As a regular visitor to the Soane Museum, I am sometimes a little underwhelmed by some of the contemporary art exhibitions which are installed there from time to time. The Museum is a difficult space to work with, and I wonder if it is an art installation in itself? The viewer enters what seems like a historic property, but moving towards the back of the house, enters into a bewildering labyrinth of objects.
Many are fragments rescued from the sites which Soane, as an architect, worked upon, while others are examples of more refined collecting, such as oil paintings by Canaletto. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Museum is the lack of labels or even wall texts, which allow the viewer to perform their role – looking at objects and the way they have been arranged.
I was therefore heartened to find the current exhibition “The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture”, mainly due to an encounter with two BT phonebooks from the early 1990s, their covers being examples of post-modern architecture. In the same room was a large ball (I think) from the TV-am building in Camden.
Soane’s Museum is itself a 3D catalogue, both an archive and a showroom, and this is reflected in these two objects. The phonebook provoked nostalgia for a time without mobile phones, when one had to consult large volumes to find things out (one can apply to same principle for encyclopedias as well). The ball, from the top of the building, is perhaps as banal as the phonebook, but both are then transformed by their presence in the Museum.
I wonder though, whether this transformation is really only possible in the Soane Museum, which is really not much like any other Museum. Its cluttered interiors and lack of interpretation mean it is much closer to a private residence (which it once was) than any of the examples of institutional collecting (e.g. the British Museum) which we tend to think of as ‘museums’. The Soane is able to cultivate an atmosphere of intimacy which seems generally unpopular in museums and galleries, large and small.
