The pathos of absent lives
Rachel Whiteread Tate Britain
Rachel Whiteread has come a long way since she sprang to fame as a sort of fellow traveller of the YBAS in the mid-nineties. If early works such as House – a fullsized concrete cast of the interior of a house – and Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) – casts of the spaces under 100 chairs – seemed all of a piece with the attention-grabbing impulse that made stars of her contemporaries Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, that connection seems far-fetched these days.
Now in her mid-fifties, Whiteread, the first woman to win the Turner Prize (1993), has become the doyenne of British sculptors through a body of work based almost entirely on the casting of objects and, more specifically, the spaces around objects – their “negative spaces” as it were
– and their interior volumes, those objects ranging in scale from a hotwater bottle to entire buildings. If this approach sounds rather severe and analytical, it has struck a chord with the public: from the outcry surrounding the demolition of House by Hackney Council in 1994 to her wittily matterof-fact response to Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, consisting simply of a clear resin cast of the plinth, placed upside down on the original.
This substantial new career survey, however, is our first opportunity to form a definitive view of Whiteread’s value as an artist, and it benefits from two major departures in the way Tate Britain displays sculpture. First, the majestic central Duveen Galleries, given over for years to temporary
– and often underwhelming – commissions from contemporary artists, have been returned to major exhibitions. Whiteread’s One Hundred Spaces looks magnificent in the sombre, sky-lit space, the ranks of subtly different cuboid forms in translucent resin resembling rows of giant boiled sweets – and it can be viewed free by the general public.
Secondly, the walls of the exhibition space itself, the North Level 2 Galleries (recently used for the Hockney retrospective) have been ripped out, leaving one vast space. Rather than following Whiteread’s artistic progress through a succession of pokey rooms, we can take the whole thing in with a single sweep of the eye. The effect – initially, at least – is quite stunning.
Barely different in tone and colour from the surrounding walls, large plaster works such as 2003’s Untitled (Room 101) – a cast of the office that inspired George Orwell’s 1984 – and 2001’s Untitled (Stairs) – two casts of her studio staircase – seem to float almost ghostlike in the enormous space: the spectral but all too physical aftermaths of spaces in which people have lived and moved.
The smaller works are placed chronologically around the perimeter of the room, from early pieces such as Flap (1988), a wooden table top, sitting on a cast of the space beneath, to layers of papier mâché, embossed with the texture of wooden sheds, created only this year. Along the way, we take in Whiteread’s various signature approaches to the casting of objects, including a superb series from the early Nineties dealing with mattresses and the spaces underneath beds. The mattress apparently slumped against a wall in Untitled (Amber Bed), in a fruity red resin that looks good enough to eat, is in fact rock hard.
In Untitled (Book Corridors), 19978, three plaster casts of the spaces between library shelving, Whiteread seems as concerned with the resonance of the object as its form: the sense of the intellectual energy contained in the books compressed into the tightly packed shelves. This notion is paralleled in her Holocaust Memorial
(seen in photographs in a section on her public projects), a cast of a library room, its shelves filled with apparently identical, unnamed books, symbolising the anonymous fates and untold stories of the murdered Jewish victims.
Whiteread’s work gives us a heightened sense of the tactility of the world around us, of what is solid and what is hollow – and what is, by extension, real and unreal – in the surfaces we interact with from moment to moment.
Yet, everything here is based on a single over-arching idea. Everything in this huge room seems to exist in a single moment, almost as though time has stood still. While there are some beautifully elegant pieces among the final works, as well as some boring ones (too many casts of doors), their impact is dulled through the feeling of repetition. En masse, you are numbed to the pathos of these absent lives.
This a strong show with enough powerful works to make it essential viewing. But it leaves you itching to see what would happen if Whiteread were to move in a genuinely new direction.
Until Jan 21. Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk