No. 4: Comparing and Contrasting Models
Proof of Life Series: No. 4
Comparing and Contrasting Models
This is a continuation of the Proof of Life series. Here I’ll take a quick look at the differences between the two spaces I visited in London: Sir John Soane's Museum and the V&A East Storehouse
1. Origins and Worldview
House Museum (1813 Collection)
Born of the imperial age, this collection reflects a British worldview of mastery and possession. Its objects arrived by ship, conquest, curiosity, and extraction. It is a deeply personalized archive—subjective, layered with aesthetic preference and the collector’s intellectual fascinations. Its ethos is containment: the world made graspable, assembled in the privacy of a domestic setting.V&A East Storehouse (Opened 2024)
By contrast, the V&A East is public, institutional, and reflexive. While it draws on the same imperial-era accumulations as older museums, its presentation seeks transparency: lifting the veil on storage, conservation, and provenance. It admits its origins in colonial acquisition, even as it repositions itself as a site for decolonial engagement and community re-interpretation. Its ethos is access and accountability.
2. Aesthetic vs Infrastructure
House Museum
The house museum is built like a dreamspace—aestheticized, symbolic, mysterious. It echoes the “cabinet of curiosities” tradition: rooms dense with resonance, implying a collector’s narrative even when none is stated. The object arrangement itself is a kind of storytelling.V&A East Storehouse
The Storehouse is infrastructural and transparent. Its architecture celebrates process—visible racks, drawers, labs, workshops. The visitor becomes a backstage guest. Here, the mystique is intentionally broken. Objects are not just seen—they are contextualized, repaired, and sometimes reinterpreted or returned. It's a museum of the museum.
3. Relationship to Empire
House Museum
Empire is embedded and largely unquestioned, even when referenced. The collector might gesture toward admiration or curiosity, but the power dynamics of extraction are rarely addressed. Empire is aestheticized, made noble through marble, teak, and brass.V&A East Storehouse
Empire is interrogated. Labels now include provenance. Displays acknowledge how and why objects arrived. The museum has invited artists, scholars, and community groups—particularly those from diasporic backgrounds—to reinterpret the collection and challenge the institution’s history and narrative or myth.
4. Temporal Attitude
House Museum
A time capsule. It preserves a past worldview intact, offering a powerful but often uncritical portrait of 19th-century intellectual ambition. It is valuable for what it reveals about the past, not necessarily for how it engages the present, at least our present. But then it was never intended to, only to be mindful of its own present and interpretation of the mysterious relics of its own past, and hence our past.V&A East Storehouse
A platform. It functions as a living archive, inviting ongoing participation. It sees the past not as fixed but as in dialogue with the present. In that sense, it is not a capsule but an ongoing conversation - at least at the moment. Each moment in time creates its own political necessities and perceptual adjustments.
Conclusion:
While both are born of the same great historical tides—empire, exploration, scientific wonder—the house museum is a preserved echo, while the V&A East Storehouse is a pivot point. One reflects a world as it saw itself; the other reflects how we now try to reckon with that vision, and possibly do better.
If the house museum whispers, “Look what we gathered,” the V&A East Storehouse asks, “Why did we gather it—and who decides what it means now?”
Of course I am looking at these spaces imagining the Ontological Museum Archives which remain in a state of process. As I am looking forward toward my own eventual end, I am considering the nature of my own overarching art project - the archives - and its possible futures and my own temporary and miniscule place in the world in relation to the world itself. Really, in relation to the Infinite before which all things are as nothing. Where anything that has a beginning, has an end and all things with beginnings and ends are brief in the face of eternity even galaxies.
Is the thought of preserving anything a pointless waste of effort? It is all a very fascinating subject to contemplate. From here forward I will be thinking about my own archives and our place as artists in the world we find ourselves in.
The Ontological Museum: A Third Mode of Memory
The Ontological Museum does not replicate the private density of the house museum, nor does it echo the transparent infrastructure of the V&A East Storehouse. It positions itself differently—not as a custodian of artifacts, but as a witness to presence, as an archives of connection. It is less concerned with what we collect and more with why collecting exists at all. If the house museum preserves the dream of possession and the Storehouse lifts the veil of provenance, then the Ontological Museum asks whether any object can ever be truly known—or if every object is a residue of something else, a rupture in time, something beyond itself and at the same time only itself.
1. Not Collection, but Recollection
The Ontological Museum is not a warehouse of conquest or a laboratory of transparency—it is a theater of recurrence.
It may hold objects, but only as clues, gestures, resonances. A clay shard might be placed next to a sound recording, a tax receipt, a recurring dream. The value is not in the object’s origin, but in the field it opens—a tuning of thought, memory, and sensation. Visitors do not learn about history; they are induced into inquiry. There is no fixed wall text, only provisional interpretations, like weather reports of meaning.
2. Architecture of the Invisible
Where the house museum recreates the bourgeois interior and the Storehouse reveals the backstage of royal power, the Ontological Museum is structured like a mind-map, a memory palace, or a dream-logic archive.
Hallways loop. Some rooms cannot be found twice. Some artifacts are missing on purpose. Others reappear in slightly altered forms. Erasure is part of the exhibit. So is doubt. So is silence.
The spatial experience is imagined to evoke the internal architecture of thought—not the empire’s external map, but the soul’s internal cartography. It is a different form of navigation all pointing toward the center. Your center.
3. From Provenance to Phenomenon
The V&A East Storehouse foregrounds provenance: where an object came from, how it got here, who it belongs to. The Ontological Museum is less concerned with origin and more with effect—what does this object do to the viewer’s sense of time, identity, or coherence?
Objects are not interpreted for what they represent, but what they unsettle. You might find a 19th-century globe placed beside a photograph of someone holding that globe in a dream. A feather may be labeled simply, “last seen in a moment of grace.”
4. A Politics of Ambiguity
While the house museum mythologizes empire and the Storehouse problematizes it, the Ontological Museum inhabits the fog between them. It neither exalts nor absolves—it refracts. The politics are implicit in the arrangements, in what is juxtaposed, in what is omitted. The Museum does not tell you what to think, but it troubles your assumptions.
Its ethic is neither guilt nor glory, but radical humility: a recognition that all knowing is incomplete, all possession temporary, all meaning in flux.
5. Not a Place, but a Practice
Most of all, the Ontological Museum is not merely intended to be a building or a collection—it is a practice of attention. An ongoing experiment in how memory, matter, and meaning intersect. Its exhibitions are often ephemeral - more studio practice than public statement. Most appear as a gathering only once or never the same twice. The museum might publish volumes that self-erase, hold lectures in silence through gesture, or invite visitors to participate and to leave behind objects with no name.
It would train not curators, but correspondents—people attuned to signs, patterns, improbabilities, and the flickers of presence that ordinary museums overlook.
Conclusion: In Relation, Yet Apart
The House Museum is a relic of power.
The V&A East Storehouse is a reckoning with power.
The Ontological Museum is a departure from power—toward wonder, presence, and the deep grammar of being.
Where the others seek to define, the Ontological Museum invites us to dwell in the unknown and get comfortable in it, not as a failure of knowledge but as the beginning of a deeper attunement, of knowing more that knowledge, of immersion in experience. It is not a place of facts, but of exquisite correspondences and relationships.
It is based in the aesthetics of chance, the processes of collage and the chance encounters of things taken out of context and placed in relationships that points toward a greater underlying harmony that includes everyone and everything. It is that liminal in-between where the creative community dwells. A place of seeing more than looking or watching.