I don’t think I’ve ever seen an art exhibition in such a huge space. Tate Britain has cleared all the walls out of the north wing exhibition rooms to create one enormous open space, 1,500 square metres, which is filled with casts in concrete, resin, papier mache and so on by Rachel Whiteread.
In fact the main impact of the show is being in such an enormous open space, walking round and savouring it. The size and lightness and openness brilliantly suit Whiteread’s mostly big and sometimes enormous casts of manufactured objects and internal spaces (houses, rooms, stairs).
Installation view of Rachel Whiteread at Tate Britain, featuring Untitled (Staircase) (2001)
It is really, really relaxing to wander round and eye up the exhibits and take in their scale and dimensions and angles and attributes. At most of the exhibitions I go to you have to put in quite a lot of effort reading the wall labels introducing each of the rooms and then read the label for every individual work.
Here there was no text at all on the walls. There is a foldout guide which every visitor is given, with 18 paragraphs (just counted them) dividing the works into themes or subjects (tables and bookshelves, public works, boxes, floors and stairs etc). But you don’t have to read it. And although there is a wall label for every work, most of these have very basic titles (Stair space, Room 101, Stairs, Light I), no explanatory text, and plenty of works are untitled.
Quite quickly this encourages you simply to enjoy the works as presences in their own right, unmediated by text or interpretation. The result is a wonderful sense of release and freedom, encouraging you just to wander round and – enjoy!
Installation view of Rachel Whiteread at Tate Britain
Whiteread came to prominence when she won the Turner Prize in 1993, being – as every scrap of publicity about her emphasises – the first woman to do so. She hit the wider headlines when she cast the inside of a house in East London in concrete. The house was then demolished leaving only the cast in situ. In fact it only existed for a few months before angry locals got the work itself knocked down. There’s a video of the process of creation (shown here for those who want to sit and watch it) as well as documentary photos.
House (1993) by Rachel Whiteread © Rachel Whiteread. Photo: Courtesy of the artist
The exhibition showcases her ability to cast objects in a variety of materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal. For example, a display case of hot water bottles (and enema bags!) demonstrating her use of different materials. These were made at different dates but all have the title Torso. The key thing is that the casts record the inside of the bottles and bags: they record the internal and empty space concealed within these everyday objects.
Installation view of Rachel Whiteread at Tate Britain, featuring Torsos
At the small end of the scale there are casts of the insides of individual cans, a row of toilet rolls in different colours (Line-up), the insides of circular cardboard cylinders you keep architects’ diagrams in and the insides of filing cabinets.
Getting a bit bigger in scale, there are casts of the insides of mattresses in various colours, some propped against the wall, although they are solid not soft and bendy.
Untitled (Amber Bed) (1991) © Rachel Whiteread. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist
But it’s the really monumental casts of architectural space which catch the eye. The stairs (in figure one, above) or the internal cast of the room at Broadcasting House which George Orwell supposedly used as the basis for Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Her work makes space visible. Emptiness becomes solid. Tangible. Walk aboutable. Think aboutable.
Installation view of Rachel Whiteread at Tate Britain featuring Room 101 (2003) and Staircase (2001)
Away in one corner was a wall of sketches and 2-D works (in the background of this photo).
Installation view of Rachel Whiteread at Tate Britain
Many are preparatory sketches for castings and show the same interest in interiors and architectural features. They range in media from pencil, varnish, correction fluid, watercolour and collage.
But some are not directly tied to the casting projects and are interesting free-standing works in their own right. I was taken by a small piece, which is a postcard of birds taking off (pigeons?) against the silhouette of buildings (Trafalgar Square?) which she has covered with white paint and then punched holes in. I liked it.
Untitled by Rachel Whiteread
One of my favourite pieces was a set of bookshelves filled with books which seem to have been cast from the inside, so what is facing you is the pages-end of all the books, not (as you usually see in a library) the spines – Untitled (Book Corridors) 1997 to 1998. In fact – it dawns on you as you wander round it – what you’re seeing is not bookshelves at all – but the space between bookshelves. The emptiness into which the books give.
The book theme looms large in the enormous Holocaust Memorial erected in Vienna in 2000, a memorial to the 65,000 Viennese Jews transported and exterminated by the Nazis, which consists of a room-sized cast, whose faces are made of the page-end sides of lined-up books i.e. not the spines. I find this absence or inaccessibility of the spines which usually carry the name and title of books i.e. their identity and meaning, especially powerful and disturbing.
This is just one of Whiteread’s numerous large and public sculptures. In the entrance hall there’s a display of photos of these public artworks.
A less earnest and more playful example was the work she made to top the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square – a cast of the plinth itself, upside down, in resin. Being transparent, the work changed character with the changing light quality of the daylight. Genius.
The public, overt aspect of her work comes out in other ways. At some point she had the idea to cast the space underneath a chair. This sounds of quite limited interest or impact. But it turns out that if you cast this space underneath a whole range of different sizes and shapes of chairs, in different coloured resins, and then arrange them in neat rows – then they have a really massive impact. Hence Untitled (One Hundred Spaces, casts of chairs with all their imperfections and marks of wear and tear, lined up in five neat rows of 20, and filling Tate Modern’s long narrow atrium space (technically known as the Duveen Galleries).
Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) (1995) by Rachel Whiteread © Rachel Whiteread. Photo: © Tate (Seraphina Neville and Andrew Dunkley)
(It’s worth mentioning that around the rest of the huge atrium space are key works from Tate’s collection selected by Whiteread herself as important for her practice and view of art.)
Whitereadiana
In the shop are posters, postcards, half a dozen books about Whiteread, as well as a number of videos and a Rachel Whiteread scarf, handkerchief and notebook, as well as a selection of paperbacks chosen by the woman herself (High Rise by J.G. Ballard, Depths and Quicksand by Henning Mankell, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson etc).
Outside the gallery, on the south lawn, is a new piece, the inside of a chicken shed cast in concrete.
Chicken Shed (2017) by Rachel Whiteread © Rachel Whiteread. Photo: © Tate
The visitor handout, once I came to look at it, discusses the types of works (Early work, Works on paper, Public Commissions and so on) and raises various themes and issues which can be found in her work.
The most obvious ones are that:
- It is a lot of hard work to make these apparently effortless sculptures.
- And that all of the pieces are, in some sense, memorials: memorials of spaces which are transitory because the objects which frame them are transitory: the houses will be torn down, the mattresses will be thrown away, the water bottles will be junked. The rates of decay vary but she does what all artists do – captures some of the beauty and wonder of the world while it lasts.
The entire exhibition is blessedly free of the usual rhetoric about gender and identity although the fact that the artist is a woman might give some critics the opportunity to speak about these being mostly domestic spaces and domestic articles and taking it from there.
But, unlike so many recent shows I’ve been to, above all this one felt light and airy and uncluttered. It really is an amazing space and an amazing collocation of objects to fill it with. For some reason, T.S. Eliot’s lines come into my mind. You could ask what the works are about, or what they’re for or what they are saying. Or you could just enjoy them directly, engaging with them face to face without the intervention of curators or critics.
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.
Treat yourself to a total immersion in Rachel-Whiteread-World.
Visitor demographics
I go to lots of exhibitions and am always alert to the popularity and the types of visitors they attract. From a demographics point of view, what was really unusual about the visitors to this exhibition was the number of young people and, in particular, the large number of young women in evidence – singletons, pairs and groups of women in their 20s. It was noticeable enough to be worth commenting on.
And this was another rather uplifting aspect to this exhibition – it felt younger than almost all the exhibitions I attend. Prompting the thought that it might be inspiring the next generation of women artists, students, writers and so on to create works as varied, as individual and as powerful as Whiteread’s.
The video
Every exhibition has at least one promotional video.
//players.brightcove.net/1854890877/4811b2e3-75b4-4489-b1a5-21a18a61075e_default/index.html
Related links
- Rachel Whiteread continues at Tate Britain until 21 January 2018
- Five things to know about Rachel Whiteread
- Tate’s Rachel Whiteread page
- Untitled (Stairs)
- Rachel Whiteread selects
Books & Boots 