"Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow" at the Soane Museum - various artists; installation art; London, Enlgnad - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 2000 by Alex Coles

For many artists, the Soane Museum has long been something of a place of worship. Now, apparently, curators have joined in. It's not too difficult to see why--once inside this museum, the visitor is pleasurably enveloped by an archaic labyrinth with no end of secret passageways packed with Egyptian and Renaissance fragments collected by the renowned British architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837).

During "Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow," each room of the three-floor museum played host to a small contemporary art work selected and installed by the show's curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist. But from the very outset, this methodology--placing the mostly generic art works in a highly specific space--presented a serious problem, and it ran right through the exhibition like a fault line.

However, there were two impressive exceptions: Gilbert and George's photograph of their diurnal ritual of drinking morning tea transposed from their home into the drawing room of the museum, and Steve McQueen's subtly placed mirror, sited beneath one of Soane's antique tables in the mirror-coated upper quarters of the museum. These interventions achieved an intimate dialogue with their respective spaces that effectively engaged the viewer. Elsewhere though, it was hard to see why particular works were placed in one room instead of another. Much of the art--such as Anish Kapoor's revolving water urn in the downstairs breakfast parlor and Richard Wentworth's still-life with coffee cup and newspaper on the ground floor--simply skidded off the museum's dazzling surface. Cerith Wyn Evans's contribution (modifying the tone of the ring of the museums' doorbell) came off slightly better, as did Richard Hamilton's poster that advertised the exhibition by mimicking the Soane Museum's house design style.

Obrist also drew in elements from a number of other art museums. From an odd institution called the Invisible Museum (a collection of art constantly on loan), he included works by Katharina Fritsch and Liisa Roberts. In the same downstairs corridor as the Fritsch and Roberts pieces, a business card from the Museum of Jurassic Technology was discreetly displayed in one of Soane's cabinets. The notion of exhibiting a museum within another museum is intriguing, but these were only token efforts in that direction.

It's too bad that among the 24 artists in the show, Obrist didn't include any renowned for addressing the conventions of the museum, its strategies of acquisition and display. Because of these omissions, the history of the Soane Museum was never probed, leaving visitors tantalized but, ultimately, unsatisfied.