IN THE STUDY
Sculpting the Unseen: Rachel Whiteread's Incomprehensible Art
Sculpting the Unseen: Rachel Whiteread's Incomprehensible Art
by James Romaine
Dr. James Romaine is an associate professor of art history at Lander University. He is the cofounder of the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art (ASCHA). He is a frequent lecturer on faith and the visual arts. His books include Art as Spiritual Perception: Essays in Honor of E. John Walford (Crossway), ReVisioning: Methodological Studies of Christianity in the History of Art (Cascade), and Behold: Christ and Christianity in African American Art (Penn State University Press). Video essays by Dr. Romaine can be viewed at Seeing Art History on YouTube.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Domestic), 2002; cast plaster on various armatures; overall dimensions: 676 x 583.88 x 245.11 cm. (266 1/8 x 229 7/8 x 96 1/2 in.; weight: 3852.4 kg. (8493 lb.). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Owned jointly by Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; George B. and Jenny R. Matthews Fund and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Henry L. Hillman Fund, 2006. © Rachel Whiteread. Image courtesy of the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome; and Gagosian Gallery.
Between September, 2018 and January, 2019, the contemporary British artist Rachel Whiteread was the subject of a retrospective at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C. One of the benefits of such a career-spanning exhibition, which also traveled to the Saint Louis Art Museum from March 17 to July 9, 2019, is the possibility of discovering reoccurring themes and artistic strategies in the artist’s oeuvre.1 However, an additional benefit of seeing a survey of work by a contemporary artist, in an institution such as the NGA, is the opportunity to measure these reoccurring themes and artistic strategies in relationship to a larger history of the visual arts. For example, is it possible that an old master such as El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) might propose a conception of art as a catalyst for the viewer’s spiritual imagination that enriches a viewer’s engagement with Whiteread’s sculpture? Or, conversely, could Whiteread’s art demonstrate how strategies present in El Greco’s painting manifest themselves in contemporary reality?
In fact, the history of the visual arts is rich with connections between works that are separated by centuries of time and differences of historical context, and which, at least on the surface, seem entirely unlike each other. Such is the affinity between Untitled (Domestic), a sculpture by Whiteread, created in 2002, and a painting, from the NGA’s permanent collection, of a penitent Saint Jerome by El Greco from between 1610 and 1614. One work is a painting created during the Catholic Reformation and the other is a recent work of sculpture. Untitled (Domestic) is a cast of the space within a stairwell. El Greco’s painting depicts a Christian saint in a moment of spiritual awakening. El Greco frequently made work for distinctly religious contexts; Whiteread makes no religious claims for herself or her art. Nevertheless, these works share a common strategy and a similar purpose that transcend their differences. Both works direct the viewer’s eye to move through a compositional structure that is deliberately complex, thereby testing the viewer’s visual attention. El Greco and Whiteread require viewers to read and reread their work in order for viewers to comprehend what they see.
In fact, the history of the visual arts is rich with connections between works that are separated by centuries of time and differences of historical context, and which, at least on the surface, seem entirely unlike each other. Such is the affinity between Untitled (Domestic), a sculpture by Whiteread, created in 2002, and a painting, from the NGA’s permanent collection, of a penitent Saint Jerome by El Greco from between 1610 and 1614. One work is a painting created during the Catholic Reformation and the other is a recent work of sculpture. Untitled (Domestic) is a cast of the space within a stairwell. El Greco’s painting depicts a Christian saint in a moment of spiritual awakening. El Greco frequently made work for distinctly religious contexts; Whiteread makes no religious claims for herself or her art. Nevertheless, these works share a common strategy and a similar purpose that transcend their differences. Both works direct the viewer’s eye to move through a compositional structure that is deliberately complex, thereby testing the viewer’s visual attention. El Greco and Whiteread require viewers to read and reread their work in order for viewers to comprehend what they see.
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Saint Jerome, ca. 1610–1614; oil on canvas; overall dimensions: 168 x 110.5 cm (66 1/8 x 43 1/2 in.); framed: 194.3 x 137.2 x 6.4 cm. (76 1/2 x 54 x 2 1/2 in.). Chester Dale Collection, 1943.7.6.
Furthermore, in both of these works of art, a viewer’s reading and comprehending what they can see is not the end or final purpose of the work. Whiteread and El Greco both employ their art to stretch the viewer’s imagination from what can be seen with the eye to a reality that is unseen. The work of art visualizes the invisible. El Greco and Whiteread’s art both demonstrate how the work of art can be an impetus for the expansion and reorientation of the viewer’s perception toward a realm beyond what can be seen or depicted.
El Greco
El Greco’s Saint Jerome is exemplary of his paintings of penitent saints. This work captures the saint in a moment of spiritual revelation. He turns his head away from the large text before him and looks up towards a light. Jerome looks past the upper left corner of the picture, which is the edge of the depicted world, into a space beyond what is visible to the eye. However, in El Greco’s painting, viewers are more than witnesses to someone else’s spiritual awakening. Through the reading of this painting, El Greco draws viewers towards a vision of the invisible.
Many of El Greco’s paintings of penitent saints, with Jerome, Mary Magdalene, and Peter the most frequently represented, share a common compositional structure. In Saint Jerome at the NGA, viewers enter the composition from the lower left corner (which is where we often begin reading European paintings). Here Jerome’s extended naked leg leads the eye toward the saint’s torso. In the painting’s center, viewers see signs of Jerome’s penitence, the rock and bare chest. But, at this point, the composition takes a critical turn. The saint’s twisting torso, set against the blackness of a cave, reorients the eye. While the lower half of the painting reads from the lower left to the upper right, the upper half of the painting reads from right to left. The eye follows Jerome’s gaze towards a light that fills the painting’s upper left. This light, which emanates from beyond the picture’s frame (and thereby beyond the temporal realm), visualizes the immortal destiny of Jerome’s soul.
El Greco’s painting raises a proposition, concerning how a work of art can act as a conduit between the viewer and the sacred, that can enrich engagement with Whiteread’s sculpture. How does the artist move the viewer toward the sacred? What makes El Greco’s painting a successful work of sacred art? Is it the fact that this depiction of a mostly naked man has the title “Saint Jerome” attached to it? Or is it the fact that reading El Greco’s depiction of this subject guides some viewers through a process of penitence, from the flesh to spiritual light? El Greco’s Saint Jerome is so much more than a depiction of a Father of the Church in a moment of penitence and spiritual awakening. El Greco’s art has the potential to lead Christian viewers, especially, through their own process of spiritual redirection. This painting’s claim to be an example of “sacred” art proceeds from its impact on those who engage with it—its capacity to expand and reorient the spiritual consciousness of those who gaze upon it. This brief consideration of El Greco’s Saint Jerome can frame a longer examination of Whiteread’s art. Although Whiteread’s art is not “religious” in its iconography as is El Greco’s painting of Saint Jerome, their work does share something that is potentially more fundamental. Their art employs a strategy by which the visible can lead viewers into the invisible.
Untitled (Domestic)
Looking at Untitled (Domestic), it might not be immediately clear what this object is or how to read it. Whiteread’s deliberately evasive title doesn’t help very much. Nevertheless, the sculpture’s surface and form intrigue the imagination. This very large object rises on two sides. As one walks around it, this sculpture gracefully looms overhead. On one side, Untitled (Domestic) has steps that ascend in two directions. These steps terminate in rectangular blocks. The work, as a volume of space occupied by material, seems to be designed to keep people out. It is only after carefully scrutinizing the object and discovering its process of creation that the imagination is given access to the work.
Untitled (Domestic) is, in fact, the cast of a stairwell.2 This sculpture demonstrates three decades of Whiteread’s work in perfecting an unusual process of casting. Since 1988, she has made casts of spaces. For example, Whiteread’s 1990 sculpture Ghost, her most famous extant work, maps the volume of a Victorian living room. From this basic method, she has created a body of work that is visually intricate and conceptually epiphanic. In Whiteread’s art, viewers are witnesses as absence becomes substance and the unseeable is given tangible form.
Rachel Whiteread, Ghost, 1990; plaster on steel frame; dimensions overall: 269 x 355.5 x 317.5 cm. (105 7/8 x 139 15/16 x 125 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of The Glenstone Foundation. © Rachel Whiteread.
Since works such as Ghost and Untitled (Domestic) are literally inversions of spaces that humans might occupy, comprehending Whiteread’s art requires viewers to hold two realities in their minds at once—both the sculptural form that they see and the space that they imagine. Consequently, their perception of their place in relation to “space,” “form,” and “reality” is expanded.
Untitled (Domestic) demonstrates Whiteread’s conceptual and technical dexterity; casting the elevation and rotation of a stairwell is even more challenging than casting the perimeter of a room. Just as it was complex for the artist to create, Untitled (Domestic) is difficult for a viewer to read and comprehend. In fact, the trajectory of Whiteread’s oeuvre has been a pursuit of materials and forms that make it increasingly difficult, even impossible, for viewers to hold the object and the space in mind at once. It is a rare artist who can make viewers question their confidence in and orientation toward what they perceive as “real.” But taking Whiteread’s art seriously, as something more than a clever trick, invites just such a reformation of the imagination.
Although Untitled (Domestic) is a relatively recent work by Whiteread, it was installed at the entrance of a retrospective of her art at the National Gallery of Art.
As we will explore later, the spatially complex and twisting form was installed in a place where it could be seen from numerous vantage points. However, the decision to make Untitled (Domestic) the first work that viewers encounter proposed incomprehensibility as a developing theme of the entire exhibition. Nevertheless to start with Untitled (Domestic) is to engage Whiteread’s project at, or near, its present state. To appreciate Untitled (Domestic) more fully as a visualization of the invisible, this essay traces an evolution in Whiteread’s oeuvre towards sculptures that are increasingly incomprehensible.
Untitled (Pink Torso)
The success of Whiteread’s art proceeds, in large part, from the inseparability of her methods, materials, and motifs. In all three of these elements, Whiteread transforms what is seemingly mundane to reveal an otherwise unseen magnificence. Sometimes, Whiteread finds spaces that the viewer might think she knows, but has never actually seen. Untitled (Pink Torso), which Whiteread created in 1995, is the cast of the inside of a hot water bottle. To make this sculpture, Whiteread took a hot water bottle, an ordinary domestic object, and filled it with plaster. After the plaster had hardened, Whiteread peeled away the rubber skin. The invisible volume of the hot water bottle’s interior had been transformed into a solid object. This is an object that one might overlook when walking through an art gallery; measuring about six by ten inches wide and standing only about four inches tall, this relatively small plaster object is, nevertheless, very large in its potential to impact the imagination. The sculpture’s title evokes the human body and may remind some viewers of classical Greek or Roman sculpture. Although Whiteread’s sculpture still retains the literal materiality of plaster, Untitled (Pink Torso) demonstrates how a form can expand one’s imagination. A fragmentary form can suggest the whole of a figure. The work of art does far more than just depict (a visible or invisible reality); it encourages viewers to see, in their minds, more than that which is actually there.
Many of Whiteread’s works explore spaces, such as the space under a stairwell, that seem initially commonplace but become stranger as one thinks about them. The startling element of her art is, in part, that it makes viewers look at spaces that they might have come to ignore. And then she causes them to rethink their relationship to objects and spaces they encounter in their daily routines. The inventiveness of her process and the uniqueness of her motifs might create a perception of Whiteread as a continuously curious artist who relentlessly experiments with form and material for the pleasure of creating sculptural puzzles. However, the seeming straightforwardness of her process and the apparent ordinariness of her vocabulary belies its conceptual complexity. Whiteread is, at least in the opinion of this art historian, one of the most consequential artists working today. I have found that, time and time again, her art has expanded and reshaped my imagination by sharpening my attention, by asking me to look at what can be seen, and by focusing my consciousness on the reality of what cannot be seen.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Pink Torso), 1995; pink dental plaster; overall dimensions: 3 15/16 x 6 7/8 x 10 13/16 in. © Rachel Whiteread. Image courtesy of the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome; and Gagosian Gallery.
Saying that Whiteread casts spaces in, under, and around objects, furniture, and architectural spaces is an accurate description of her process. But this is like saying that Vincent van Gogh was a painter of landscapes. It is both true and misses the point entirely. In looking at Untitled (Pink Torso) or Untitled (Domestic), the viewer can interpret the sculptural object in relationship to what one imagines it might be like to occupy that space—to be in the stairwell. Whiteread’s art gives visible and material form to this conceptual experience of being in the space. Her work explores how viewers might gain spatial knowledge, how they might remember, and misremember, things, and how they might interpret the experience of place. It could be argued that Whiteread’s art not only transforms space into sculpture; her art reorients perception. The casting of an otherwise unseen void is the vehicle by which this reorientation is achieved. The implications of this reorientation are, perhaps, best evidenced in Whiteread’s 1988 work, Shallow Breath.
Shallow Breath
Whiteread’s project of making the immaterial solid began with four sculptures that the artist herself identifies as the commencement of her post-student work. These sculptures, all created in 1988, are: Closet (the inside of a wardrobe cast in plaster and covered in black felt), which was Whiteread’s first cast object; Mantle (the underside of a dressing table); Torso (the inside of a hot water bottle); and Shallow Breath (the space under a single bed cast in plaster and polystyrene). These unassuming sculptures, cast from spaces that would otherwise be unseen and unknown, were first exhibited in a four-work solo exhibition at the Carlisle Gallery in London. They established the process and vocabulary that Whiteread has, over three decades, modified and expanded but not abandoned. Among these four foundational works, Shallow Breath is arguably the most Delphian. If Closet inaugurated a process and vocabulary, Shallow Breath best articulates the sense of purpose in Whiteread’s art.
Shallow Breath is unlike the other works in the 1988 Carlisle Gallery exhibition in that the sculpture is installed in the gallery in a different orientation from the space that it materializes. Closet, for example, is posted upright in the gallery, even though the wardrobe was cast laying on its back. It stands like a wardrobe that can only be opened by the imagination. Shallow Breath is the cast of a horizontal space that exists between a bed and the floor, but the work is exhibited propped upright against the wall.
This reorientation of the object, from the floor to the wall, redirects the viewer’s perception of the space made solid. Shallow Breath introduced a process of recognition, imagination, and comprehension that would be replayed in each encounter with Whiteread’s art. Viewers recognize that this upright form is, in fact, a cast of space under a bed; they imagine how that horizontal space might have looked; they try to reach some understanding of the relationship between that accumbent space and the standing object. The result is a transformation of perception, not only appreciation of the art but, more importantly, awareness of reality, both seen and unseen.
Rather than lying on the floor like a sleeping, or dead, body, Shallow Breath stands up to engage the viewer. This plaster sculpture bears the horizontal imprints of five wooden slats in the bed frame that support the mattress. These give the surface of the work the appearance of undulating, as if it were slowly inhaling and exhaling. They also read like a ladder along which the viewer’s gaze rises and descends across the vertical object. Shallow Breath rejects the floor. It rises as if from the dead. It also resembles a door as much as a bed—a door that Whiteread’s sculpture opens to admit the viewer into a transformed world. Characteristic of Whiteread’s art, Shallow Breath does more than give solid form to space. This work transforms perception and understanding of space. The work transforms reality itself.
Rachel Whiteread, Shallow Breath, 1988; plaster and polystyrene; overall dimensions: 185 x 90 x 20 cm. (72 13/16 x 35 7/16 x 7 7/8 in.); weight: 305 kg. (672.403 lb.). © Rachel Whiteread. Image courtesy of the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome; and Gagosian Gallery.
From the very beginning of her art, Whiteread was not only reorienting spaces, she was reorienting her viewers’ points of view. These early works focused attention on the marginal aspects of life. Much of the furniture that Whiteread employed in these works had either been discarded or found in second-hand stores. These were objects and spaces with former lives, lives unknown, generally, and often unknown to Whiteread herself. By virtue of the artist’s selection, what had been discarded has been ennobled; the lost has been recovered; the last has come first.
Whiteread’s sculpture resists quick recognition and straightforward interpretation. Shallow Breath is designed to expand one’s ability to perceive. In the exercise of first recognizing and then deciphering this work, the viewer’s capacity for comprehension is expanded. The connections between one’s eye and one’s mind are challenged and strengthened. Whiteread’s sculpture awakens imagination and enriches intellect.
Ghost
Two years after Shallow Breath, Whiteread created Ghost. Ghost’s most prominent features are a door, window, and fireplace. The sculpture is encircled at three points by indentations created by skirting boards, a curtain rail, and cornicing. In addition, one finds many small details like the impression of a light switch and markings where the wall had been repaired. Because the cast needed to be removed without destroying the room, Ghost was made in sections. Over a period of four months, mostly working alone, Whiteread mapped the walls, starting from the fireplace, to determine the division of the space. The result of this casting process is evidenced in the work’s structure. The grid, which divides the overall work into units, invites viewers to read Ghost abstractly as well as literally.
Equally strange and familiar, Ghost was Whiteread’s most disorienting sculpture to date. Like her previous works, Ghost requires viewers simultaneously to hold two opposite forms in the mind. One is the form of the sculpture, which can be seen. The other is the room, which has to be constructed in the imagination. One’s impulse to see the room, to think of oneself in the room, cultivates a reorientation of perception. If this essay traces an evolution in Whiteread’s oeuvre towards sculptures that are increasingly incomprehensible, incomprehensible because the relationship or distance between the form of the sculpture and the space cast has been expanded and complicated, Ghost can function as a baseline.
Like many of Whiteread’s previous works, Ghost is cast in plaster. This is a material that, in sculpture, is more often associated with copies than with original art. Museums and art schools are filled with plaster casts of famous sculptures. Ghost’s haunting presence is advanced, in part, by the fact that it is both an original and a copy.
Plaster’s surface has a chalky softness, at least compared to traditional materials of sculpture such as marble. Plaster has what Molly Donovan called “a dusty patina of ephemerality.”3 In fact, Whiteread would later explore materials such as rubber and resin out of a frustration with the fact that plaster forms were often too fragile to withstand being moved around the studio or gallery. There is a paradox in that. As a solid white form, Ghost has a substantial visual presence. And yet, Ghost also has physical vulnerability. Any touch could easily damage it.
The pliancy of Ghost’s surface is central to its impact. This surface has picked up traces of life that had been left in the walls. The material has, to quote Donovan again, “the fragile residue of human activity indexed therein.”4 There are a number of places where a wall had been damaged or patched. Most noticeably, walls had been marred by soot from the fireplace. If walls could talk, Ghost is a recording of some previous time, some past lives. The material surfaces of Whiteread’s work provide evidence of traces of life that evoke infinite associations.
Ghost’s transposition of reality, between surface and space, is more readily apparent than in any of her previous works. The inversion of the room’s space and surfaces creates a strangeness about the work. Ghost is alien and incongruous. Ghost compels viewers to reexamine where they reside. Are they inside the room? Are they outside the room? Ghost is a work of art that asks viewers, the gallery, and even the world to reorient themselves around it. This is a process in which a work of sculpture transforms perception of reality.
This strangeness of Ghost, the way in which Whiteread’s sculpture causes the viewer to rethink the object, and through the object rethink one’s relationship to reality, is made all the more immediate by the work’s literal scale. Since Whiteread casts real things and spaces, her art’s one-to-one scale with the objects and areas of the world is a natural, but significant, consequence. Discussing the issue of scale, James Lawrence writes, “Despite the disorienting spatial and topographical effects that inhabit some of Whiteread’s larger works, there is always something that appeals to a common sense reading of scale.”5 This literal scale prompts one to believe the aspects of it, its mysterious indentations and protrusions, that viewers do not readily comprehend.
Its scale also gives Ghost a corporeal presence in that it solidifies a space that one might be able to occupy. Whiteread’s previous works had cast spaces such as the inside of a closet or the space under a bed. These are conceptually interesting, even mysterious spaces. The theme of secret spaces has haunted Whiteread’s art from the beginning. Works cast from the inside of closets and under beds are places where people, and sometimes monsters, like to hide. They are spaces that inspire the imagination. Whiteread is conjuring spaces in which the unknown might reside. But their sense of mystery lies, in part, in their unfamiliarity. Most adult gallery visitors have long ago given up hiding in closets and under beds. But a room is part of an experience that is equal parts common and personal. In Ghost, Whiteread discovered the power of intimacy and how familiarity with a type of space could multiply her art’s disorienting impact. If, as I am arguing here, the central theme of Whiteread’s art is to reorient our spatial perception, Ghost achieves this more effectively, or at least more directly, than Shallow Breath.
There is a reciprocal relationship between the surface and scale of Whiteread’s sculpture. If the transposed mapping of a room’s features in plaster gives Ghost a degree of strangeness, its scale regrounds Whiteread’s sculpture in human experience of reality. At the same time, the familiarity created by the scale makes the surface even more uncanny. As a room, Ghost is larger than the viewer but still remains somehow intimate. The familiarity of the room’s features, even if one has never lived in a Victorian house, keeps Ghost from crossing over into the realm of monumental sculpture.6
This discussion of scale in Whiteread’s art is significant here because it contributes to a central theme of her work, namely, the reorientation of perception of space. If Ghost were either an object or a monument, it would be less successful. An object, a work in which reality as represented is reduced from reality as naturally experienced, may lack the power to reorient vision.7 In contrast, a monument, a work in which reality as represented is enlarged from reality as naturally experienced, may succeed in this reorientation of perception by overwhelming the viewer but, as soon as one steps out of the monument’s orbit, one may feel relief that one has returned to one’s former state of perception. Ghost’s scale grounds the reorientation that it induces in the here and now. As such, the work can instill within viewers a sense of reorientation that they carry beyond the gallery. Ghost functions as a volume which perpetually hovers in experience between literal sculpture and inverted architecture.
Ghost succeeds through a carefully calibrated exchange between the intimacy of a room, and it association with “home” and belonging, and the otherness of an impenetrable white cube. Whiteread’s art estranges from the familiar without disconnecting from reality. This paradox of surface and scale is present in all of Whiteread’s cast sculpture, except that, as her oeuvre develops, she adds other layers of complexity, in material and form, that even further stretch the imagination.
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces), 1995; resin; variable dimensions, smallest: 16.5 x 11 x 11.25 in., largest: 16.5 x 18.125 x 20.125 in. Private Collection. © Rachel Whiteread. Image courtesy of the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome; and Gagosian Gallery.
Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces)
In 1994, having worked in industrial plaster, dental plaster (which is more sensitive to capturing details), wax, and rubber, Whiteread began to cast in resin. Whereas the previously listed materials are opaque, resin is translucent. The ability of resin to open up the interior of the sculpture to view transformed Whiteread’s practice.
In Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces), one of her first major resin works, Whiteread cast the space beneath chairs.8 This work is similar to Ghost in that it is a space materialized. As such, the issues of surface and scale, already discussed, also apply. However, Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) differs from Ghost in two significant ways. As its title indicates, this work is composed of multiple units. And, whereas Ghost was made of opaque plaster, Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) was made of translucent resin. In both its form and materials, Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) was part of a new evolution in Whiteread’s art towards a more complex visualization of “interior” space. Ghost reads as the interior space of a room but that “interiority” is on the exterior surface of the sculpture.9 Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces), without losing any of the surface, has multiple layers of interiority. By embedding details within the work, Whiteread’s art expanded more deeply into the realm of the immaterial and the immortal.
To create these casts, Whiteread boarded up the chair’s underside to create a mold. Describing Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), which is nearly identical to Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces), except for the number of units, Whiteread noted this was “probably the most colorful sculpture I ever made. It was a series of one hundred chair spaces, nine different chairs, three different types of resin, and three different types of catalyst. By mixing and changing the catalyst, I could change the color without using any pigment.”10 While the visual and conceptual complexity of one hundred units is multiplied in Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) is nearly as magnificent.
The units in Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) are exhibited in a five by five foot square. Intervals between each unit are roughly equal to the size of the units.11 From overhead (which is a view that the viewer must imagine), Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) is a square of alternating forms and nonforms, a composition of notes and pauses, anchored at the four corners by resin units. Given that the visualization of unseen spaces had been the signature element of Whiteread’s art, the creation of a work with a visible internal structure of alternating units and spaces between units created additional layers of visual interest and conceptual complexity for navigation. As so often in Whiteread’s art, viewers are required to work through contradictory impressions. There seems to be an inverse relationship between thinking about and grasping Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces). And yet, in my experience at least, this conundrum leads to delight rather than frustration. In Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces), viewers are continually drawn back to reinvestigation of the work by the inexorable pull of something that has been largely absent in Whiteread’s art to date; that is, the beauty of luminous color.12 However, for our purposes, perhaps the most consequential aspect of Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) was not Whiteread’s more complex engagement of the form-space relationship of her art, but rather in her investigation of resin as a new material in her oeuvre. In resin, Whiteread found a material to realize more completely a metamorphosis of the immaterial into sculpture.
The colored resin fills with and is brought to life by organic illumination. Whereas works such as Ghost and Shallow Breath may be described as a materialization of space, Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) gives form to light. These groups of iridescent resin chairs are jewel-like forms that change as one walks around them. From some points of view, depending on where the light is, the forms read as solid. And then, with the next step, they seem to liquefy. However, resin is not perfectly transparent. Things seen through the resin appear distorted. They lack clear mass and contours. In short, they look as though they inhabit another dimension, an effect heightened by the addition of color.
If the transmutation of space, rather than its mere solidification, is a central characteristic of Whiteread’s sculpture, Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) represents a critical turning point in her career. While Ghost turns a room inside out by casting its walls, Whiteread’s work in resin has an even more fluid visual relationship between exteriority and interiority. Briony Fer describes Whiteread’s casts of chair spaces as “empty gap[s] of air . . . given shape, which [are] in turn subjected to an almost acrobatic series of transmutations.”13
Since Closet and Shallow Breath, Whiteread had been transforming voids into tangible matter; with resin she was able to expand this project of making the unseen visible and materially present with forms that are simultaneously dense and ephemeral. The complexity of the resin form’s interior and exterior life makes Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) all the more difficult to grasp conceptually. From 1994 to the present day, Whiteread has continued to find ways of using resin to make sculptures that are increasingly incomprehensible. One of the most successful is Monument.
Monument
In 2001, Whiteread created a work of public art for her home city of London. This work, entitled Monument, was a commission for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.14 This is a granite platform that has stood empty since it was built in 1841. In 1998, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) commissioned three works of contemporary art to be temporarily displayed on the plinth.15 Monument was the third of these works.
Monument was the largest resin cast ever made. Initially, it was not certain if Monument could even be made, as it was not clear if eleven-and-a-half tons of clear resin could be cast without the heat generated by the resin exploding the mold.16 Monument was a departure of sorts for Whiteread in that she was not casting a space but, rather, making an exact replica of an object. However, the effect was a semitransparent mirroring of the plinth. Monument transformed the void above the plinth into a transfiguration of the plinth.
Rachel Whiteread, Monument, 2001; Image courtesy of the artist
Monument gave witness to yet another evolution in Whiteread’s capacity to use resin to beguile. In Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces), Whiteread cast the air framed by the dimensions of chairs. However, in Monument, Whiteread juxtaposed, in identical yet inverted forms, the solidity of the granite plinth and the translucence of resin. The plinth speaks to a sense of authority and permanence; Monument was muted and ephemeral. The luminance of resin gave Monument visible mass without perceptible weight.
Doors and Windows
Resin continues to be an important material in Whiteread’s art. Over the last decade, she has used resin to cast a series of doors and windows. In LOOK, LOOK, LOOK (2012), Whiteread removed the glass and cast both sides of the window frame. In circa 1665 (I), she made casts of doors by taking casings of two sides of a door and then placing those impressions back to back. Whiteread’s work has routinely been described as casting the air in a space. With these resin casts of windows and doors, she might be better described as casting iridescent light.
One of the most visually and conceptually complex of the door casts is Due Porte. The title is Italian for “two doors,” and the work is, in fact, two identical panels. The large doors lean against the wall, like Shallow Breath. However, unlike Shallow Breath, the transparency of the pale green resin allows viewers to see through the work, to the space between the sculpture and the wall. Viewers may have an impulse to cast this void conceptually. There is also a vertical gap between the doors, which further complicates the exchange of seen and unseen spaces. Is this space between the doors now the negative cast, in air, of what had been the molding between the doors? Ironically, these casts of doors are some of Whiteread’s most impenetrable works. Pointing out that these doors and windows are boundaries or portals between spaces may seem like stating the obvious, but Whiteread has made a career out of converting nondescript motifs into a visualization of mystery.
Untitled (Domestic) revisited
Whiteread’s interest in visual, evocative, and volumetric complexities of transitional spaces has, to date, found culmination in a series of casts made in stairwells. Untitled (Domestic), and its companion stairwells, solidify a theme that has been present and growing in Whiteread’s work since Shallow Breath. There has been an evolution of increasing complexity of spatial reorientation in Whiteread’s oeuvre. In Shallow Breath, space is stood up; in Ghost, it is turned inside out; Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) visualizes interior space as simultaneously solid and transparent. In Monument and Untitled (Domestic), space is inverted. At each point in this history, Whiteread has found ways of further stretching her viewers’ perceptive capacity, that is, the capacity to hold in the mind simultaneously both the space as it is solidified in the object, and the space as it existed in situ.
Untitled (Domestic), like Shallow Breath and Monument, presents viewers with a volume of space that has been reoriented as well as inverted. Because it would otherwise topple over, this cast of a stairwell is installed with a 90-degree rotation. There is a landing, which becomes the base, or even pedestal, from which the sculpture rises in two directions. Both stairwells are topped by boxlike forms, cast from the spaces where the stairwells connect to rooms. These spaces draw one’s imagination up the stairs, into the unknown. Shallow Breath, Monument, and Untitled (Domestic) are case studies in how sculpture can present a reorientation, as well as solidification, of space. Talking about her stairwell sculptures, Whiteread says,
I was thinking for this piece that I wanted to try and flip the architecture a little bit. I wanted to change the way one might think about how you walk around or through something. . . . When we first put the stairwell work up in the studio, I remember I was struck by the sense of physical disorientation it gave me.17
From the beginning of her career, Whiteread created works designed to be walked around. Works like Ghost have a symmetry that enables viewers to imagine one side of the work by looking at the other. However, Untitled (Domestic) has a complexity and irregularity of form that requires one to walk all the way around the work, perhaps several times, before one can begin to understand it.
As if inherent disorientation were not enough, some of Whiteread’s stairwell works have been exhibited in various orientations, depending on the dimensions of the gallery. So the work has no fixed orientation. At the National Gallery of Art, Untitled (Domestic) was exhibited on a concourse-level landing where several spaces meet. For those familiar with the design of the East Building, this is where the underground moving walkway from the West Building connects in an open volume of space that can be seen from the Ground, Mezzanine, and Upper levels of the museum. This allowed Untitled (Domestic) to be seen from numerous points of view. This shrewd placement of Untitled (Domestic) ensured that, wherever one entered the NGA, this would be the first work by Whiteread that the visitor encountered. It may seem odd, but this presentation of Untitled (Domestic) made me wish that I had arrived at the museum without knowing anything about Whiteread or her art. I could imagine stepping into this space and being totally confounded by this sculpture.18 While Ghost gives up its surprising identity with ease, even for the novice viewer, Untitled (Domestic) is bewildering.
More than any of Whiteread’s previous works, these cast stairwells disorient corporeal experience and transport imagination somewhere else.19 From the very beginning, a signature characteristic of Whiteread’s objects have been their inversion of reality. In Ghost, the fireplace protrudes and the light switch is a cavity. However, Untitled (Domestic) is even more “strange.” Susanna Greeves writes, “A stairwell represents movement, after all: it is a kind of three-dimensional diagram of human locomotion.” She goes on, “But however familiar and functional, in negative form it is alien and bizarre; the inclines seem so exaggerated, the masses double back on one another illogically.”20 Perhaps compelled by the stairwell’s inherent sense of movement, one might be fooled into thinking that one could climb the steps. It is only when one reaches the landing at the top of the stairwell in one’s imagination that one finds oneself on the outside of the room, under the floorboards. Of course, one was climbing the underside of stairs all along; however, in Untitled (Domestic), the perceptual slippage between what is read as “inside” and “outside” is greater. While comprehending one’s own spatial relationship to any of Whiteread’s works requires an active concentration, and even imagination, the stairs intensify one’s quandary. Whiteread’s sculptural mapping of stairwells taxes one’s cerebral dexterity more than any of her prior works.
In 2002, Whiteread first exhibited Untitled (Domestic) at the Haunch of Venison gallery. There it was installed on the top floor (requiring visitors to climb staircases to see it) into a skylight. Writing in the catalog for that exhibition, Greeves described the sight of Untitled (Domestic) climbing towards heaven as “a gleaming Jacob’s ladder.”21 She added,
Somehow a massive architectural form has been liberated from its gravitational mooring, rotated, and made unfamiliar. Though solid and palpable, it is somehow not quite believable. Our mental contortions after understanding reflect the ‘crazy gymnastic backwards thinking’ that Whiteread described herself as performing in solving the technical challenges of making it.22
One way of testing the significance of a work of art is to ask the question “what is at stake in this work? Is this work just an illustration or decoration or does this work, in fact, engage something important in a way that is meaningful?” Untitled (Domestic) is more than a visual puzzle. To change position is to transform sight. It is to transform not just what we see but how we see. Untitled (Domestic) provokes viewers to look more carefully, see differently, and think uncommonly. Although the evolution from Ghost to Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) to Untitled (Domestic) is one of increasing incomprehensibility, it persists in affirming a sense of life. A careful observation and consideration of Whiteread’s sculptures most often leads to discovery and even elation, to a state of greater awareness that is life expanding.
Comprehending the Unseen
There is a spiritual reality materialized in Whiteread’s sculpture that has almost entirely been unexplored. Considering Whiteread’s art from a theological point of view has, at least, two values. First, it opens up new potential dimensions of her work. And second, it challenges the misconception that the sacred in art must proceed from the work’s religious iconography and/or the artist’s pious intentions. Instead, the spiritual potency of the work of art is in its ability to reorient imagination from the visible to the invisible, from the known to the inconceivable. Encountering Whiteread’s Untitled (Domestic), especially if one is not already familiar with her casting method, can be a visual and conceptual challenge in comprehension that results in wonder, a heightened sense of awareness, and even moments of spiritual revelation.
Whiteread makes no personal profession of faith, nor does she consider her art as having any specific sacred meaning. Nevertheless, her art has a distinct spiritual resonance. Paul Klee’s statement, “art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible,” has been repeated to the point of becoming cliché; however, Whiteread’s process of casting voids into material form fulfills this call as superbly as any contemporary sculptor.23 Her art exercises the viewer’s capacity to imagine the unseen. Furthermore, Whiteread’s art has increasingly manifested a pursuit of the immaterial. Her sculptures, from Monument to Untitled (Domestic), employ form, material, and light to visualize a world in a state of continual transformation.
In considering El Greco’s painting of Saint Jerome, we saw that this work was more than just an illustration of the spiritual rewards of Jerome’s penitence. El Greco’s art guides the eye and expands the imagination, by means of the material (paint) and the visible (picture), into the invisible and incomprehensible. Similarly, the spiritual power of Whiteread’s art is not found in her process, materials, motifs, or forms. It is in the impact that art has on those who view her art. From her earliest works, like Shallow Breath, she has compelled viewers to reimagine spaces. Her art situates the viewer between the object seen and places that can only be imagined. Whiteread’s sculptures gracefully hold viewers in that perpetual paradox of familiarity and astonishment, between everyday life and another world that can only be imagined. This reorientation of perception cultivates a greater awareness of what is yet unseen.
From the beginning of her career, Whiteread created works designed to be walked around. Works like Ghost have a symmetry that enables viewers to imagine one side of the work by looking at the other. However, Untitled (Domestic) has a complexity and irregularity of form that requires one to walk all the way around the work, perhaps several times, before one can begin to understand it.
As if inherent disorientation were not enough, some of Whiteread’s stairwell works have been exhibited in various orientations, depending on the dimensions of the gallery. So the work has no fixed orientation. At the National Gallery of Art, Untitled (Domestic) was exhibited on a concourse-level landing where several spaces meet. For those familiar with the design of the East Building, this is where the underground moving walkway from the West Building connects in an open volume of space that can be seen from the Ground, Mezzanine, and Upper levels of the museum. This allowed Untitled (Domestic) to be seen from numerous points of view. This shrewd placement of Untitled (Domestic) ensured that, wherever one entered the NGA, this would be the first work by Whiteread that the visitor encountered. It may seem odd, but this presentation of Untitled (Domestic) made me wish that I had arrived at the museum without knowing anything about Whiteread or her art. I could imagine stepping into this space and being totally confounded by this sculpture.18 While Ghost gives up its surprising identity with ease, even for the novice viewer, Untitled (Domestic) is bewildering.
More than any of Whiteread’s previous works, these cast stairwells disorient corporeal experience and transport imagination somewhere else.19 From the very beginning, a signature characteristic of Whiteread’s objects have been their inversion of reality. In Ghost, the fireplace protrudes and the light switch is a cavity. However, Untitled (Domestic) is even more “strange.” Susanna Greeves writes, “A stairwell represents movement, after all: it is a kind of three-dimensional diagram of human locomotion.” She goes on, “But however familiar and functional, in negative form it is alien and bizarre; the inclines seem so exaggerated, the masses double back on one another illogically.”20 Perhaps compelled by the stairwell’s inherent sense of movement, one might be fooled into thinking that one could climb the steps. It is only when one reaches the landing at the top of the stairwell in one’s imagination that one finds oneself on the outside of the room, under the floorboards. Of course, one was climbing the underside of stairs all along; however, in Untitled (Domestic), the perceptual slippage between what is read as “inside” and “outside” is greater. While comprehending one’s own spatial relationship to any of Whiteread’s works requires an active concentration, and even imagination, the stairs intensify one’s quandary. Whiteread’s sculptural mapping of stairwells taxes one’s cerebral dexterity more than any of her prior works.
In 2002, Whiteread first exhibited Untitled (Domestic) at the Haunch of Venison gallery. There it was installed on the top floor (requiring visitors to climb staircases to see it) into a skylight. Writing in the catalog for that exhibition, Greeves described the sight of Untitled (Domestic) climbing towards heaven as “a gleaming Jacob’s ladder.”21 She added,
Somehow a massive architectural form has been liberated from its gravitational mooring, rotated, and made unfamiliar. Though solid and palpable, it is somehow not quite believable. Our mental contortions after understanding reflect the ‘crazy gymnastic backwards thinking’ that Whiteread described herself as performing in solving the technical challenges of making it.22
One way of testing the significance of a work of art is to ask the question “what is at stake in this work? Is this work just an illustration or decoration or does this work, in fact, engage something important in a way that is meaningful?” Untitled (Domestic) is more than a visual puzzle. To change position is to transform sight. It is to transform not just what we see but how we see. Untitled (Domestic) provokes viewers to look more carefully, see differently, and think uncommonly. Although the evolution from Ghost to Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) to Untitled (Domestic) is one of increasing incomprehensibility, it persists in affirming a sense of life. A careful observation and consideration of Whiteread’s sculptures most often leads to discovery and even elation, to a state of greater awareness that is life expanding.
Comprehending the Unseen
There is a spiritual reality materialized in Whiteread’s sculpture that has almost entirely been unexplored. Considering Whiteread’s art from a theological point of view has, at least, two values. First, it opens up new potential dimensions of her work. And second, it challenges the misconception that the sacred in art must proceed from the work’s religious iconography and/or the artist’s pious intentions. Instead, the spiritual potency of the work of art is in its ability to reorient imagination from the visible to the invisible, from the known to the inconceivable. Encountering Whiteread’s Untitled (Domestic), especially if one is not already familiar with her casting method, can be a visual and conceptual challenge in comprehension that results in wonder, a heightened sense of awareness, and even moments of spiritual revelation.
Whiteread makes no personal profession of faith, nor does she consider her art as having any specific sacred meaning. Nevertheless, her art has a distinct spiritual resonance. Paul Klee’s statement, “art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible,” has been repeated to the point of becoming cliché; however, Whiteread’s process of casting voids into material form fulfills this call as superbly as any contemporary sculptor.23 Her art exercises the viewer’s capacity to imagine the unseen. Furthermore, Whiteread’s art has increasingly manifested a pursuit of the immaterial. Her sculptures, from Monument to Untitled (Domestic), employ form, material, and light to visualize a world in a state of continual transformation.
In considering El Greco’s painting of Saint Jerome, we saw that this work was more than just an illustration of the spiritual rewards of Jerome’s penitence. El Greco’s art guides the eye and expands the imagination, by means of the material (paint) and the visible (picture), into the invisible and incomprehensible. Similarly, the spiritual power of Whiteread’s art is not found in her process, materials, motifs, or forms. It is in the impact that art has on those who view her art. From her earliest works, like Shallow Breath, she has compelled viewers to reimagine spaces. Her art situates the viewer between the object seen and places that can only be imagined. Whiteread’s sculptures gracefully hold viewers in that perpetual paradox of familiarity and astonishment, between everyday life and another world that can only be imagined. This reorientation of perception cultivates a greater awareness of what is yet unseen.
Rachel Whiteread, Line Up, 2007–2008; plaster, pigment, resin, wood and metal; overall dimensions: 6.0625 × 35.4375 × 9.8125 in. Private collection, New York. Image courtesy of the artist and Mike Bruce .
NOTES
1. For more than two years, a retrospective of Whiteread’s work, the largest to-date exhibition of her art, traveled to four venues. Co-organized by the Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art, the show opened in London. After a stop at the House 21 Museum of Contemporary Art in Vienna, the show came to Washington, D.C. The retrospective’s final stop was in Saint Louis. I would like to thank the National Gallery of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Luhring Augustine for providing images of Rachel Whiteread’s art.
2. For technical reasons, in Untitled (Domestic), Whiteread made a separate mold of this stairwell rather than casting, as she typically does, directly in the space. Nevertheless, for all intents and purposes, Untitled (Domestic) is the cast of the space within an actual stairwell.
3. Molly Donovan, “Vies Trouvées (Found Lives)” in Rachel Whiteread (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 40.
4. Ibid.
5. James Lawrence, “Sculptural Common Sense,” in Rachel Whiteread (Beverly Hills: Gagosian Gallery, 2008), 14.
6. This reading of Whiteread’s use of scale in Ghost is indebted to Tony Smith’s description of his 1962–1968 work Die as neither “an object” nor “a monument.”
7. This is evident in works such as Line Up. Created in 2007 and 2008, Line Up is cast from a series of toilet paper rolls. These small but colorful objects are lined up on a shelf for the viewer’s inspection (see below).
8. This is one of a series of works in which Whiteread cast groups of six, sixteen, twenty-five, and one hundred chairs, in that increasing order.
9. In fact, Ghost has an interior space and structure but these are only unintentionally visible due to the imperfections of the pieces fitting together.
10. Charlotte Mullins, Rachel Whiteread (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 72.
11. “Roughly,” since the units are not uniform in size.
12. Whiteread has previously made several works in colored rubber. Yet, as she acknowledges, these works have a deliberate dullness about them.
13. Briony Fer, “Eyes Cast,” in Rachel Whiteread (London: Tate Publishing, 2017), 133.
14. This work is sometimes called Untitled (Monument), Plinth or Inverted Plinth. Like House, Monument was designed to be a temporary installation, from June to November of 2001. Since it is site specific, Monument has not been reexhibited.
15. It was proceeded on the plinth by Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (1999) and Bill Woodrow’s Regardless of History (2000). The success of these works has led to an ongoing series of commissions for this site.
16. For a discussion of the technical complexities of creating Monument,
see https://mikesmithstudio.com/projects/monument/.
17. Craig Houser, “If Walls Could Talk: An Interview with Rachel Whiteread,” in Transient Spaces
(Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, 2001), 51.
18. As Whiteread noted in discussing the possibility of remaking Ghost, “you can’t repeat naivety,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z1Vjwsv4gw.
19. This “somewhere else” is deliberately vague. If Ghost evokes a Victorian living room that is more or less familiar to some viewers, it is nevertheless a specific type of place. Whiteread’s casting of stairwells succeeds, in part, because the stairwells transport our imagination to a deliberately nonspecific place.
20. Susanna Greeves, “Stairs into Space,” in Rachel Whiteread (London: Haunch of Venison, 2002), 49.
21. Ibid., 37.
22. Ibid., 50.
23. Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” in The Inward Vision: Watercolors, Drawings and Writings by Paul Klee, trans. N. Guterman (New York: Harry Abrams, 1959), 1.