There is a small white shack on the lawn in front of Tate Britain. It looks exactly like the very thing it is, namely the concrete cast of a chicken shed. The windows are blind and the door could never open to let the birds out, for the object is a solid block, heavy and impenetrable, unlike the airy structure it repeats. And yet it is still, first and last, a chicken shed.
Or is it? The art of Rachel Whiteread turns things inside out. This piece – hailed as a major new work at Tate Britain, though it’s anything but, and the artist calls it “shy” – is a cast of the space inside the shed. There’s a clue in the fact that the window frames are indented, instead of standing out. But so what? The object on the lawn – literal, stolid, untranslated – retains the form of the shed. It is a sculptural tautology.
Whiteread (born 1963) has been casting these so-called “negatives spaces” for three decades. The original idea comes from the US artist Bruce Nauman, whose A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1965-8) spells out the method, if not the varying effects. Whiteread has gone further, casting the innards of a hot-water bottle and a mattress; the undersides of a table, the space behind a fireplace or surrounding a bath. Her works run from the modest to the monumental – most famously the interior of an entire house – cast in plaster, resin, concrete or rubber, occasionally in metal (mundane) and lately in papier-mache (actively hideous). Everything she makes balances the possibility of poetry against the risk of banality.This is not necessarily intrinsic to the objects themselves. Take the beautiful piece Torso that opens this enormous exhibition. Cast in plaster, from a hot-water bottle, this little thing lies on its back, vulnerable, pale and turning slightly, as if troubled in sleep. Whiteread made this sculpture in 1988, and it remains unsurpassed. One can say this because the artist has been casting hot water bottles ever since. There are nine more in this show – in clear resin, yellow wax, flesh-pink plaster, each differently swollen or flexed. Not one has the same potency or charge.
It is the same with the mattresses. Some look precisely like mattresses; others appear less familiar; most are propped against the wall. But Shallow Breath is slightly slumped, as if exhausted, or trying its best to inhale and exhale in the midnight hours. There is, in short, a marvellous analogy between the original object, the sculptural form and the title. And all the nuances of solitude and anxiety are carried without any resort to the anthropomorphic.
There is a spellbinding quietude to these early works. People still go on tiptoe to look into the kitchen sink, as if there might something stirring there. Closet – the cast of a wardrobe covered in black felt – still makes the childhood fear of such interior darkness both visible and solid. Cell, her cast of a grate and the space behind it, goes to the quick of one’s curiosity about the secret world behind the fireplace. And the towering white plaster Untitled (Stairs), from 2001, zooms up and down to nowhere, with overtones of Piranesi and Escher, like the flights of steps in trapped dreams.
Reflection
The balance Whiteread makes from the original object to the cast of the objects negative space raises questions as to what form an object must take to still be the object. For example if she had burnt the shed down in essence it would still be the same sheet, just in a different form. With this in mind, the artist plays around with the concept of visibility and solidity. By giving weight to the objects she is freezing them in time as a talisman of a lost object. The choice of material is provocative too, as the connotations of concrete and plaster are ones of man. This is particularly important when thinking about why sculptures are made, is it for the pleasure of man or as physical pins set into the problems man-kind are still grappling with. Whatever the reason, Whiteread's work certainly asks the question.
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