RACHEL WHITEREAD IN ROME

by JAMES HULL

In 1993 I visited Chicago for the first time with my younger

brother Robert. We had a good friend who had just moved
there and went to see him, the town and have some fun.
During the day between visits to attractions like the Chicago
Mercantile Exchange and the Billy Goat Tavern we visited
the Museum of Contemporary Art in the center of the city in
a small shared building (the MCA is now in a big new
building looking out on the lake). The two exhibits featured
were a young British sculptor, Rachel Whiteread and an
established american painter Susan Rothenburg. Rachel Whiteread, Embankment installation view,
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 2005.

Entering Whiteread’s exhibition space first, we were greeted

by a full sized mattress made of rubber, Untitled (double
amber bed) (1991) slouching against the wall heavily
bending from its own weight. There was a group very
animated small sculptures made from pouring plaster into
hot water bottles. The strange bulbous shapes were
unexpectedly anthropomorphic (think headless doll body; a
fact reinforced by the title “Torso”) and detailed enough to
show seams and embossed writing from inside the water
bottles. What they revealed was the conceptual brilliance of
Whiteread’s work–she had found and captured a completely
“new” form–even though we had seen hot water bottles our
whole lives. The breakthrough was to cast the void, the
space hidden inside the bottles, and replace what we knew
of the outside with what she had discovered, solidified and
exposed.
Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, Plaster, 1990.

I was in the middle Graduate school for sculpture at the time

using similar processes to cast bronze sculptures. For two
years I had been making plaster and rubber molds for
waxes and resin-bonded sand molds for direct casting.
After seeing that casting and molding was the process
Whiteread used to “flip” the form, I looked closer at all the
other work in the exhibit. The rubber bed was actually a cast
of the space below a bed (which was about the same
thickness as a mattress) and the reversed upholstered
“buttons” were raised pyramids with concave discs, inverted
from their normal recessed position. I was dazzled. What a
spatial mind game.

I stuck my face under and around the sides of every

sculpture in the room and felt exhilarated that the sculptor’s
complaint “I like the mold better than the cast sculpture” had
been embraced by an artist around my age. But since I was
the only artist in the group we soon to exited the museum
(the Rothenburg horse paintings were not a big hit) and Rachel Whiteread, Sit, Plaster, wood and steel,
2006.
found a cold beer not too far away that everyone agreed on.
A month or two later back in Atlanta, the Turner Prize was announced and the artist selected was Rachel Whiteread.

I shared my recollection with the artist at her opening in Rome (I left out the beer drinking). The Rome gallery reception must
have seemed refreshingly low key for the artist compared with New York and London opening night mob scenes and she mixed
easily with Italian collectors, artists and American students from a nearby College. When I spoke to Whiteread, she was gracious
and joked that I had a good memory for that was so long ago. I complimented her on the current work and mentioned that I had
worked with Christoph Grunenberg at the ICA, Boston and she smiled and spoke fondly of her relationship with the former ICA
curator ( Now Tate Liverpool Director) and Boston’s ICA.

It was a thrill to meet and talk to her and other than the short story about Chicago I did not really discuss her new work other
than the usual congratulatory “Brava!” I visited the Rome exhibition again a week later and confirmed what I had detected at the
opening. Whiteread’s new sculpture was moving in a very different direction formally from her early works, but she seems to be
revisiting much of the autobiographical content upon which the early work was based. Having followed Whiteread's development
from that early exhibition and having had a similar technical training, I decided to give a more thorough review and comparison of
this new body of work, its roots in the early sculpture shown in Chicago and why we should note the intentions underlying the
varied strategies the artist has developed since 1993.

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In her first solo exhibition in Italy, Rachel Whiteread expands and retools her investigations of spaces to consider the emotional
impact of changing locations. The artist presented work that used her consistent formal vocabulary of plaster forms to generate a
more personal, autobiographical narrative than any work she has produced since her own childhood room was the subject in
Ghost (1990).

A statement produced for the The Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Roma exhibit states that this work was triggered by spending the last
two years moving out of both her living and working spaces. The sight of having one’s entire life and history packed into boxes
and crates must be somewhat cathartic. The response, surprisingly, was to have the entire “New Sculptures and Drawings”
exhibition focus on one singular form: a cardboard box. In this context it was specifically a moving box, all sealed up and taped
shut. The completely anonymous containers (except for one with embossed rings on the surface from wine bottles) varied in size
from several as small as a lipstick box to one as big as a liquor case. There was also a series of drawings depicting cardboard
rectangles piled next to images of stacking chairs and nesting tables clipped from magazines.

The repetition of a generic form and composing it into piles was a new trajectory for Whiteread’s work. The installation of
Embankment (2005/2006) at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London first introduced the cardboard box forms en masse. In
Embankment the artist arranged 14,000 of the box forms to create a monumental maze of towering mountains and buildings that
dwarfed the viewer and limited his or her movement and perspective. In the Lorcan O’Neill exhibit a very different, more intimate
experience was generated using fewer and smaller versions of the same form. A text from the Tate exhibition stated that “The
form of a cardboard box has been chosen because of its associations with the storage of intimate personal items and to invoke
the sense of mystery surrounding ideas of what a sealed box might contain.”

Fundamentally this new direction was defined by a decision not to articulate the voids inside any of these boxes just to mold the
inside surfaces. While the detailed plaster ( and in one case, hand painted bronze) perfectly recorded every surface texture of the
internal flaps, corrugations and perforations, it was just like looking at the external surface of the sealed box. Therefore the
encounter was closer to a confident inspection than the mind-bending discovery that Whiteread’s “space-reversing” sculptures
usually elicited by surrounding–and thus revealing–its contents.

That decision profoundly changed the viewing experience from a formal/spatial discovery to an emotional, memory-based one:
the feelings of loss, dislocation or nostalgia that were unavoidable when packing one’s entire life into anonymous boxes. The
artist reduced the interest in the individual shapes through repetition which emphasized the position and accumulation of the
components over the textural specifics or formal intrigue. This underpinned the psychological impact of slowly disappearing from
a place, just as your processions gradually turn into bland boxes as you pack up everything to move out. The gallery became a
room that was being packed up and emptied out and the space had a melancholy mood to it.

The artist used a similar tack to create a very different kind of anonymity and loss in her Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, Austria (
2001). By casting hundreds and hundreds of books on shelves with their spines hidden (facing inward) the artist kept viewers
attentive to the metaphorical and symbolic implications of the quantity of the books by obscuring any possibility of knowing what
was in any one of them.

Another striking feature of this exhibit was the use of various platforms, found objects really, to display the cast plaster forms.
Two chairs, two shelves, two medicine cabinets, a table, a stool, and a bookshelf held the multiple cast plaster works. The
positive structures that Whiteread had previously used as molds and then removed to reveal the space that surrounded them
were now sitting there as is functioning as ad hoc pedestals. The actual furniture from her studio had become just another object
to wrap up and move or a flat surface to use as a landing spot for more boxes.

Rachel Whiteread has spoken for years, especially in her groundbreaking works Ghost (1990) and House (1991), about how
memory and a general sense of loss that inhabited the “voids” that she cast because of their history. Now she had used the
mystery of a sealed box to tempt the viewer with an unseen space. The material that she had used to make space more visible
was now enclosing and obscuring space.

Returning to the content that she began her career with, Rachel Whiteread invigorates her new work with a poignant sense of
mystery. In a recent interview Whiteread spoke of this directly saying, “I’m trying to work out a way of changing, of going
backwards and remembering when I was working in the depths of the East End and cycling to the studio. The freshness of that
time was easier, and I’m trying to find that place again.” The Rome exhibition was clearly more about change, the leaving of a
place and uprooting things than about the specifics of that space or what was being moved. Our discovery of unexpected spaces
was replaced by a reverent memorial to the past and the stocktaking that emotionally connects this work to the act of ending,
packing up and starting something new. It is an interesting and symbolic move for the artist and presents a private counterpoint
to Whiteread’s monumental public sculptures.

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Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Roma

"New Sculptures And Drawings" is on view at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Roma.

All images are courtesy of the artist and Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Roma.

James Hull is an artist, educator and an independent curator based in Boston. He is a regular contributor to Big RED
& Shiny.

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