Exhibitions 3
Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life (Tate Gallery, Liverpool, till 5 January)
Solid space
Andrew Lambirth When Rachel Whiteread's most famous sculpture, a plaster cast of the inside of a terraced house, was still on show in London's East End, visiting it encompassed something of the fairground. Taxis were parked at the nearest curb, the park in which it was situated was thronged with people, and passing builders' lorries slowed so that the grinning occupants could more satisfactorily hurl abuse. `House', as it was called, certainly aroused public debate — besides making a rather fine sculptural statement — before it was demolished in 1994, the year after it was built. Whiteread (born London 1963) has worked once or twice on room-sized sculp- tures since then, but most of her work has been on a more domestic scale. Her cur- rent exhibition at the Tate Gallery Liver- pool, incidentally the first substantial showing of her work in this country, thus comprises more humanly manageable items the size of chairs or baths or mat- tresses.
The exhibition has been laid out not chronologically but for dramatic effect. The viewer is immediately confronted on enter- ing the gallery with Whiteread's 'Untitled (One Hundred Spaces)': like a field of large glace sweets, it is her most spectacu- lar and benign installation to date. These furrowed blocks of different coloured opaque resin are formed from casting the shapes under chairs and tables. Monu- ments to domesticity, they are like solidi- fied jellies, opalescent ice-cubes, or bars of soap — lavender, rose, spearmint, lilac. They look like a regulated graveyard or a series of futuristic standing stones with a passing resemblance to television sets. They're chunky but not inelegant, like old brass weights.
Whiteread's aim is the paradoxical one of making space solid, casting as it were the negative of the object rather than its real presence. Is this supposed to be a spiritual metaphor? The clarity of Whiteread's forms is matched by the ambiguity of her intent. Much contemporary art self-con- sciously concerns itself with death — as if it had just discovered what in fact has always been one of the great themes — and Whiteread's is no exception. The attractive patinas of the plaster, or the colours of the resin, entice, before Whiteread staves the viewer off, quickly sealing up the possibili- ties, entombing flexibility of response. Is she some kind of art gangster, fitting out the perceptual world with a concrete over- `Untitled (One Hundred Spaces)' 1995 by Rachel Whiteread coat and then exhibiting the results rather than sending them for a long dip in the Thames?
These pieces make a very definite appeal to the senses. 'Untitled (Orange Bath)'„ cast in rubber sections and reassembled, is translucent and deliciously tawny with the colours of rust. Some of the sculptures have an almost edible appearance: the jujube quality of 'One Hundred Spaces', or the smoothed fudge/candy look of 'Unti- tled (Double Rubber Plinth)'. This latter reference is particularly disturbing when you learn that these plinths are cast from a mortuary slab. Often there is something decidedly minatory about a Whiteread sculpture.
The earliest piece on show marks the beginning of this type of work for Whiteread, and is called 'Closet' (1988). Unusually, this cast of the interior of a wardrobe is muffled in black felt, apparent- ly due to the artist's personal memories. Is Whiteread offering us the child's eye view? Hiding in the wardrobe or under the bed, waiting for something magical to happen? We've grown up now, and we're still wait- ing. There's a distinct lack of magic in most of these pieces. The suspicion recurs that Whiteread does not allow her work to depart sufficiently from its raw material. Art is about transformation, not replica- tion.
It has to be said that Rachel Whiteread, like so many of today's younger artists, has only one idea, and her artistic procedure consists of producing a set of variations on the same theme. As an idea, it's pretty thin and pale, and neither terribly new nor orig- inal. In fact, the American artist Bruce Nauman made a plaster cast of the space under his chair as long ago as 1965. Although the actual changes Whiteread manages to ring on this idea demonstrate the versatility of her imagination and the seriousness of her endeavour, so much of what is on display is not riveting. Why is there this contemporary yearning to focus on ordinary household objects? And if we can't have humour or poetry, could we not at least have a bit of irony?
The handsome catalogue is peppered with Whiteread's photographs: the serried benches in an amphitheatre, the head- stones in a war cemetery, a staircase, old furniture in the street. These are far more revealing of her working methods than the obscurantist texts. An accompanying video on the making and destruction of 'House' plays in a room containing photographs by John Davies and a set of 12 screenprints based on Whiteread's own photographs of the demolition of tower blocks. In one cor- ner is a model of the Holocaust Memorial she has designed for the Judenplatz in Vienna, a prestigious and valuable commis- sion. It is like an anonymous library inevitably inside out — so that the page- ends rather than the spines of the books are visible around the walls. Although it's difficult to judge from a model, this build- ing looks as if it will rival 'House' in impressiveness. All we need now is a large Whiteread in London. She should be encouraged to cast a tower block in con- crete, and make of it a fitting memorial to the appalling post-war architecture foisted upon the hapless inhabitants of our inner cities.
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