A house is not a home

Poe's stories and essays are full of detailed descriptions of florid interiors; he even dispensed haughty advice on interior design in his magazine The Broadway Journal, condemning Americans for their ostentatiously expensive aesthetic tastes. At the conclusion of his essay 'The Philosophy of Furniture' (1845), Poe articulated his ideal of a restful room, modestly hung with crimson and gold draperies, where the inhabitant 'lies asleep on a sofa' amid well-chosen decor with 'arabesque' trimmings.

But Poe never found the perfect home. One of the most striking facts about his pitiful biography is how often he moved from one shabby domicile to another - Luc Sante has noted that in his New York years alone he lived in eight different squalid locations. 1 He died in 1849, not in his bed but after collapsing on the street in Baltimore.

Poe's craving for a home could easily be seen as a desire for the solid, well-built selfhood he never attained. In this he was supremely and typically Victorian. But in Poe's tales, the Victorian dream of a presentable public façade is subjected to various forms of surreal mockery - interiors turn on their inhabitants. A murderer hears his victim's heart beating under the floor. A letter with the power to bring down a Queen lies on an ordinary mantelpiece, invisible because it is so clearly in view. A cruel Renaissance ruler and his court hide themselves away from the plague in a palace with no view of the outside world; the rooms are all decorated in different hues and their illumination filtered by stained glass, creating a completely artificial fantasy environment. Stalked through spaces that are blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and black, the king and courtiers are finally destroyed by the hooded figure of the Red Death.

In 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (1839), Poe's definitive tale of architectural horror, the 19th-century psyche found the ripest expression of its phantasms. Roderick Usher, Poe's alter ego, is a man of sensitivity - an artist who paints abstract canvases, plays music and composes verse - who hides himself away in his family's ancient mansion. The house, however, fails to provide rest and seclusion. Its history of incest and perversion - the narrator explains that, since time immemorial, the family have practised a bizarre form of inter-marriage - manifests itself in an increasingly oppressive atmosphere. When Usher prematurely buries his sister in the family vault, the very structure of this introverted world begins to tear itself asunder. The narrator, witness to the dissolution of Usher and his domicile, finally flees:

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, the fissure rapidly widened - there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind -

the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight - my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder - there was a long and tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters - and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the 'House of Usher'. 2

Poe has haunted Modern art from the beginning. In fact, there's something unearthly about the extent to which he prefigured Modernism in so many ways and was then mined by successive generations. Poe's alcoholic life and melancholy death were an inspiration to the very idea of the avant-garde. Baudelaire's translation of his tales in 1856-7 led to Poe being adopted by Parisian artists as the supreme Bohemian hero. Manet made a plaintive portrait of him in the early 1860s and illustrated Mallarmé's translation of The Raven (1875). The Poeism of the Surrealists can be seen most obviously in Magritte's 1937 portrait of Edward James, the English collector and patron of Dalí, entitled Not To Be Reproduced, in which James stands with his back to us, before a mirror that repeats the same view. On the shelf, under the mirror, is a French translation of Poe's only novel, The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).

The way Poe, like some kind of historical poison, mixes high and low culture is even more extraordinary. He muddies the waters of cultural history in truly disconcerting ways; a history of his secret influence would provide an alternative narrative of Modern art. His legacy is seen in Roger Corman's gaudy film adaptations of the 1960s, which served as a popularisations of underground cinema - take The Masque of the Red Death (1964), for example, whose cinematography by Nicholas Roeg includes delirious psychedelic sequences. There's also the figure of Vincent Price, archetypal Corman star, Poe villain, and notable art collector. Price crops up at some surprising moments of post-War art history - such as the occasion, in 1958, when he sat alongside Marcel Duchamp on the jury that awarded a $500 prize to Jasper Johns' for Grey Numbers at the Carnegie Institute's Pittsburgh Biennial. But perhaps the strangest haunting of 20th-century art by this drunken Southern Gentleman is the connection between Poe's writings and those kinds of art which, since the 1960s, have adopted site, architecture, and interior as their media. His obsession with interiors and their destruction - the Gothic core of his writing - is a constant, unspoken presence in this art.

In 1968 Robert Smithson invoked the ghost of Poe: 'One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion', declared Smithson in an article that was a manifesto for an art that acknowledges entropy, that gives in to time, that abandons the rational, individualist desire to draw strong boundaries between self and world. Smithson sees the Modern artist, making rigid forms in the protected shut-off space of the studio, as the epitome of this closure, this resistance to time and reality. He prophesies the doom of this art, the disintegration of perfection, as steel cubes rust, bright industrial objects fall apart, and the psyche of Modernism implodes: 'The Modern artist in his "studio", working out an abstract grammar within the limits of his "craft", is trapped in but another snare. When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble and fall like "The House of Usher", so that mind and matter get endlessly confounded.' 3

In 1974, Gordon Matta-Clark cut a comforting, nostalgic American clapboard house in two. Slicing it down the middle, he opened up a fissure like the one that admitted the moonlight in Poe's 'House of Usher'. Photographs of Matta-Clark's Splitting show the light burning through the huge crack which opens from bottom to top in a wedge of intrusive space. One side of the house is tilted a little so the building appears to be in motion; it appears to be the beginning of an accelerating process and suggests that powerful forces are rending the house asunder. But are those forces coming from inside or out?

In Poe's story there is no force outside the house; it is doomed by its own incestuous domesticity. In Smithson's reading of Poe, Modern art disintegrates because it tries to ignore reality outside the studio. For Smithson, the House of Usher stands on shifting ground; the earth is not a solid platform but in flux. This is an image of society as a fluid, powerful constellation of forces. The House of Usher, that mansion of the private self, ignores these forces, and they tear Smithson's building apart, pulled rather than pushed in two. The enclosed, private world of the 19th-century individual is attacked by a larger social whole that will not permit privacy.

How do you inhabit a world that does not permit privacy, that no longer offers any space in which the individual can hide? We are all on the street, like Poe on his final bender in Baltimore. The opaque windows of Rachel Whiteread's House (1993) were straight out of 'The Fall of the House of Usher': 'I looked upon the scene before me - upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain - upon the bleak walls - upon the vacant eye-like windows... with an utter depression of soul...' 4 But when destruction came, it was from outside as the house was rent asunder by a demolition crew. Gregor Schneider's house in Rheydt, on the lower Rhine, is permanently permeable to the outside world. It's a private space that is also a public spectacle: he rebuilds his disorientating rooms - one revolves very slowly, others have false natural light - in public exhibitions, recently reconstructing his dank, dark cellar for the Royal Academy's 'Apocalypse' (2000).

Andy Warhol's 27-room townhouse on the Upper East Side was a private space, but it was also a mausoleum. Warhol filled it with his different collections, and each night, before going to bed, he would put the lights on in each room and look inside. The rest of the time, most of the rooms were locked. Each individual room was consistent - the East Parlour, for example, was fitted out in Federal period style, with furniture contemporary with Poe, but which he could never have afforded. Yet, Warhol's house disintegrates in the imagination: each room was different and irreconcilable, one contained his art deco objects, another his cookie jars. The boundary between inside and outside dissolved explicitly at the original 1960s Factory, Warhol's official residence, where, in the silvery environment of perpetual partying (with Warhol as Prince Prospero in his palace) the making of art went on among everything from gossip to attempted assassination. The walls of the studio vanished like the House of Usher sucked into the tarn.

Perhaps Warhol was a 20th-century Poe - if the latter had prophesied the doom of the private self, it was Warhol who recorded domesticity's final dissolution. In 1977, he lent items from his collection of Americana to the Museum of Folk Art in New York. He said his favourite exhibit was a blue-painted door and frame from an 18th-century house. It was set up in the museum so it could be opened, closed, and walked through. 'I like the door best', said Andy, 'you can go in and out of it and still go nowhere'.