Julie Burchill is on holiday this week.