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MODERN ARTISTS
First published 2004 by order of the Tate Trustees Author's acknowledgements
by Tate Publishing, a division of Tate Enterprises Ltd, My thanks go to Rachel Whiteread for her time, patience
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG and support over the years. Lewis Biggs, Mary Richards,
www.tate.org.uk Hazel Willis, James Elliott, Cristina Colomar, Mark Francis,
Reprinted 2008 Helen Beeckmans, Emma Woodiwiss, Valerian Freyburg,
© Tate 2004 Melissa Larner and Tyrone Lou made this book a reality, and
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted | thank them for making it happen. Finally my love and
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, thanks to Paul Ayres for his continued encouragement and
mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter understanding.
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission Artist's acknowledgements
in writing from the publishers. In memory of my parents, Pat and Tom Whiteread.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted. My thanks to Charlotte Mullins for writing this book, to
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Lewis Biggs, Mary Richards and all at Tate Publishing.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the To Hazel Willis, to Lawrence Luhring, Roland Augustine and
British Library Claudia Altman-Siegel at Luhring Augustine Gallery, to
ISBN 978
185437 519 3 Mark Francis and Cristina Colomar at Gagosian Gallery, for
Distributed in the United States and Canada by their continued professional support.To James Elliott, to my
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York studio assistants for their continued technical support.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Finally, my love and thanks to Marcus and Connor for being
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003112065 there.
Designed by UNA (London) Designers
Printed in Singapore by CS Graphics

Front cover (detail) and previous page:

UNTITLED (RUBBER PLINTH) 1996 (fig.44)
Overleaf: UNTITLED (BOOK CORRIDORS) 1998 (detail, fig.64)
Measurements ofartworks, where known, are given in
centimetres, height followed by width and depth. Inches are
given in parentheses.

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7 Tate Publishing
007 BEGINNINGS
018 CLOSET 1988

023 TRACES OF LIFE

034 UNTITLED (AMBER BED) 1991

039 ARCHITECTONIC GHOSTS

050 HOUSE 1993

O59 ALCHEMY AT WORK

070 UNTITLED (ONE HUNDRED SPACES) 1995

077 PAPERBACK SCULPTOR

090 HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL 1995/2000

097 HOME TRUTHS

WN
Ooakhk
110 UNTITLED (UPSTAIRS) 2000-1

115 AN UNTIMELY DEATH: A CONTEXT FOR

RACHEL WHITEREAD

124 BIOGRAPHY
127 INDEX
UNTITLED (ROOMS) 2001 [1] UNTITLED (CLEAR TORSO) 1993 [2]
Mixed media Polyurethane resin
282 X 726 X 1343 (111 /g X 286 X 529 Yg) 10 X18 X 25.5 (3 7/g X7%g X10)
Tate. Purchased with funds provided Private Collection
by Noam and Geraldine Gottesman
and Tate International Council 2003

BEGINNINGS

Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures subtly yet deter- Whiteread was born in April 1963, in a Victorian
minedly disturb the status quo. From her earliest casts house in Ilford, East London. Her mother Pat was an
of wardrobes and hot-water bottles to her recent artist, a socialist and a great supporter of the feminist
series of towering staircases, her body of work consti- cause —in 1980 she helped organise the first feminist
tutes an ever-expanding lexicon of overlooked spaces. art exhibition in London, Women’s Images of Men,
She inverts everyday objects, turning them into at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Thomas, her
ghostly negatives of themselves, uncanny replicas father, was a geography teacher who later worked
that seem familiar yet strange. as a Polytechnic administrator, and was a lifelong
Whiteread’s early plaster sculptures — created from supporter of the Labour Party. Rachel and her elder
workaday post-war bedroom furniture, the child- twin sisters Lynne and Karen grew up imbued with
hood territory of her generation — turned private their beliefs. When Whiteread was four, her family
spaces into public ones. The secret surfaces of a dress- moved to Essex, but they returned to the city three
ing table and bed, for example, were brought into the years later, and Whiteread spent the rest of her
light for scrutiny. Whiteread excavated memories like childhood in Muswell Hill, North London. At
an archaeologist, continuing to hunt for traces of past Creighton Comprehensive, she entered the sixth form
human life as she went on to cast a room, then studying arts and science A-levels, in part chosen to
a whole house. When she began creating ahistoric distinguish herself from her artist mother, But at the
objects such as plywood living units and stand-alone last minute she switched to art, and suddenly couldn't
floors to further her investigation into form and get enough of it.
materials, her work became increasingly abstract. The After completing a foundation course at Middlesex,
fragments of paint, the soot in the grate, the dents and Whiteread moved to Brighton to study painting at the
chips in tabletops — all captured in the surfaces of her Polytechnic. For the first two years, her subject matter
early plaster works — disappeared when she cast in was the landscape that her father had brought to life
resin and rubber, revealing the three-dimensional for her as a child, by pointing out natural phenomena
solidity of the spaces underneath and behind objects. and the specific ways in which certain stones weath-
Her interest in objects may have shifted from the ered. But her interest was not in painting traditional
personal and specific (items of a remembered bed- oils; her works rarely even stayed within the confines
room) to the universal (faceless rooms, anonymous of the canvas or paper, but extended out onto the wall
staircases), but each cast reveals clues that point to and floor, becoming three-dimensional drawings that
shared histories. Throughout her career, Whiteread’s occupied real space, the space normally reserved for
works have remained inherently suggestive of the sculpture.
human body and its cycles. This is true even of her A workshop given by the sculptor Richard Wilson
recent public projects. Water Tower 1998 (p.80), is a during Whiteread’s time at Brighton increased her
cast of a New York storage tank, the ‘bladder’ of the interest in three-dimensional form. It wasn't a com-
house, while Monument 2001 (p.g4) is a replica of an plex workshop ~ her real training in sculpture came
empty plinth in Trafalgar Square that was originally later, at the Slade ~ but through the simple process of
intended as a podium to commemorate dead subjects. pressing a spoon into sand, and then pouring lead into
Eva Hesse
SANS II 1968 [3]
Fibreglass and polyester resin ;
Each unit 96.5 X 91.5 X15.6 (38 X 86 x 6 Yg)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchased
through a gift of Phyllis Wattis

the curved impression that remained, she cast her first occasional table. Whiteread rendered these objects
negative space. While the mould had been made from useless through various devices: one leg was cut off
a functional piece of cutlery, the resulting cast in solid a stool, its underside stuffed with an eiderdown;
lead was an abstract domed form, a cast of the space a wardrobe was tipped on its side and propped
normally occupied by the spoon and the space inside on a cushion on a bentwood chair, its door hanging
it. The properties of the spoon had disappeared, and it open like a trap.
had been transformed into something altogether As a student, Whiteread was fascinated by the
different. This fascination with both physical and work of Eva Hesse. She admired the fragility of pieces
mental transformation was to form the core of much that spanned corners, spilled over the floor and were
of her subsequent work. suspended from the ceiling, drawing shapes across
While at Brighton, Whiteread collected flotsam the room (fig.3). She felt a connection with Hesse
from the beach, picking up squashed cans, old drain- (who died in 1970 aged thirty-four) through her use of
pipes and even a discarded mantelpiece. She took delicate materials to make robust works that
simple wax casts from them, still seeing them as commented on vulnerability as they sliced through
drawings in space but in fact making her first forays galleries, probing negative space. While Whiteread
into sculpture. By the end of her degree at Brighton, later became interested in the formal properties of the
Whiteread was spending more time in the sculpture work of male Minimalists such as Carl Andre and
department than in the painting school. Her tutors Donald Judd, something of the feminine sensibility of
suggested that she should switch from the painting to Hesse’s post-Minimalist work — which could be both
the sculpture course, but she refused — just because formal and emotional simultaneously — has con-
her work wasn’t two-dimensional, she reasoned, it stantly informed her practice.
didn’t mean that it wasn’t painting. She graduated Whiteread was also interested in the work of the
with First Class Honours. generation of British artists immediately prior to her
Given that Whiteread has made her name as own, the ‘New British Sculptors’. They included Tony
a sculptor, it’s hard to understand why she was Cragg, whose murals were composed of bits of
so adamant to remain on the painting course, but coloured plastic picked up from the street, and
when she left Brighton, she still wasn’t convinced Bill Woodrow, who used old washing machines and
that her future lay in sculpture. She applied to two ironing boards to create new forms such as Indian
London colleges to study for an MA in Fine Art, and headdresses and electric guitars. She went on regular
was offered both a place on the painting course at visits to London’s galleries, and admired Antony
Chelsea, and one at the Slade to study sculpture. ‘ Gormley’s casts of his body, and the abstract sculp-
She eventually chose the Slade and sculpture, and ture of Alison Wilding, which was also suggestive
spent the next two years continuing her exploration of human presence.
of old, abandoned objects. With no beach to comb, During this time, Whiteread started casting from
she bought things from junk and charity shops — old her own body in wax. Used for thousands of years to
carpets, clothes, stools — or turned to items that she take death masks and make human simulacra, wax has
had used herself as a child — a checked blanket, an a capacity to hold light within itself and is an uncanny
 UNTITLED 1987 [4]
Wax and copper
61 X 91.4 (24 X 36)
Destroyed

89
UNTITLED 1986 [5] UNTITLED 1986 [6]
Shirt, hot water bottle, Pillowcase, hot water bottle,
coathanger and water coathanger and water
91.4 X 61 (36 x 24) Destroyed
Destroyed

Sg
os
.
 UNTITLED 1987 [7]
Wax, plaster and carpet
Private Collection

substitute for human flesh. A wax leg, jointed below her work from all but the most determined degree-
the knee, was attached to a patterned prosthetic made show visitors, several influential people were excited
from a worn-out rug (fig.7); a wax mould of her back by it. One was her Slade tutor Alison Wilding, for
was wrapped in a copper plate that looks like a protec- whom Whiteread went on to work as an assistant for
tive piece of body armour as well as an implement for a year after graduating. Another was Barbara Carlisle,
shovelling up the dead (fig.4). A photograph taken in who ran a small gallery in Islington, several miles
her studio at the Slade shows the side of her head from Cork Street in Piccadilly (which was still the
smothered in plaster as she cast the inside whorls of centre of the commercial art world in London). On the
her ear. Whiteread was using her body as a living strength of her Slade show, Carlisle offered Whiteread
mould, wax-casting the space between her knees, her first solo exhibition the following year, which was
under her armpits, across her back. She also fused to include four new7 works, Closset, Shallow Breath,
everyday household objects with parts of the body, Mantle ond Torse\ AI ANS i
emphasising their symbiotic relationship — furniture Aft leaving Vhestade, Whi a ad rented a studio
describes our physicality by being made to fit it. inWapping. Withou théstipportof staff and fellow
By 1987 and her MA show at the Slade, Whiteread studeé ts at college, e soon realised that the work
had started to use hot-water bottles as a stand-in for she m adewould haveto bem fable and workable on
human organs, their soft, rubbery exteriors fleshy and her own. ‘She wastekne casting from her own
malleable. Warm and comforting when filled, they body, but usedfurhital® asa
a fete -in for human pres-
resembled deflated lungs when empty. She sus- ence. Chairs, ‘tables, war bes, hot-water bottles,
pended one neck-down inside a granddad shirt on a beds — all were creat do man scale for human
hanger, positioned roughly where the bladder would use, and all carried. thore of past lives on their
be (fig.5). The mouth of the bottle hung just below the scuffed surfaces.
tails of the shirt, like testicles, the body of the bottle Whiteread started be use this single-casting
protected only by the thin cotton (as thin as human method to make larger pieces, employing old furni-
skin). A further hot-water bottle was sewn inside ture bought from junk shops and through the classi-
a pillow slip that she had cut to look like an apron, the fied columns of newspapers as moulds. She searched
bottle in a pouch at the front as if it were a womb, or underneath tables and inside cupboards for signs of
a baby marsupial (fig.6). wear and tear. Like a detective looking for clues of the
When it came to the end of her two years at the object’s past, she pulled prints from these unseen
Slade, Whiteread was unsure about showing her surfaces, filling objects with plaster and waiting for it
work. During her MA she had destroyed works such to set before ripping off the furniture’s frame to reveal
as the trap-like wardrobe, finding it too disturbing, a flaky white cast of the space beneath it.
and she chose to hang her final show in tucked-away The first work she made that was included in the
places: the male and female hangers, initially called Carlisle show was Closet, a plaster cast of the inside of
Torso, were hung on the back of a door, and the cast of a small wardrobe, covered in black felt (see p.18).
her back in the copper shovel was positioned on the Whiteread felt that Closet was her first proper sculp-
10 11 floor in the metalwork room. But even though she hid ture, since it was the only one she had made that
Doris Salcedo
UNTITLED 1995 [8]
Wood, cement, cloth and steel .
195-9 X 190.2% 126.1 (77 '/g % 74 7/g % 49 5/g)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Joseph H. Hirshhorn
Purchase Fund, 1995

didn’t depend on the architecture of the space in by Whiteread are utilitarian, generic things that
which it was shown for support. Taking its cue from belonged to a whole post-war generation. The loss she
the simple architectural objects of the Minimailists, speaks of is collective rather than personal,
such as Carl Andre’s controversial Equivalent VIII 1977 Whiteread’s show at the Carlisle Gallery was auto- —
—128 fire bricks that were stacked to form a long, slen- biographical in origin, using objects that she remem-
der platform in the Tate Gallery — this work stood bered from her childhood. The four sculptures were
unaided in the middle of the gallery floor. all cast from items that could have been foundinany =
Shallow Breath (fig.g), however, used the wall as small bedroom, furniture from a time already passed
a crutch. It was cast from a single bed, a basic piece of into history. But while these objects do have their
post-war utilitarian furniture with five slats stretched own past, it is not specifically hers, The surface marks
across the narrow frame to support the mattress, She that linger in the finished pieces are archetypal to
cast the dark space beneath the counterpane, the most old furniture, They suggest a shared sense of
underside of the base of the bed, which she had history, It could be our wardrobe that has become
covered with thickly woven brown hessian, replacing Closet, our bed that now leans against the wall,
the original thin fabric. As the plaster was poured recorded and preserved as Shallow Breath. And even
onto the upside-down base it tried to force its way though Shallow Breath was made as a direct response —
through the hessian, so that when it had set and the to her father’s death, its power of communication
bed was pulled away, a layer of brown threads was goes beyond the personal narrative that inspired it.
trapped in the surface, resembling fine body hair, The We all sleep in beds, were conceived and born there,
fragile plaster surface and the imprint of the slats had fevers on the mattress and feared the monstersin
running horizontally across the surface gave the work the gloom below. A bed is as much a part of our every- :
the appearance of a frail old man, the title suggesting day life as sleep, sex and death, all of which occur on
a pair of weak lungs hidden beneath a pale flaky its porous surface,
rib-cage. Two other sculptures completed Whiteread’s
Whiteread’s father had died of heart failure a few Carlisle show. The first, Torso (fig.10), was a macabre
months before the Carlisle show opened, and Shallow cast from the inside of a hot-water bottle. In contrast
Breath was made in part as a homage to him, In Closet to the use of this comforting object that she had made
and Shallow Breath, as in much of her later work, at the Slade, all allusion to warmth and security had
death is never far from the surface. These works been stripped away. The bottle had been flayed to
represent a claustrophobic blocking-in of the spaces reveal a grey plaster cast of the inside, the mei
underneath and inside furniture (the body’s substi- pattern imprinted into the surface like nena
tute). But while they speak of death and past life, they shape swollen like a baby’s belly, limbless ar
are not specific. Unlike the work of Whiteread’s less, The other work, Mantle (4g)
contemporary, the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo dressing table, its drawersfi
(fig.8), these sculptures do not use personal items destroyed, These solidifiedin
such as shoes or clothes to refer to particular men and on top of each other, on eith
women who have been killed. The objects employed cast ofthe space where the |
TORSO 1988 [10]
Plaster (white)
8.9 X 27 X17.2
(3% X10 5/g X 63/,)
Private Collection

have been. The glass that covered the original table the brim with plaster. Increasingly her work relied less
lies on top like the protective transparent shield over on the remaining trace of the original object, and
a museum exhibit, under which precious objects can more on the form and surfaces resulting from the
be seen, except that in the case of Mantle, all that is casting process. Fort was a table, or more accurately
visible is an imprint taken from the inside of the top the space beneath a table. With no room left to put
drawers. The glass highlights these previously your legs, it denies personal engagement. It is less like
private, personal spaces that Whiteread has forced a table than a solid-walled garrison. There is no
into the public domain. remaining sense that this was once a surface on which
Throughout 1988 and 1989, Whiteread continued to share a meal. A place of discourse and communica-
to work with domestic furniture that evoked memo- tion is turned into one where entry is refused.
ries of childhood. Yellow Leaf (fig.12) was the cast of Isolation and fear have replaced cosy round-the-table
a table similar to the Formica-topped extendable one communality.
that her grandmother had kept in her kitchen. In the two years after Whiteread left the Slade, es
Its central leaf had been stored in another room, used work developed from simple casts of her body in wax
only when the table needed to be lengthened for visi- to complex plaster structures based on everyday
tors. Whiteread cast her version with this middle items that, through daily use, had become invisible.
section in place. For Whiteread, working alone in her She turned tables into architectonic structures, recre- —
studio, casting objects with which she was familiar ated the psychological blackness of fear, and explored
connected her to her family. For the viewer, the every- the under-the-bed syndrome. She started manipulat-
day nature of the objects make the sculptures imme- ‘ing materials, no longer simply pouring lead into
diately accessible, communicating a shared sense of a spoon but building frames for bed bases and tables,
history, an irrecoverable past. dictating what was removed and what remained,
As if drawing on her initial training as a painter, the experimenting with release agents and different types
surface of each cast was vital to Whiteread, a register of plaster, drilling holes to ensure that the moulds
of the underside of the original object but also were completely full, and destroying the furniture she
a canvas on which she could experiment. With Yellow associated with childhood.
Leaf, for example, Whiteread used cooking oil as
a release agent, rubbing it on the underside of the table
before casting to help intensify the traces of colour
left behind in the plaster. Yellow Leaf was imprinted
with dust, cobwebs, chewing gum and uneven screw:
heads, mute indicators of the hidden history of
the table.
In 1989, Whiteread cast another table, calling the
work Fort (fig.13). This was one of her last sculptures
to include part of the original furniture within it: the
slim drawer for table linen, now exposed, was full to
MANTLE 1988 [11]
Plaster and glass
61 X 120 X 50.8 (24 X 47, X 20)
Private Collection
YELLOW LEAF 19869 [12]
Plaster, formica and wood
149.8 X 73.6 X 93.9 (59 X 29 X37)
Collection Gulbenkian Foundation,
Lisbon
FORT 1989 [13]
Plaster and wood
90 X 130 X74
(35 3/g X 51% X 29 Vg)
Private Collection
CLOSET 1988

In 1988, a year after graduating from the Slade with an MA in sculpture, Whiteread
completed Closet, a work she describes as her first real sculpture.
When I was at college it was very hard for me to make a sculpture for some
reason. At Brighton Polytechnic I worked in the painting department. My work was
on the wall, or leaning; there were a few floor-based things. When I was at the Slade
the same thing happened. Occasionally I'd manage to get something to go on the
floor, but it was always very small or almost insignificant. So I see Closet as the first
sculpture I ever made. It was a real breakthrough in a way, in that Imade something
that just went in the middle of a room. It was an object, you could walk round it. I
was amazed when Ifinally managed to make something that did that.
Since leaving the Slade, Whiteread had become increasingly interested in
working with furniture, the objects that surround the body for its own use.
These were all very particular pieces offurniture — cheap, post-war furniture —
which I somehow wanted to immortalise, to give it a kind ofgrandness. I was trying
to make spaces that I was very familiar with, and that a lot ofpeople would be very
familiar with.
Closet was cast from a cheap wooden wardrobe, 160 centimetres high, its
stained doors and walls stripped off after the inside had been filled with plaster
and allowed to set. Only the five thin brown shelves that were layered symmetri-
cally down the right-hand side of the wardrobe were left in place, now filled with
compartments of solid plaster. |
I used a very simple technique that, in essence, hasn’t changed. I had a wardrobe,
I laid it on its back, filled it with plaster, then removed the wooden mould, and even-
tually covered it in black felt. This was a very crude method — somethingIcould do in
the studio on my own. I don’t think my technique has really changed since, it’s just
that the technology I employ has become more complicated.
When Whiteread removed the doors and walls of the wardrobe, she was left
with a pale plaster cast of the interior space. In future work this flayed interior
would be left to stand just as it was cast, its vulnerable surface pock-marked with
all the weer of the Soke object, stained with traces of varnish, paint

nee space that once held a rail of clothes, and the six cubes cast aebe
the shelves — in thick ba felt. She we remembers ie oe ee se
 grandmother’s wardrobe. In Closet she succeeds in visually recreating not just the
darkness of her memories but also the sense of palpable fear that total blackness
invokes.
Originally Closet was about trying to make a childhood experience concrete: I
came to itfrom that angle. I was trying to think of a material that was as black as
childhood darkness, which isfundamentally frightening because you don’t know
what's in that darkness. I was trying to use a material that would suck the life out of
light. I looked at various things and black felt seemed to be the right material.
The use offelt was also partly informed by my memory of sitting inside
wardrobes as a child. My parents had this wardrobe that was full of clothes and
boxes full offabric. You could be in this place that was incredibly comforting and
dark, totally surrounded by material. There would be a little chink of light, but essen-
tially it was black, and it was totally enveloping. I wanted to make that experience
tangible.
Looking at Closet is an uncomfortable experience. The black felt absorbs all the
surrounding light, its dense surface wrapping tightly round each of the interior
spaces, smothering it. The thick velvety reality of total darkness is rendered solid,
recalling the sensation of not being able to see your hand in front of your face. The
air inside the wardrobe has become a solid void, representing the heightened
emotions of the child trapped within.
Since the early 1990s, Whiteread has given her works the most minimal of
titles, referring to them as ‘Untitled’ followed by bracketed words pointing to the
mould from which they were cast. But with Closet, Mantle, Shallow Breath and
Torso, the titles were a metaphorical part of the sculpture. The word ‘closet’, for
example, simultaneously brings to mind hidden, secret spaces, covert deals done
in dark rooms, repressed ideas and psychological boundaries. The blackness of the
sculptural Closet echoes the shady, manifold meanings of the word. Closet may
stand exposed in the middle of a gallery rather than against the wall of a private
bedroom, but its interior spaces are still impenetrable, locked away.

18 19
Cons stru ction of CLOSET [14]
LOSET 1988 [15]
laster, wood and felt
10 X 88 X 37 (63 X 34 5/g X14.)
rivate Collection
GHOST 1990 [16]
Plaster on steel frame
270 X 318 X 365 (106 X 140 X 125)
Private Collection

GIT LAZ
TRACES OF LIFE

With her table pieces Yellow Leaf and Fort, Whiteread them. She completed most of the panels for Ghost on
had moved from casting bedroom furniture to objects her own over a three-month period, smothering the
from other areas of the home. Simultaneously, she walls with thick clods of wet plaster, at one point
had her mind set on an altogether bigger project: the blocking herself in as she cast the door.
casting of a whole room. The result was Ghost (fig.16), At the time, Whiteread envisaged that Ghost
which was exhibited at the Chisenhale Gallery, would be exhibited for a few weeks at the Chisenhale
Bethnal Green, in 1990, and was bought by Charles before, in all likelihood, ending up in a skip. She
Saatchi. When she set out with the idea to cast didn’t even really understand the full effect of what
a room, she was still relatively unknown as an artist, she was making until she assembled all the panels ona
but this work would put her on the shortlist for the metal armature in her studio and began to grasp the
1991 Turner Prize. level of disorientation that the viewer would experi-
While Chisenhale’s director Emma Dexter was ence. Ghost recreates the living room at 486 Archway
supportive of Whiteread’s proposal, she didn’t have Road, each panel revealing the shape of the walls, fire-
the money needed to commission it. Whiteread had place, window, door, skirting and cornice. But every-
to apply for funding, writing on her application forms thing appears in reverse, inside-out, the deep skirting
that she wanted to ‘mummify the air in a room’. She now a recessed frieze, the grid of tiles around the
received money from both Greater London Arts and bulging fireplace indented. Whiteread realised, as she
the Elephant Trust, and the project became a reality. looked at the reversed light switch, that she had
The living-room she found to cast from was in a become the wall, looking onto the space that had once
house at 486 Archway Road, a Victorian property that been inside the room and was now solidified. She had
was about to be renovated. Located not far from succeeded in her aim of mummifying the air in the
where she grew up in Muswell Hill, its rooms were on room, of entombing the social space in which lives
a similar scale to those in her childhood home. were once lived out. Visual reminders of those lives
Whiteread spent a month visiting the room every day remained — the soot in the fireplace, the chips in the
prior to casting, deciding how she was going to tackle skirting board, the fragments of paint that had been
it. In order to work out the optimum panel size she absorbed into the plaster as it dried. But life itself was
should use to cast each section of the room, so that absent. The work is a spectral negative, an after-image
when it was reassembled it would have a sense of of a room that no longer exists, a record that had been
balance, of wholeness, she looked at the paintings of bleached of colour like an old photograph left out in
Piero della Francesca, an artist whom she greatly the light. In a sense cathartic, Ghost is a mausoleum to
admired for his sense of composition. Her largest Whiteread’s own past, yet it speaks of ashared sense
previous work had been the cast of a wardrobe, where of loss, of memories bricked in and entombed.
plaster was poured into a mould on the floor. Now, When she was a teenager, Whiteread worked at
she had to work out how to take casts directly from Highgate cemetery in north London as a volunteer,
the walls, and ensure that she could remove them helping to repair broken headstones and pillaged
through the living-room door once they were crypts. She clearly remembers the sensation of terror
complete. She also had to make sure that she could lift coupled with fascination when approaching a tomb
VALLEY 1990 [17]
Plaster and glass
95:3 X 185.4 X 96.5 (37 Y, X73 X 38)
Private Collection

whose door was ajar, daring herself to look within, (fig.26) and Untitled (White Sloping Bed), new works
fearing to see the body she knew must be there. Ghost in plaster and rubber. Contemplating these sculptures
initially appears as if it has been hewn from solid rock, was an uncanny experience: while your mind told you
but as you walk around the sculpture, cracks appear in that you were looking at a bathtub, a bed, you were in
its solid armature and — rather uneasily — you are fact looking at everything that these things were not.
drawn to look between the panels, to see what lies You were looking at solidified air from under a bath or
inside. The flaky panels are like chalky white grave- a bed rather than the object itself.
stones, with chinks of light appearing between them, Ether was the first of three bath pieces that
pulling you closer to look into the tomb. Whiteread produced in 1990. It was made using an
Ghost is nota solid tomb but a facade, a skin peeled old cast-iron bath stripped of its enamel coating. The
away from a dying room, a death mask capturing tub was placed in a rectangular mould of shuttering
surface detail, not substance. The fact that there is no ply (a cheap builder’s material that Whiteread chose
ceiling, and that one can see through the sculpture to for its particular wood grain) and plaster was poured
the metal scaffold within, doubly denies your reading in. As it began to set, the rust from the bottom of the
of the sculpture as a room. Nothing is as it seems: not bath was drawn into the plaster like paint in a fresco.
only is everything in reverse, but the seeming solidity When Whiteread saw these dirty orange stains,
of the negative room is also challenged. Ghost ques- which clung to the plaster like scum in a bath, she felt
tions what a room actually is — is it the four walls, the the need to drill a hole where the plug would have
ceiling, the door, or is it the life that is lived out within been. It was as if a body had dissolved into the plaster,
it? Is the room purely a container for social space, a or had melted down the plughole. She had watched a
place to act out lives, or does it — did it — have a physi- news item earlier in the year that had shown ancient
cal presence? lead coffins being carried out of a church in
Ghost was exhibited on its own in the windowless, Spitalfields, near to where she now lived. The bodies
warehouse-like Chisenhale Gallery. Whiteread’s first had liquefied and could be heard sloshing around, and
significant show could not have been more different experts discussed whether the plague could be
from the early commercial success of many others of released if they were breached. In Ether, the corporeal
her generation — Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Fiona is again implied if not present, an allusion heightened
Rae, Ian Davenport. While they graduated more or by the body-sized scale of the work.
less as a group from Goldsmiths College in the late Whiteread’s baths have little to do with their origi-
1980s, and exhibited together in an old Docklands nal hygienic use. The box-like shape of the mould that
building in the exhibition Freeze (a show often cited * she used to cast the tubs gives the finished sculptures
as the starting point for the Young British Artists), the look of sarcophagi, their generous proportions
Whiteread was tenaciously following her own path. resulting in a sculptural solidity that suggests ancient
But she nevertheless joined Rae and Davenport on the stone. The sculptures were removed from the moulds
Turner Prize shortlist in 1991. chipped and flaking, as if they wore their long history
In the accompanying Turner Prize exhibition she on their sheer sides. Not since the late paintings of
was represented by Ether, Untitled (Amber Bed) Pierre Bonnard, who repeatedly painted his wife in
UNTITLED (BATH) 1990 [18]
Plaster and glass
103 X105 X 209.5
(40, X 41/, X 82)
Private Collection
 UNTITLED (AMBER MATTRESS) 1992 [19]
Rubber \
11.8X927X109.2
(44X36, X 43)
Private Collection

the bath — her body at times dissolving under the It was while creating the three baths that
dancing highlights of the water — had this simple Whiteread pared down the titles of her works. While —
domestic object received such attention. she wanted her work to transcend the specifics of the
In Valley (fig.17), the second bath piece, Whiteread object from which it was cast, the title she gave to |
added a sheet of glass to the top. It was reminiscent each piece suggested a particular way of approaching
both of the open coffins used for leaders lying in state the sculpture. ‘Closet’ implied a secret, hidden space;
~she had recently visited Red Square in Moscow and ‘torso’ the reading of the cast as a body. ‘Ghost’ and
seen the embalmed Lenin lying under glass in his ‘ether’ suggested ephemerality, a mere residue of
mausoleum — and of the still surface of a lake. Perhaps what once was. ‘Valley’ referred to the steep sides of
Whiteread was also inspired by a picture of the the particular bath she had used, along with the grey-
Glacier Man in her studio, a 5,000-year-old preserved silt colour of the resulting cast. It also alluded to the
corpse found in the ice. But Valley was also suggestive way in which the rock-like solidity and organic —
of life, albeit accidentally. While plaster sets relatively hollows in these works connect with the landscape.
quickly, a certain amount of time is needed to allow it Now, however, Whiteread chose to stop providing
to cure, or dry out thoroughly. Whiteread added the clues as to how to interpret each piece. From this ti
glass lid to Valley before this had happened, and on, all her works — with the exception of the Torsos —
returned to her studio the next day to find that a layer have been untitled.
of condensation had formed on the inside of the glass,
as if a person were lying in the hollow underneath, _
breathing, or as if the sculpture itself were sweating.
For the final work in this group, Untitled (Bath) (Amber Bed) 1991, the fist eees.
(fig.18), Whiteread again added a glass lid, but this (see p.34), was slumped against th
time drilled two holes in the top at one end, corre-
sponding to a pair of holes that had also been drilled Mattress) 1992 (fig.19), follow
in the plaster, where the taps would have been. Rust pled with cellulite, Bea :
traces had trickled down from the holes in the plaster
like tears from eyes, while the circular openings in the
glass — literally breathing holes for the plaster —
appeared like nostrils. was jaundiced orpit
At the heart of these bath sculptures lies a‘sears Untitled (Yello
rooted tension. Baths are associated with cleanliness ingly cast in dental
and comfort, yet these works bring to mind sarco- both the space ,
phagi and death; stains are all that remain of liquefied
bodies that seem to have trickled away. A similar
tension pervades all of Whiteread’s early work, where
familiar objects create a sense of security thatisthen _
purposefully yet discreetly undermined. _
UNTITLED (AIR BED II) 1992 [20]
Polyurethane rubber
122 X 197 X 23 (48 X77V, X9)
Tate. Purchased with assistance from
the Patrons of New Art through the
Tate Gallery Foundation 1993
UNTITLED (BLACK BED) 1991 [22] UNTITLED (CLEAR SLAB) 1992 [23]
Fibreglass and rubber Rubber
30.5 X 188 x 137.2 (12X74 X 54) 198.1 X 78,7 X 10.2 (78 X31 X 4)
Weltkunst Foundation, Dublin Private Collection

wet the bed. Untitled (Black Bed) 1991 (fig.22), was cast
from a folding double bed; a thin ridge protrudes
down the centre where the thick tar-like rubber forced
its way into the fabric hinge. While the blackness of
the piece recreates the emotional sensation experi-
enced when looking at Closet, the surface also resem-
bles human skin, pock-marked and covered with
short hairs, the central fold labial and protruding.
In a couple of bed pieces, Whiteread seemed to
delve inside the body. Untitled (Air Bed II) 1992
(fig.20), a cast of the air inside a blow-up bed, is a posi-
tive rubber sculpture the colour of pickled organs ina
laboratory. Forming a freestanding block, its bloated
tubes resemble distended intestines, far removed
from the air-filled original. It is as if the bed had
gorged on those who slept on it, turning its insides
solid in the process.
Sigmund Freud described the uncanny (or unheim-
lich) as ‘the name for everything that ought to have,
remained ... secret and hidden but has come to light’,
and the term is therefore extremely apt in describing
the disturbing nature of Whiteread’s works. In many
of her bed pieces, she played with the boundaries
between animate and inanimate. They became substi-
tutes for humans, propped up against her studio wall
or curled in a corner. She endlessly photographed
abandoned beds and mattresses she saw on the street
that took on human attributes as they lolled, sprawled
and lay comatose. This confusion between the
animate and the inanimate recalls Pygmalion’s dream
in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the sculptor falls in
love with his own carving of a naked young girl, and
eventually transforms her marble curves into flesh
and blood through the power of Venus (his desire).
Freud uses a modern reworking of the myth, E.T.A.
Hoffmann’s The Sandman 1817 (about a boy and his
automaton), to explore the uncanny relationship
 t Y

30 31
UNTITLED (SLAB I!) 1991 [24]
Rubber
14.X197X75(5%X77%2X29%)-
Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum,
Eindhoven
 UNTITLED (TORSO) 1991 [25]
Dental plaster
8.3 X16.5 X 23.5 (3, X6% X94)
Private Collection

between the inanimate and the animate. Whiteread’s By 1992, Whiteread’s work was attracting interest
beds — made to fit human proportions — draw on a from America and Europe. Her first commercial solo
similar psychological uncertainty, where logic show in New York was held at Luhring Augustine,
surrounding inanimate objects fades away to be and one-person exhibitions of her work were also
replaced by the irrational fear that they have somehow presented in public galleries in Eindhoven and
come to life. Barcelona. At home, Charles Saatchi included her in
Whiteread also worked with other objects inti- his first exhibition, titled Young British Artists, along-
mately linked to human scale. In the early 1990s, she side Damien Hirst and others. Whiteread’s work at
frequently rummaged around in a particular architec- this time reflected her interest in everyday objects,
tural salvage yard in Dalston. One day she purchased and her desire to challenge the perception of things
a ceramic butcher’s draining board, and asked if they that others took for granted. With the Slabs, her work
had anything similar but larger. The owner took her to had become more abstract, yet it still resonated with
his other yard in Mile End, and she found what she’d human connections. The body was alluded to —
been asking for without realising it — two mortuary despite being physically absent — in all her work, in
slabs, covered in moss and algae. They remained the anthropomorphic parallels seen in the belly folds
untouched in her studio for six months until she of mattresses and beds, in the shape of the finished
decided to clean them, a task she found repulsive yet Torsos (fig.25), and in her use of materials to suggest
fascinating, likening it to cleaning a body. The porce- pasty flesh or bodily fluids. But increasingly she was
lain surfaces were marked all over with shallow lines moving away from such direct references to bodies,
made by scalpels exiting bodies; a smooth groove ran and beginning to look beyond domestic furniture to
around the edge of the slab to take away unwanted architecture, as a natural extension of her sculptural
liquid from the corpse. When she cast from them, vocabulary.
Whiteread decided not to use a release agent, to
ensure that they would retain all the surface detail.
She therefore had to wrestle the sculptures out of
their moulds, and since the slabs are the shape of the
body in its purest form, once cast in rubber they
discreetly pointed to their original human cargo
through their scale.
Untitled (Clear Slab) (fig.23) is like a giant tongue
cast in milky white rubber and balanced on its curved
end on the floor against the wall. It is lascivious and
suggestive, the colour and opacity of semen. Untitled
(Slab II) (fig.24), cast in amber rubber with a dark
centre, runs along the floor. Its surface shines like
viscous liquid, a pool of bodily fluids, like a liquefica-
32 33 tion of the corpses that once rested on the slab.
UNTITLED (AMBER BED) 1991

One of the first pieces of furniture from which Whiteread cast was a bed (Shallow Breath
1988). It was no longer a bed on which you could sleep, since the mattress and sheets
were long gone. The single bed base had been turned over so its four short legs stuck
straight into the air, and it was boxed in with a shallow wood frame before plaster was
poured in. Three years later, the fragile rigidity of plaster was replaced by an altogether
more fleshy material: rubber. The first work cast in rubber was Untitled (Amber Bed).
I wanted to make something figurative. It was a way of using the mattress, or the spaces
underneath beds, as a metaphor for people. I've lived in London virtually all my life and
having grown up through Thatcher’s years, seeing the deprivation, and seeing more
and more homeless people everywhere, Ifeel sad about what’s happening here, about
the state of Britain.
Old mattresses, bed bases, etc. are very much a part of London's detritus and you see
them abandoned everywhere on the streets. Iremember seeing a television documentary
about a particularly run-down housing estate in Hackney, East London. As the documen-
tary progressed you became increasingly aware of the degradation and poverty in which
these people lived. An old blind man living on the estate reported a terrible stench coming
from the adjoining flat. Eventually the council intervened and found aman who had died
in his bed. He had lain there for two weeks and had sort of melted into his mattress. The
corpse was removed and the council cleared his furniture onto the street with the intention
of taking it to the rubbish tip. No one came to pick it up. There was this dreadful image of
young children playing on the mattress that the old man had died on. I must have seen that
film over ten years ago but the images have stayed with me and have possibly influenced
me in some way. There are all sorts of stories related to the pieces Imake. When you use
second-hand furniture it’s inevitable that the history of objects becomes a part of the work.
Whiteread has almost always used furniture or architecture with a history, and at the
time she was making Untitled (Amber Bed) she was regularly advertising in Loot, a buy-
and-sell newspaper, for specific items. After a time she stopped advertising because the
people who owned the furniture would share endless stories and personal details with
her. If she purchased her materials from second-hand shops instead, she could excavate
the mute history of each object from 'the surface over time.
But Untitled (Amber Bed) is not remarkable so much for its specific history as for its
use of materials. Up until this point Whiteread’s work had been entirely plaster based.
The limitations of this material were beginning to frustrate her —it was very fragile when
cast, yet also heavy and cumbersome, and some works were impossible to move on her
 own. She therefore decided to cast the bed base in rubber.
It was liberating to make a piece in rubber and to be able to bounce it around the studio
without it breaking up; also to be able to find other ways of introducing colour.
Taken from the base of a single bed, Untitled (Amber Bed) was cast in a similar way to
Shallow Breath, and when the rubber had set, Whiteread tried to prop it against the wall
as she had done previously. But the flexible material wouldn’t support its own weight; it
slid down the wall, coming to rest with the bottom third flat against the floor, the middle
of the sculpture creased like a stomach.
I kept seeing it out of the corner of my eye as I was working and it always gave me a
shock, as ifsomeone was just sitting there, or was slumped up against the wall.
The pale plaster had been replaced by thick orange rubber, and the bed base had been
transformed into an anthropomorphic form, old and spent, propped up, an exhausted
cast. It became the visual metaphor of London life for which Whiteread had been search-
ing, a sculpture that not only had human qualities — the slight paunch, the two leg holes
suggesting blank eyes on the world — but evoked the physical traces of a life lived out.
Iused rubber that’s a sort offleshy orange. The material is very tactile and has a direct
reference to our own corporeality. I then started working with a company that designed
rubbers for me. I would have these bizarre conversations where I'd call up and request a
rubber the colour of the first piss in the morning.
The beds she casts from are stained and old, the lives once lived on top of them
reduced to blooms of yellow, orange and cream on the surface. The colour Whiteread
selected for Untitled (Amber Bed) evokes the bodily fluids and memories that were once
lodged in the fabric of the bed itself. But it is not only the colour that was carefully
chosen. This sculpture — which bends and folds like an old mattress — was cast from a bed
base whose underside was covered in fabric pulled tight over the slats. For Untitled
(Amber Bed), Whiteread replaced the old material with coarse hessian.
One reason I keep casting from beds is that I’ve found a surface that Ican manipulate
in a different way each time. I cast the space underneath a bed using the surface like
a canvas — by sizing it in different ways, stretching it, getting it taut, Ican completely
control the surface.
In Untitled (Amber Bed), the opaque rubber functions like flesh, its surface brittle and
flaky as desiccated skin where the thickly woven material that Whiteread stretched over
the slats of the bed has roughed it up. It is this fascination with materials and their
unique properties that has threaded through all of Whiteread’s work, long after her
34 35 anthropomorphic interest in beds subsided.
UNTITLED (AMBER BED) 1991 [26]
Rubber
129.5 X 91.4 X 101.6 (51 X 36 X 40)
Musée d’Art Contemporain de
Nimes

\\
 ARCHITECTONIC GHOSTS

Architecture is built on a scale that corresponds to the space (see fig.28). He wasn’t alone in examining the
human form, but it is not as personal or specific as contrast between positive and negative space on such
individual items of furniture. Wardrobes and dressing a large scale. Land artists like Robert Smithson, with
tables store our personal belongings, record our lives; his Spiral Jetty 1970 in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, and
beds absorb our dreams and fevers as we sleep. Michael Heizer with his Double Negative 1969 — two
Within architecture’s walls, on its floors and stairs, huge trenches cut into the Nevada desert — also exam-
events may be played out, but the marks it acquires ined the visual power of the void.
over time are incidental: dents in the floor from Whiteread has studied Matta-Clark’s work, which
dropped toys; chips in doorframes from clumsy colli- now exists chiefly in photographs and drawings. All
sions; layers of different paints and wallpapers tracing his projects were temporary, as Ghost was initially
changes in fashion. Whiteread’s fascination with the meant to be. House —- conceived only a couple of weeks
architecture of space in Ghost marks a pivot in her after Ghost was exhibited — was also emphatically
sculptural thinking. For while furniture is specific, intended to be an ephemeral work. While House now
subjective, laden with memory, architecture plays exists in endless photographs and newspaper
itself out on a more public scale, and Whiteread’s cuttings, in Whiteread’s drawings and video footage,
interest in its geometries becomes increasingly formal the actual physical experience of standing on the
from this point on. pavement in Grove Road, in the East End of London,
In Ghost, the walls of a room that had experienced and facing a pale concrete cast of all the spaces that a
100 years of use were fingerprinted for evidence. family once privately inhabited, can never be recre-
Plaster, chiefly used by sculptors as an in-between ated (see p.50).
medium for modelling before casting in bronze, had Photography as a record both of her own work and
created an in-between room. It was a negative imprint of contextual areas of interest is vitally important for
in the gallery (itself a positive space), a solidified cast Whiteread. Since 1991, when House was still just an
within the void of a larger room whose social space idea, she has used a camera as if itwere a sketchbook
was still active, evolving, changing. Whiteread was to document architectural structures. She has photo-
not the first artist to present a room within a room. graphed skyscraper facades and the gaps between
Post-Minimalist artists such as Louise Bourgeois and buildings in New York; concrete frames of unfinished
Bruce Nauman had installed rooms and corridors ina houses and ancient steps in Turkey; metal construc-
gallery context, challenging the experience of both tion grids and condemned tower blocks in the East
the gallery and the architectural form. American artist End of London. Dozens of boxes in her studio contain
Gordon Matta-Clark’s slices of real buildings often images of windowless houses, external staircases and
found their way into the gallery environment. His canals cut through cliffs. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling
short working life (he died in 1978 aged thirty-five) Water, a house built over a waterfall, features in her
was spent examining space within domestic architec- collection and epitomises her long-standing interest
ture, cutting holes through floors, carving wedges in the play between positive and negative space, as do
through house facades, bringing the outside into the her photographs of marble trompe l'oeil floors from
38 39 heart of buildings, revelling in shards of negative Italian villas, where depth is implied but is illusory.
 In 1992, Whiteread cast her first floor. In contrast boards was still visible, the raised level of the slim
to the trompe Uoeil floors, depth was given where rows and the alternating voids and plaster beams
none was expected. For Whiteread had cast not the would not sustain even mental footsteps. Whiteread
surface of the floor, but the hidden volume under- had succeeded in disorientating the viewer once
neath it, the secret space between the joists that again, challenging our understanding of what a floor
support the wooden floorboards. The idea to cast a was, and what it could be.
floor came when she was asked to create a new work Carl Andre’s works may have given Whiteread the
for Documenta IX, a vast exhibition of international confidence to put white plaster blocks in the centre of
art held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Aged a gallery, and to create her own floor pieces, but she
twenty-nine, she was one of the youngest artists didn’t directly address his series of metal floors until
participating. She spent days in the gallery she had 1999. Untitled (Floor) is more evocative of aperform-
been allocated, familiarising herself with the specific ance piece by Vito Acconci called Seed Bed 1972, in
architecture of the Fridericarium. Whiteread has which he lay under a false floor in a commercial
often been called a geographer of hidden space, and gallery and masturbated while visitors walked over-
initially her idea was to map the whole room, recreat- head. Both deal with hidden space, a space of secrets.
ing the floor in the first-floor gallery as if it were a Whiteread’s floor for Documenta IX was the first
fitted carpet. But after studying it she felt this was too work in which she had fabricated the shape of the
fussy, and instead decided to invent a floor of her own sculpture. She had created the two indents to allow
to show there. viewers to get close to the work, to get inside it and
Cast in plaster, Untitled (Floor) 1992 (fig.31) is scrutinise the surface. She had determined the size of
rectangular, with two missing square sections at the piece and its shape. But it still had a degree of
opposite ends, as if these parts of the floor had been authenticity — it was cast from second-hand floor-
removed (as Matta-Clark did with the corners of a boards, the height of the sculpture dictated by the
clapboard house in Splitting 1974, fig.28), or that the height of the original joists. It would not be until the
floor had originally been laid around cupboards or following year that she would become bold enough to
external pipes. It was 25cm deep and lay in 8 long cast a sculpture from an object entirely of her own
rows, each plaster block separated by a narrow void making.
the width of the original joist. The heavy imprint of Whiteread cast several more floors and related
wood grain ran perpendicular to the rows, a,cobweb works in 1992. In Untitled (Wax Floor) (fig.29) she
of swirls and knots pressed into the plaster. took a slim cast the depth ofa floorboard from a corri-
While floors necessarily feature in every building, dor, the tan-coloured wax taking an imprint of the
they are rarely scrutinised. Even the Italianate trompe grain as if it were a death mask. As Roland Barthes
l'oeil floors are merely a clever skin stretching across wrote in his influential book on photography Camera
joists, hiding what Whiteread has described as the Lucida 1980, a death mask necessarily underlines
‘intestines’ of a property. With this work, however, death while trying to preserve life, a quality that can
the floor became the centre of attention. But it was not also be applied to the photograph. The vast majority
a surface to be walked on; while the pattern of floor- of Whiteread’s work can only be created at the
Gordon Matta-Clark
SPLITTING 1974 [28]
Colour photograph
68 x 99 (26 ¥, x39)
Courtesy David Zwirner
Gallery, New York

40 41
UNTITLED (WAX FLOOR) 1992 [29]
Wax and polystyrene
28 X 100 X 465 (11X 39 3/g X 183 3/g)
Eindhoven Museum
UNTITLED (AMBER FLOOR) 1993 [30]
Rubber
2X 86 X 245 (7/g X 337/g X96 ¥,)
Private Collection

42 43
UNTITLED (FLOOR) 1992 [31]
Plaster
24.1 X 280.7 X 622.3
(9 ¥, X110 ¥, X 245)
Private Collection
 tT

Study for FLOOR 1992 [32] UNTITLED (FLOOR/CEILING) 1993 [33]

Brown ink and correction fluid Resin and rubber
38.2 X 28.6 (117/g XN.) Two parts, 12 X140 X120
Private Collection and 2.5 X140 X 120
(43/, X55 Vg X 47 Vy
and 1X 47%, X55 Vg)
Tate. Purchased 1993

expense of the object — a floorboard, a table, a room, Foundation as part of her scholarship, much of her
a house. Her sculptures document the history of the work during her stay in Berlin was completed in her
object up to that moment, but only by destroying its flat in Charlottenburg, where she began by making
future life. The cast, just like the photograph and the drawings of the parquet floor (fig.32). Using correcting
death mask, records a moment that can never occur fluid over thin ink lines, and often finishing them off
again; the present has become the past and the future with watercolour, Whiteread constructed these
will not, cannot, alter this snapshot of time captured. layered and painterly drawings from the new environ-
Whiteread extended her series of floors to include ment around her. Frequently working on graph paper,
casts of platforms that she constructed from old floor- she used the minimalist grid to underpin drawings
boards. She also made Untitled (Floor/Ceiling) 1993 that became white approximations of three-dimen-
(fig.33), a double cast of a floor and ceiling, with the sional voids. The correcting fluid, a manipulable
ceiling rose indented in the middle of an orange liquid that would set to form a hard opaque surface,
rubber block. But increasingly she became preoccu- functioned in a similar way to the plaster she had used
pied with drawing, and was given the opportunity for her sculptures.
to explore this more fully when she was awarded Unlike many sculptors’ two-dimensional works,
an eighteen-month DAAD International Artists’ most of Whiteread’s drawings are not sketches for
Exchange Scholarship in Berlin. future sculptures. During the three years it took to
Whiteread moved to Berlin in the spring of 1992, make House, she did create hundreds of related draw-
temporarily abandoning her exploration of British ings — of house-shaped correction-fluid drawings or
history as exemplified by its furniture and domestic doctored photographs of terraced houses with indi-
architecture. Now, Berlin took London’s place as her vidual properties blanked out — but almost her entire
sourcebook. On her arrival she felt an acute sense of output during her time in Berlin constituted works on
grief and horror concerning Hitler’s years in power, paper not directly related to any forthcoming sculp-
and travelled to concentration camps, watching how tural project. These grew from her exploration of the
German and foreign visitors dealt with the over- city: the line where the Wall had been until 1989; the
whelming emotions that surfaced. At the time, endless faceless apartment blocks of former East
a labyrinth of Nazi bunkers had been discovered Germany; the grid-like facades of former West
underneath Berlin, and a debate was in progress as to Berlin’s hotels and office blocks. But, while her final
what to do with them. In the end, in a strange parallel exhibition at the DAAD Gallery in 1993 comprised
with Whiteread’s work, they were filled with only drawings, she did create one major sculptural
concrete to prevent them from becoming a shrine for piece during her scholarship.
Neo-Fascists. But Whiteread had wanted them to be Untitled (Room) (fig.34) was a critical response to
blown up or dug out — in her mind, this series of the architecture Whiteread found around her. This
linked, solidified rooms under the city centre had the was the first sculpture that she had made from
potential to remain a powerful buried symbol of the a structure entirely fabricated by herself. Unlike
Nazi regime. Ghost, it was not a cast of a room, but a cast of an
Although she was given a studio at the DAAD object that resembled a room. The whole mould was
Ryans eae
sali
made within her Berlin studio, constructed out of mass-produced houses as ‘healthy and beautiful in
cheap plywood sheeting, the window unopenable, the same way that the working tools and instruments
the window frame unpainted. It had a basic low skirt- that accompany our existence are beautiful’.
ing board, but no other wall ornamentation; the door Whiteread’s work was a riposte to the modernist
was unpanelled, with only a simple indent left where dream, a sharp look at the reality of faceless existence.
the handle should have been. Built to the dimensions She described Untitled (Room) as a ‘unit designed
ofabasic modern room — which uses the arm span asa to survive in’, but survival itself was even brought
proportional tool — it was wholly faceless and without into question — there was no light-switch, no heat,
history, a superficial simulation of a room that existed no way out.
solely to be destroyed. Ghost verges on the nostalgic, withiits traces of past
When Whiteread had finished making the mould life embedded in its walls, an example of what the
— which from the inside resembled a room but from nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich
the outside looked like a stage set, with the walls visi- Nietzsche described as man’s need to cling to the past:
bly bolted together — she set about preparing it for ‘however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with ~
casting. There was no trace of history to capture in the him’. But Untitled (Room) has no such chain. In part a
plaster’s responsive surface, no soot in the fireplace, response to the architecture that surrounded her
and no fireplace either. She didn’t have to pull during her time in Berlin, it was also as if temporarily
cupboards off walls, or strip wallpaper, board up the moving to Berlin allowed Whiteread to take a step
windows or plug the cracks. There were no electrical back from her own life. For while much of her work
circuits to disengage, no door handles to remove. up until 1993 was rooted in autobiography, Untitled
The resulting sculpture, although of comparable (Room) stood clear of any such reading. It was a tabula
size, stood in complete contrast to Ghost. In Untitled rasa, a clean sweep, free of memories and emotion. It
(Room) the walls were sheer and mute, the panels cast was a blank canvas, the visual and mental foil to
in such a way as to suggest solid blocks of stone, nota Ghost. And, as it turned out, to House.
crumbly facade. The release agent used had pulled Untitled (Room) was first exhibited at the Tate
colour from the ply into the plaster, but instead of Gallery in the autumn of 1993. On the strength of
suggesting layers of history it looked like the begin- Whiteread’s 1992 solo show at the Stedelijk Van
nings of damp, a subtle mottling above the window Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and new work pres-
frame and over the walls. This had never been a home; ented at the Sydney Biennale and Galerie Claire
it didn’t even look like a habitable place. It was like a Burrus in Paris, she had been nominated for the
visualisation of the concrete cells described by J.G. Turner Prize again. But by the time the prize was
Ballard in his dystopic novel High-Rise 1975, where awarded, Whiteread was already receiving far more
people hopelessly attempt to personalise the media attention than the other three shortlisted
symmetrical rooms up and down a forty-storey tower artists (Hannah Collins, Vong Phaophanit and Sean
block. It also resembled one of Le Corbusier’s ‘units Scully). On 25 October, House —her most ambitious:
for living in’, part of his grand plan to create ‘House- sculpture to date —was unveiled. It wastodominate
machines’ in the 1920s. He described these soulless the press for the duration of the Turner Prize.
 UNTITLED (ROOM) 1993 [34]
Plaster
275 X 300 X 350 (108 Vg X 18 Yg X 138)
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York

J.G. Ballard described the tower block in High-Rise

as a body, the lifts pumping up and down like a giant
heart, people like blood cells in arterial corridors, the
ventilation system breathing for its inhabitants.
Whiteread refers to the individual components of a
house in a similar way: the space under the floor as the
intestines, the walls as the skeleton, the electrics and
plumbing the nerves and arteries. But in House the
skeleton has been broken away, the everyday func-
tions halted, the interior of the body filled up and
sealed. The windows were vacant eyes, now blinded.
The sense of protection afforded by a house, from
within which we can gaze onto the world, has been
denied. As Jean-Paul Sartre said in Being and
Nothingness 1943, ‘the bomb which destroys my
house also damages my body in so far as the house
was already an indication of my body’.
As if excavated at Pompeii, House was a solidifica-
tion of the social spaces of an entire building. Since it
had been three years in the planning, it related closely
to Ghost. It was riddled with history, fragments of the
past embedded in its pale grey surface like fossils. But
Untitled (Room), simultaneously exhibited in the
Turner Prize exhibition, was everything that House
was not. Untitled (Room) was to represent a signifi-
cant step, signalling Whiteread’s increased interest in
form and composition, which was later to be explored
further in her sculptures cast from tables and chairs.
But in 1993, Untitled (Room) was overshadowed by
the publicly sited House, which continued to domi-
nate the headlines even after Whiteread became the
first woman ever to win the Turner Prize and House
was destroyed on 11 January 1994.

a
HOUSE 1993

On 25 October, 1993, a small group of people gathered on a piece of featureless park-

land in East London to celebrate the completion of House, Whiteread’s largest and most
ambitious work to date. It was her first public sculpture, and over the course of the next
three months it was responsible for transforming her from a relatively unknown promis-
ing young artist to a household name.
The idea for House had first arisen three years earlier, a few weeks after she had
completed Ghost.
House was a continuation of my early work from the late 1980s, like Yellow Leaf 1989
and Closet 1988, where elements of the originals became an integral part of the work.
When making House we cast a concrete skin throughout the whole building — casting
around the wooden stairs and floors.
Initially Whiteread obsessed over how to cast a whole house without destroying it,
as she had previously managed to do with the room in Ghost. But when she teamed up
with art facilitators Artangel, the idea of using a house due for demolition was presented
to her. A giant cast of the inside could be made, with no requirement to preserve the
building. The problem then became one of finding a suitable condemned house to use as
a mould. For more than two years Whiteread scoured London for suitable properties.
She came close to using a building on the proposed site for the controversial new M11.
A fake blue heritage plaque, which had been attached to the property, read: “This house
was once a home.’ But she finally settled on 193 Grove Road, a Victorian terraced house
in Bow, where the tenant — Mr Gale — had refused to move out when the rest of the street
was cleared to make way fora park. Eventually he was persuaded to vacate the property,
and Bow council granted Whiteread access to the house to enable her to create a tempo-
rary sculpture from it.
This was a semi-derelict house in East London and Iwas very clear that it had to be
in an area I was absolutely familiar with, and a building that was going to be knocked
down. Grove Road was on a green corridor with a view to Canary Wharf, one of Thatcher's
troubled economic babies, originally envisaged as an urban utopia.
On 2 August 1993, with a team of engineers, construction people, assistants
aid student volunteers, Whiteread set to work preparing the inside of the property
for casting.
The previous tenants were obviously DIY fanatics. The house was full offitted
STUDY FOR HOUSE 1993 [35]
“orrection fluid on laser copy, two sheets
10 X 42 (23 5/g X16 ¥,)
-rivate Collection

HeXTON SQUALE - LerPon ~N.|

HexttIn Stvracté Lmag yl

50 $1
cupboards, cocktail bars and a tremendous variety of wallpapers and floor finishes. I was
fascinated by their personal environment, and documented it all before I destroyed it. It
was like exploring the inside of a body, removing its vital organs. 'd made floor pieces
before in the studio, and had always seen them as being like the intestines of a house, the
hidden spaces that are generally inaccessible. We spent about six weeks working on the
interior of the house, filling cracks and getting it ready for casting. It was as ifwe were
embalming a body.
To build a building within a building, we had to make new foundations. We worked
meticulously on the interior, stripping it to its carcass. Then we applied a release agent,
sprayed one centimetre of top-coat concrete [Lockrete, used to ‘retouch the white cliffs of
Dover] over it, put the metal armature in place, and heavy-filled it with the rest of the
concrete. It was a very strange place inside, like a cave or grotto. We used that process
throughout the whole building; essentially the building became a mould. Then we stripped
the whole thing by hand — every brick, every fireplace, and every door. When wed finished
casting, we got out through a four-foot square in the roof. The construction people said that
it could just be patched over with wood, butIinsisted that it had to be cast so that it would
be a completely sealed space.
It took over a month for the interior of the whole house to be cast, and a further ten
days for the concrete to cure and set. Then scaffolding was erected around the outside,
and Whiteread and her team began removing the exterior of the building. .
As we stripped away the building, it was amazing to me how much detail the casting
had picked up, like Ghost but much more substantial, not just because of its size, but
because of the material and the brutality with which it had been made.
The interior volumes of the family house had been solidified, and as the bricks were
pulled away, sheer concrete walls imprinted with the idiosyncrasies of 100 years of
domestic use were revealed. Soot clung to the bulges that protruded where fireplaces had
once been; lemon paint from a top-floor bedroom clung to one wall, recalling a damaged
fresco. Flexes that had once supplied electricity to switches had left their mark as tiny
recessed spaces embedded in the concrete skin; the light switches themselves had been
reversed and rendered unusable. The social spaces that had once been privy to secrets
and arguments and love and despair had been petrified, making amateur archaeologists
of the onlookers, who could only reconstruct the past uses of each room and stairwell
from the tiny fossilised fragments that were left, captured in the concrete like prehistoric
mosquitoes in resin.
Whiteread and her
assistants working on
HOUSE, 1993 [36]

fq

:
:

$2 53
UNTITLED (HOUSE) 1993 [37]
Commissioned by Artangel
Sponsored by Beck’s

House was in fact the inverse of a house. All that had been air was now solid; few
things that were solid had remained (only the staircases and the wooden floors were left
in place, because Whiteread couldn't find a way to cast the house without them). It was
an uncanny sculpture, having the proportions ofa house, replicating the window frames,
the doors, even the lean-to extension at the back, but in fact presenting everything in
negative; fireplaces were now protrusions, window-frames like shallow crosses etched
into the surface. House offered no way in, and — significantly — no protective roof over
your head, since Whiteread had chosen not to cast the attic space. Instead it had a flat top
cast from the upper-floor ceiling, and House appeared as a white-walled modernist pile,
created from a Victorian terrace that was riddled with the woodworm of history.
During the two-and-a-half months that House stood silently on Grove Road, it
generated an unrelenting storm of media noise. Over 250 newspaper and magazine arti-
cles were written about it, and it was debated everywhere from the House of Commons
to the back of black cabs. Tabloids and broadsheets across Britain carried pictures of it on
their front pages; the local paper the East End Advertiser ran stories every week, from the
vox pop ‘If this is art then I’m Leonardo da Vinci’, to a piece that ran on 13 January 1994,
two days after House was torn down by bulldozers, headlined ‘Bringing the House
down’. The Bow Councillor Eric Flounders pilloried the sculpture in a series of vitriolic
letters to the Independent and elsewhere (which was rather ironic, since he was responsi-
ble for securing the licence for House in the first place). This provoked a counter attack by
campaigners, who presented petitions and proposals to save the sculpture.
On 23 November, the same day that Bow Council made the decision not to grant
House a stay of execution, Whiteread won the Turner Prize. She used her acceptance
speech to condemn the Council’s edict. She was also awarded a £40,000 prize for
‘worst’ artist of the year, an event staged outside the Tate on the night of the Turner
announcement by an attention-seeking group calling itself the K Foundation (comprising
former members of the pop group KLF). Whiteread divided the £40,000 between a fund
for young artists and Shelter, a charity for London’s homeless.
In the end, the relentless campaigning on Whiteread’s behalf paid off, and a month
later Bow Council capitulated and granted an extension to the lease on the site occupied
by House until 12 January 1994. A number of people — from museum directors to collec-
tors to sponsors — had by this point offered to buy House, but Whiteread was adamant H
 Eas
}

emnciternee:

S
fs

&
ee
a
that it shouldn’t be moved. While she had wanted the sculpture to remain in place long
enough for it to become part of the fabric of the neighbourhood, she had always intended
House to be a temporary structure. |
By the time the bulldozers were ordered in on 11 January 1994, House had been seen
by thousands of people from around the world, and discussed by thousands more. From
the outset, Whiteread couldn’t even stand in front of the sculpture for fear of being

the street and peering round a newspaper. House was a mute memorial fortheareaand _
its history, and a tomb that visualised the darker side of domestic life. Butitalsocameto
be a pawn in the political discourse, and was called variously a ‘bunker’, an ‘eyesore’, a
‘mausoleum’, and an ‘exceptional work of art’. It was clever yet simple, amonument to
thoughts and dreams and sensations, a human-sized foil to the faceless scale of Canary
Wharf. And suddenly it was gone.
By the day of the demolition, it was covered in graffiti and beginning to look pretty sad;
birds were living on it.It took three and a half years to develop, four months to make, and )
thirty minutes to demolish.
Now Grove Road is flanked by an unbroken stretch of flat green grass, and House :
exists only in photographs, drawings and the fragments that Whiteread collected from
the ruins. But it also exists in the memories of all who saw or read about it — perhaps the Z
most appropriate site for this silent monument to lost conversations and past lives.
The destruction of
HOUSE, 1993 [38]

ae
UNTITLED (SIX SPACES) 1994 [39]
Resin, six parts
From 42 X 29 X 28.2 to 40 X 48.5 X 41.5
(16 Y, X113/g X11 Yg to 15 3/, 19 Ye
x16 3/g)
Arts Council Collection, Hayward
Gallery, London
 TABLE AND CHAIR (CLEAR) 1994 [40]
Resin
68.6 x 101.6 X 74.9 (27 X 40 X 29 Y,)
Private Collection

ALCHEMY AT WORK

Whiteread had completed her DAAD Scholarship in memorialising sense of immortality she captures, like
the autumn of 1993, but the drawings she made in three-dimensional photographs of time passed by.
Berlin continued to tour after her DAAD Gallery When Whiteread started experimenting with
show closed, first to Cologne and then to her New synthetic resin, it was being used commercially to
York gallery, Luhring Augustine. Simultaneously, a make nothing larger than paperweights. But wanting
retrospective show of her sculpture opened at the to cast the space beneath a table and chair, she
Kunsthalle in Basel, and while it included works for embarked on eight months oflaborious tests, trying
which Whiteread was now internationally famous — to find a way of making the flammable and volatile
Closet, Ether, Untitled (Amber Bed), Untitled (Room), polymer stable enough to use on such a scale. The
photographs of House — the show also included three result was Table and Chair (Clear) (fig.40), first exhib-
new works from 1994, two in rubber and one ina ited at the Kunsthalle in Basel in 1994.
medium new to Whiteread: resin. Whiteread has admitted that resin is a frightening
Whiteread had always been fascinated by different material with which to work, but its unique proper-
materials: their individual properties, transformative ties make it worth the risk. Up until her first resin
abilities, colours and surfaces. She had employed work, all of Whiteread’s sculptures had been opaque,
organic products — wax and rubber, plaster from negotiated from the outside, the scale and surface the
gypsum (a naturally forming calcium sulphate) — and only ways in which to access each piece. Now
explored their transitory capabilities, using them in Whiteread wanted to reveal the interior of each cast
liquefied states to submerge every surface detail in old void, a more complex articulation of space that saw a
furniture, and to bring it back to life once it had hard- simultaneous solidification and yet opening out of the
ened. She had experimented with various types of spaces cast. She had tried to cast from coloured glass,
each material, smearing thick black rubber onto hess- which was similarly translucent when cast in thin
ian-coated beds, layering extra-fine dental plaster on sheets, but as a block, only resin would hold light
mattresses to pick up the surface detail of fabric. inside itself, refracting it to appear as if it were illumi-
Increasingly she sought help from engineers to push nated from within.
each material (and herself) further than it had ever Table and Chair (Clear) is the cast of the space
gone before. Her use of resin continued this interest in under a squarish table and chair. Both objects were
transformative materials that have an innate instabil- cast together, so that the chair form neatly slots into
ity. Starting out as a liquid, the solid resin hints at its own space in the cast from under the table. The
its original properties — in certain lights her resin chair cast is thus a removable block, a cast of a void,
sculptures seem to transform back into a liquid state. that leaves a new void in the larger cast ofavoid. This
The manufactured resin favoured by Whiteread has intricate play on space is further enriched by the
parallels with the tree resin that captured prehistoric glowing solidity afforded by the resin cast. The gently
insects in its sticky ooze, killing them while preserv- sloping sides of the main form are evenly cut into at
ing them, just as a wax death mask preserves a the corners where the legs once were, a frieze-like
simulacrum of life while highlighting death. Again, cornice articulating the top of the sculpture where the
$8 59 death is as much a part of Whiteread’s work as the wooden table-top support had sat.
UNTITLED (SLAB) 1994 [41]
Rubber
20 X76 X 200
(7 7/g X 29 7/g-X 78 3/4)
Private Collection
 TABLE AND CHAIR (GREEN) 1994 [42]
Rubber and polystyrene
68 X 122 X 83 (26 3/, X 48 X 325/g)
Private Collection

The sculpture takes on the appearance of an ancient afterlife. Cast from a rich orange rubber, it was the
temple, a solid windowless Mayan mausoleum or an imprint from the surface of amortuary slab obtained
Egyptian tomb. When the chair is pulled out from by Whiteread three years earlier. When she initially
under the table it reveals an architectonic replica of its cleaned the slab, and removed the plug, she found that
shape, burrowed into the table cast. Like a cavernous it was full of hair, the remnants of many lives that
entrance hall, this shape seems to be guarded by its were already over once they reached this destination.
solid twin as if it were protecting a gateway to the In the sculpture, the inside of the plug now protrudes
spirit world. The inner glow of the resin suggests that upwards, a tiny, hopeless phallic gesture in the fleshy
this is amonumental piece of architecture designed to rubber form, whose scale is based on human dimen-
protect the dead and allow them passage into the sions, and which lies stretched out on the floor, inert
afterlife. The light trapped in the resin also implies and spent. Whiteread has commented that ‘we begin
that the sculpture has a life of its own, the colours to die as soon as we are born’, a statement asserted
within the blocks constantly changing in different by this work, which resembles a golden coffin, or the
lights, flashing green and yellow and white and gold. lid to an ancient sarcophagus, a reminder of our
Despite its domestic scale (it is under a metre high), mortality.
Table and Chair (Clear) transcends its previous every- After making Table and Chair (Clear), Whiteread
day role and becomes part of the same ritualistic clus- started to concentrate solely on chairs, casting several
ter as Ether, Valley and Ghost. But unlike these works, series of spaces from underneath wooden seats of the
where life was notably absent, here its essence has kind found in church halls and schools, old dining
been forced back into the sculpture and appears to rooms and public institutions. Untitled (Six Spaces)
linger in the resin. (fig.39) was the most colourful work that Whiteread
Also in Whiteread’s Basel show were two other had made to date, each uniquely proportioned chair-
new works, both cast in rubber. One of these was space a different shade: indigo, slate, tea, lime, antique
another table and chair in dark green. Whiteread only gold, rose. They were ofa similar height, but as indi-
rarely colours the materials with which she works, vidual as human physiognomy, the top of the broad
preferring their pigmentation to be inherent or come tea-coloured block curving into a smile, the narrow
from the process of making the piece — absorbed from loftiness of the lime space giving it a certain grandeur
the walls in Ghost, dictated by the catalyst in Table like arched eyebrows. Lined up as if for an identity
and Chair (Clear). Table and Chair (Green) (fig.42) parade, the works drew in light from outside their
was no exception; the bottle-green rubber had been forms, and thus started to dissolve from the bottom
coloured at the manufacturing stage, before she up like mirages on a desert plain, palpable memories
purchased it. Now it appeared opaque and robust, the of the past lingering in the present. Whiteread had
resulting sculpture appearing as if it were somehow succeeded in transforming the most mundane object
cast from malachite-edged basalt, its architectonic from our universal daily existence, the seat, into an
form solid, unflinching and timeless. object of beauty and mystery.
The third new work shown was Untitled (Slab) Untitled (Six Spaces) was followed by the watery
60 61 (fig.41), a sculpture that offered less promise of an Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) (fig.43), where the fir
UNTITLED (TWENTY-FIVE SPACES)
1994 [43]
Cast resin (25 blocks)
Each 30 X 30 X 40
(113/, X1913/, X15 3/,)
Queensland Art Gallery
 UNTITLED (RUBBER PLINTH) 1996 [44]
Rubber and polystyrene
68.5 X76 X 86.5 (27 X 297/g X34)
Private Collection

green of an ancient iceberg’s heart gave way to paler gold. For them, this was an eternal material, the high-
imitations so that the clearest blocks replicated the est planetary metal and therefore symbolised by the
dancing light of surface water or melting ice. The sun, the life-giver. Gold meant life, and thus repre-
largest series of ‘spaces’ was finished the following sented a transformation of inanimate into animate
year (1995). One hundred spaces were lined up like material. In this way alchemy replicated Pygmalion’s
miniature regimented troops across the gallery floor, desire to see his sculpture become flesh. The same
the grid-like arrangement reminiscent of a military desire has inspired Gothic writers like Edgar Allan
graveyard, the insubstantial multi-coloured forms Poe and horror-film directors such as Wes Craven and
like souls hovering at knee height as you passed others, who breathed life into dolls or blurred the
among them (see p.7o). boundaries between reality and dream. Whiteread
Whiteread made Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) in has an innate ability to work within this transitional
her studio in Carpenter’s Road, Hackney. Formerly a space where the inanimate comes to life, where mate-
Yardley’s scent factory, it was filled with light. It was rials are transformed and gold results from casts of
this element that was responsible for giving life to materia prima.
these squat forms. Through the casting process that In 1996, Whiteread returned to casting from
Whiteread so carefully controlled to differ the mortuary slabs. But unlike Untitled (Slab) of 1994 or
colouration, she replicated the belief of second- Untitled (Clear Slab) of 1992, the source material for
century alchemists, extolled by Plutarch, that colour these sculptures was not apparent in the final form.
should not be an incidental quality in objects, but an She used two ceramic mortuary slabs to create a
integral part of their nature, an essence emitted by a complicated mould from which she cast rubber
central power. plinths. Created five years before her clear resin
Also in 1995, Whiteread made Untitled (Floor) doppelganger of the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square
(fig.45), a dark-green resin cast that forges further was unveiled, these works were not based on existing
alchemical links. Cast in a similar way to the floor structures. The size and height of the rubber plinths
made for Documenta IX in 1992, it comprised seven replicated that of the ceramic mortuary slabs, but
rows of the spaces from between the joists of a 13- the scalloped sides were designed by Whiteread, who
foot-square floor. In a shaded gallery space it was fabricated a plinth in plaster, took a rubber and fibre-
brooding, dark and secretive, but as soon as sunlight glass mould of it and used it to cast the final rubber
crossed it, it was transformed, the interior lighting up sculptures. Whiteread created a series of plinths,
like a bevelled emerald, flashes of gold and copper including Untitled (Rubber Plinth) and Untitled
glistening on the surfaces that had previously rubbed (Rubber Double Plinth) (figs.44, 46). The rubber is
up against the joists. The uneven surface imprint of pale yellow, the colour of flesh with the blood drained
the rough-grained floorboards danced, and the previ- away. And yeta plinth is traditionally associated with
ously dark spaces were exchanged for the translu- longevity and immortality. It is an architectural dais
cency ofa shallow lake. that raises the subject placed upon it beyond mortal-
The raison d’étre of alchemists was to attempt to ity to look down on the ephemerality of life from a
62 63 transform base materials, the materia prima, into position of permanence. But the subjects who
UNTITLED (FLOOR) 1994-5 [45]
Polyester resin
20.4 X 274.5 X 393 (8 X 108 X 155)
Tate. Purchased 1996
UNTITLED (RUBBER DOUBLE PLINTH) 1996 [46]
Rubber and polystyrene
Two units, each 68.5 x 76 x 86.5 (27 X 29 7/g X34)
Private Collection
UNTITLED (BLACK BATH) 1996 [47]
Pigme ted urethane and urethane
filler
80 X 207 X100
(31% X 81/, X39 3/g
Private Collection
UNTITLED (YELLOW BATH) 1996 [48]
Rubber and polystyrene
80 X 207 X 10
(31, X 81Y, X43 Y,)
Private Collection

informed the scale of these pieces were cadavers. screenprints of three suites of photographs that
In 1996, Whiteread chose to return to another Whiteread had taken around the time that House was
object with which she had previously worked, also completed. In each suite, four time-lapse photographs
connected to death. This time using three different captured the moment when a high-rise block of flats
coloured rubbers, she cast a trio of sculptures from was blown up, leaving a mushroom cloud of dust and
one bathtub, using a larger surrounding mould than smoke where people’s homes once were (fig.49).
before, elevating the bath’s imprint. This time there Whiteread had wanted to record this dramatic deto-
was no sense of a person just departed, no trace of a nation of post-war housing in London’s East End, and
particular body putrefied and present in the form of as with House her work was the only remaining
stains at the bottom of the tub. In these three new evidence that lives had once been lived on each site.
baths Whiteread had created timeless sarcophagi, the The photographs were documents of loss, but they
rubber clean-edged as freshly cut stone, the surface also captured the momentary transformation of all
pristine and unchipped. that was solid being turned into dust-clogged air,
Untitled (Black Bath) (fig.47) looks as if it was great cauliflowers of debris temporarily mimicking
hewn from a coal face in four blocks, traces of pale the cumulus clouds above them before collapsing
minerals seeming to run down each sheer face. As back down to earth, leaving a fog like a pea-souper
with the grandest Egyptian sarcophagi, it is hard to that brought back more distant memories of London’s
peer to the bottom of these human-scaled tombs, industrial past.
such is their scale and bulk. It is as if they have come Shedding Life contained fifteen major works, as
directly from the landscape, as ancient as the earth well as photographs and a film of House, and an addi-
itself, cut from age-old rock and stone. Untitled tional seven sculptures were added when the show
(Orange Bath) has below-the-surface flares of colour, toured to Madrid in 1997. It was a significant reflection
as if cut from the same block of alabaster that Jacob on her career to date, a chance for her to see work
Epstein used for his monumental Jacob and the Angel made over nine years that was now in public and
1940. Untitled (Yellow Bath) (fig.48) seems to have private collections around the world. But one work
been made from costly honeyed marble. And that was included, a model of Whiteread’s competi-
although each sculpture has a polystyrene core tion-winning entry to design a Holocaust memorial
implanted in its centre to reduce its weight, they for Vienna that was due for completion later the same
appear immeasurably heavy, solid and timeless. year, pointed to a fraught and challenging time ahead.
In September 1996, Whiteread held her first major Whiteread won the competition to design a
solo show in a public gallery in Britain, at Tate Holocaust memorial for Vienna’s Judenplatz in
Liverpool. Called Shedding Life, it was a retrospective January 1996, beating an international line-up that
that began with Closet and ended with new work such included Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and the Israeli
as Untitled (Orange Bath) and Untitled (Rubber sculptor Zvi Hecker. Although Whiteread had been
Double Plinth) (fig.46), which showed a renewed invited to take part in the competition, she almost
interest in physical death and destruction. Demolished changed her mind about submitting her proposal —
66 67 1996, included in Shedding Life, was a series of twelve she wasn't Jewish, and had no familial connection
From DEMOLISHED 1996 [49]
Screenprint on paper
49 X 74.3 (19 /, X29 V4)
Tate. Purchased 1996

with the Holocaust. But, drawing on her time spent

on the DAAD Scholarship in Berlin, her visits to
concentration camps, and the overwhelming sense of
history being quietly swept under the carpet that she
had experienced when she lived there, she felt driven
to participate.
Her winning model took the form of a concrete,
windowless library, a pair of panelled double doors
providing the only break in the book-lined walls
(fig.50).. However, the books that filled the shelves
were turned inwards, their spines against the walls,
with only the edges of their pages exposed to view.
65,000 Austrian Jews died as a result of the
Holocaust, and in this library, filled with nameless
volumes, the Jewish people — the People of the Book —
were remembered. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of
Babel, which is infinite and whose volumes are name-
less, this fictional library can only be accessed through
the mind. It can be both personal and collective, the
lack of titles allowing access to anyone — any individ-
ual life could be on the spine of any given book. It isa
memorial to lives lost, designed sympathetically
while retaining a brutal rigour befitting a memorial to
unspeakable loss. But, while it was initially scheduled
to be unveiled in the square in the autumn of1996, it
would take another four years ofbattling to have the
work cast and put in place, due to the volatile politics
of Austria and the scalding debate triggered by the
proposed Memorial (see p.88).
‘
MODEL FOR JUDENPLATZ

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 UNTITLED (ONE HUNDRED SPACES) 1995

In 1995 Whiteread was invited to participate in the Carnegie International, a major trien-
nial exhibition of international art held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. One of the
works she made for the show was Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), a resin piece that
comprised 100 casts of spaces from underneath the seats of old wooden chairs.
Whiteread had been using resin to create work since 1994. She had enlisted the help
of a former chemist from South Africa, who was also a mould maker, but her early exper-
iments with the medium didn’t always go according to plan.
The first piece I made, I set the mould up to cast the table and chair, and Ipoured in the
first layers. When I came back to the studio the next morning the whole thing had just
exploded — fractured like a rock under very high pressure. The heat was extraordinary. I
was very lucky not to have caused a fire.
A lot of the work I do involves pushing materials to the limit. With the resin pieces, the
people I spoke to about the material, the chemists, were saying that the scale of whatI
wanted to do was impossible. The materials were designed for making paperweights, very
small objects. I spent a lot of time figuring out how I could push it. Playing with materials is
very much a part of my ongoing investigation.
After rigorous research into the limits of certain types of resin and catalysts,
Whiteread and her team found a way to cast resin on a scale that had never before been
attempted. The furniture was cast in plaster and then a mould was taken, and the pieces
were finally cast from silicone rubber and fibreglass moulds. Resin was poured in at the
excruciatingly slow pace of 2.5cm a day. This enabled the material to remain stable
instead of overheating and exploding, and —-as Whiteread became more experienced
with using resin — the slow process enabled her to work at minimising the pour lines that
can be seen in Table and Chair (Clear).
The result in Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) is a series of multicoloured jewel-like
blocks that threaten to dissolve in front of your eyes. By using resin, Whiteread yet again
confounded visual expectations. The blocks appear insubstantial, composed of coloured
light or at most a form of jelly that has been cajoled into occupying a rough cuboid form
for just a few moments. Each block is a different colour, from the milky blue of Venetian
canals to the bottle green of dense forests. Some are cloudy like jellyfish, others sparkle as
if sunlight is lighting on the crests of tiny waves; all of them change colour in different
lights and from different angles. They are as individual as people, some squat and broad
and dark, others taller and paler. The chair may have gone, but it has left behind these
iridescent spaces as if they are the memories of the people who once sat above them.
UNTITLED (ONE HUNDRED
SPACES) 1995 [51]
Installation view, Carnegie
Museum ofArt, Pittsburgh
Resin, 100 units
Dimensions variable
Private Collection
 Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) is probably the most colourful sculpture I ever made.
It was a series of 100 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
colour without using any pigment. It was a very complicated thing to do. It is about a kind
of purity, I suppose, in material. I know the colour’s there and Ican work with it.
Because the resin maintains its translucency even when cast on sucha scale, the
actual volume of each cast remains visible. With Whiteread’s plaster casts, the back of
each sculpture could only be viewed by circumnavigating the work, and the internal
volume could never be seen. It was all about the surface, the interface between the object
and the material.
There is a difference in the way the resin pieces are made. They re built up slowly. The
resin blocks are very thick. When looking at the pieces one experiences a strange sense of
being visually drawn into the dense matter, whereas the plaster pieces are very much to do
with the surface.
In Untitled (One Hundred Spaces), while these surface anomalies are still present —
the recessed bars between the legs wonky and chipped, the seat of the chair not quite
level — they are no longer visually dominant, and the eye is drawn into the material,
moving around inside the resin as if feeling the space from the inside, the back and side
faces of the form visible simultaneously.
Although Whiteread is the first artist to have used resin to cast the space underneath
the seat of a chair, she is not the first to have cast this space. In the 1960s, while still a
student, Bruce Nauman created a small series of works that investigated hidden space.
He cast the space under a chair, the space under his hand as he wrote his name, the space
between two boxes on the floor. His work was intentionally anti-Minimalist (the domi-
nant art form of the day) and provocative. It shunned the Minimalists’ industrial materi-
als and the rigorous grid that informed their work; it dealt with the body and its messy
and moveable place in the world. While Nauman quickly moved on from this line of
casting, his A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1965-8) has often been discussed in
relation to Whiteread’s work. And Whiteread did see Nauman’s chair piece when she
herself was a student.
I'd actually forgotten that I'd seen the piece by Nauman at a show that Nick Serota
curated for the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London many years before. Ijust hadnt really
noticed Nauman’s piece at the time. I think I used the space under chairs for all sorts of
other reasons. For me, it was a step to making an absent place for one person — or in the
case of One Hundred Spaces, an audience ofpeople. _
 Nevertheless, when she was asked to participate in the Carnegie International, she
felt the need to deal with the persistent reported link between her work and his. By cast-
ing the chair spaces in resin, not plaster, Whiteread distanced herself from direct
comparisons with Nauman’s cast, while still acknowledging the visual connection.
When I made Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) it was actually about confronting
Nauman. I had to do it, and when I was invited to be in the Carnegie itfelt like the right
place to do it. Ultimately, I think that my work is more physiological, and Nauman’s more
psychological, conceptual. My works are very much connected with the body and with the
human touch. Whether it’s my touch, or someone else’s, or a whole family’s touch, they re
about a piece offurniture that has been used.

72 73
UNTITLED (ONE HUNDRED
SPACES) 1995 [52]
UNTITLED (PAPERBACKS) 1997 [53] UNTITLED (TEN TABLES) 1996 [54]
Installation in progress Plaster
72.5 X 293.5 X 478 (28 5/g X15 5/g X 188 3/g)
Yale Center for British Art

PAPERBACK SCULPTOR

Whiteread’s ongoing meetings with the Austrian to age, like the spotting found in old books or mould
government and Viennese local council regarding her on walls. :
proposed Holocaust memorial started her thinking Untitled (Ten Tables) is above all architectural in its
about tables again. As she attended meeting after form. Although just over seventy centimetres high, it
meeting in Vienna, held around endless board- and has the monumentality of an Atlantic Wall bunker.
committee-room tables, she began to see new possi- With no side openings it appears windowless, turned
bilities. Instead of choosing hand-me-down domestic in on itself, protecting the internal void. Even the
furniture, she picked the standard table of the office indents on the top appear like archers’ slits in castle
and classroom, its symmetrical form designed to walls, the minimum risk for maximum damage. Or
function on its own or grouped together. For the sculpture could be the excavated foundations of
Whiteread, the table was no longer specific. tied to some vast fortress, solid, unbreachable, the spaces
home-spun memories, but utilitarian and ahistoric. where the legs once were now mysterious holes for
From these bland, bureaucratic tables Whiteread missing beams to take the building upwards. This
cast Untitled (Ten Tables) in 1996 (fig.54). The result isn’t the small garrison of Fort, but a vast and faceless
was an almost-abstract interlinked puzzle. The casts citadel, the centre of power.
of a geometric office table were arranged into a larger Untitled (Ten Tables) was one of eight works that
rectangular form, a central void penned in by nose-to- Whiteread chose to show in 1997, when she repre-
tail casts. These solid blocks were punctuated by diag- sented Britain at the world’s longest-running and
onal holes where the legs once were, and by the shal- most prestigious international art Biennale in Venice,
low imprint of the horizontal struts that had held the and where she was awarded the prize for best young
table-top in place. The infinite circling pattern made artist. (She was also the first woman to have a solo
by these reiterated forms had strong associations with show in the British Pavilion.) While Untitled (Ten
the futile discussions that are often conducted over Tables) occupied the central gallery, and referenced
similar tables. Bureaucracy was revealed for what it the endless battle to install the Holocaust Memorial, it
often is —a stubborn blocking of new ideas, an endless was Untitled (Paperbacks) (figs.53,55) that visually
round of repetitive and often pointless conversations. connected with her proposed Viennese sculpture. As
Whiteread’s work may have moved on technically the Holocaust Memorial project was increasingly
and conceptually, as she dealt with increasingly delayed, Whiteread began making other works that
complex moulds and transcended the early domestic were based on books.
connections made by her work, but in terms of mate- In the Holocaust Memorial, the books that line the
rials she had returned to using plaster from which she walls are positive casts of wooden replicas, but in
cast her first postgraduate work. But now the plaster early test pieces Whiteread had experimented with
was no longer picking up scuffs and chips or frag- casting from real books, ripping them out of the plas-
ments of paint. In Untitled (Ten Tables) the edges ter to leave ripple-edged gaps. Whiteread’s first
of the cast are crisp and sharp, the surface imprinted sculpture made in this way was Untitled (Three
only with a fine nondescript grain. A faint sepia Shelves) (fig.56), completed in 1995, when she was
76 77 mottling that runs over the top of each cast alludes putting together her proposal for the competition.
 UNTITLED (PAPERBACKS) 1997 [55] UNTITLED (THREE SHELVES) 1995 [5€
Installation at the Venice Biennale Plaster, three units
Plaster and steel 23 X65 X16 (9 X 25 5/g X6¥/,)
Dimensions variable Private Collection
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Agnes Gund and Committee on
Painting and Sculpture Funds

Books have always been a means of communication, a if the books had gone, but a ghostly after-image was
store of the history of the world passed down from recreating the library for you one last time.
generation to generation. Throughout time, when Looking at this installation, it became clear that
cities were conquered by invaders, libraries such as thousands of books had been used to create the work,
the Great Library at Alexandria were burnt downina begging the question: where were they now? What
symbolic gesture that emphasised the fact that the had they been about? With the realisation that so
past had gone and the future had arrived. The Nazis many books had been destroyed to make the piece
torched hundreds of thousands of books that came a sharp sense of melancholy that so much
disagreed with the way in which they believed society knowledge had been irrevocably lost. Like the post-
should. operate. Destroy historic records, they war wardrobe destroyed to make Closet, and the
reasoned, and you destroy history itself, an approach Victorian terraced home taken down brick by brick to
that Orwell parodied in 1984, in which books create House, the books used to make Untitled
are constantly amended in line with the dominant (Paperbacks) no longer exist. And these particular
political party’s ever-changing ideological agenda. volumes — cheap paperbacks that entertained a previ-
Whiteread’s sculptures connect with this loaded ous generation — will never be made again.
history of the book. At the back of the British Pavilion, Whiteread
In Untitled (Three Shelves), the books have disap- installed a work from 1995. Untitled (Resin Corridor)
peared. Carefully arranging second-hand paperbacks — comprises nine short resin blocks. These are the
sci-fis and James Bond novels, dog-eared and yellow- colour of a Venetian canal in shadow, blue-green and
ing — on polystyrene shelves, she then covered them slightly cloudy, an internal milkiness that turns
with plaster. When it had solidified, the shelves and almost white when sunlight strikes it. Running in
books were physically torn out of the plaster. This parallel with the canal behind the pavilion, they gave
very physical act of removal left traces of what once the impression that water had somehow been arrested
were pages scored into the surface, fragments of print mid-flow, hovering in the gallery space in a state of
embedded, the colour from the books seeping into the transmutation, not ice but water suspended in stasis.
plaster. Water has always held a certain fascination for
While Untitled (Three Shelves) was relatively Whiteread — she has cast sinks and baths, and deter-
modest in scale, resembling a small set of bookshelves minedly experimented with resin to replicate a
in a student’s bedroom, Untitled (Paperbacks) was a watery translucency. As a compound, water can exist
full-scale home library. This work was installed in a in all three states — gas, liquid and solid — and this
windowless room in the British Pavilion, the entire sense of imminent transformation is something that
wall-space lined with casts of shelves and books. It Whiteread has tried to recreate in many of her works
was hard to work out whether this work was positive by using unstable or changeable materials. It is not
or negative — you could see the irregular, recessed surprising, therefore, that when she was offered the
voids left by the removed books, yet the solid block chance to create a temporary public sculpture in New
representing the cast space above them seemed to be York, she chose to tackle this element head-on by
the shelf for the books on the tier above. It appeared as casting a water tower. Whiteread had been offered the
WATER TOWER 1998 [57]
West Broadway and Grand Street
New York
Resin cast of the interior ofa
wooden water tank
304.4 X 243.8 (134 x 96)
A project of Public Art Fund, New
York
 opportunity to create a work in New York by the that still lived in the present, although it was one that
Public Art Fund just six months after she had was about to expire as New York’s plumbing finally
completed House. She was very reluctant to take on moved on.
another public commission, but she flew to New York But casting a wooden barrel that was 12-foot high
to talk about it in the autumn of 1994, and used the and 9 foot in diameter was not an easy matter, partic-
opportunity to explore the city. ularly as nothing that big had ever been made in resin
In 1973 Gordon Matta-Clark created a work called before. It took almost four years for Whiteread’s idea
Reality Properties: Fake Estates, a series of photo- to become reality, a time in which she had to find a
graphs and inventories that documented the $25 lots suitable site, an available water tower, an engineer and
of land he had bought at auction. These were the sliv- insurer who would share her faith that such a cast
ers of space left over between properties, inaccessible could and should be made, and a type of resin that
slices of New York. Similarly, when Whiteread first could rise to the challenge. When the water tower had
walked round New York looking for a site, it was the been found, dismantled and dried out to ensure that
abandoned fragments of land between buildings that no water was left in the wood (it would have reacted
interested her most. But she soon realised that in a with the resin’s catalyst and turned the cast cloudy), it
city as vertical as New York, she couldn’t hope to was reassembled, and four-and-a-half tons of liquid
compete with the architecture on street level. It took a resin were pumped in over twelve hours. Despite the
trip to the Brooklyn side of Manhattan Bridge, which fact that the mould cracked, and Whiteread and a
offered a skyline of Manhattan punctuated by thou- team of volunteers had to spend three weeks chis-
sands of cylindrical water towers, to work out what to elling the cast back into shape, it was finally lifted into
do. She decided to cast the inside of a full-size water place in June 1998, and remained there for two years.
tower in clear, colourless resin, positioning it back on As always, Whiteread kept tight control over how
the metal frame that had supported the original her work was seen. She refused to allow Water Tower
wooden tank (figs.58—9). Placed in a semi-hidden to be lit, so that with the setting sun it became little
location on top of a seven-storey brownstone in more than a memory until the following day. She also
SoHo, it would be the antithesis of House by virtue of refused to let it leave New York. A collector in Los
its barely-there appearance. It would engage with the Angeles was keen to buy it when it came down, but
skyline of New York and the other weathered water Whiteread was adamant — the water tower was
towers that stood nearby, accidentally discovered by indigenous to New York, and so the sculpture should
passers-by. remain there. (It was subsequently bought by the
Since the nineteenth century and until very Museum of Modern Art.)
recently, these external water towers were found on In Water Tower, Whiteread appeared to have solid-
top of every building in Manhattan, and had remained ified the water that once occupied the cedar tank, a
virtually unchanged. They were integral to the daily solid block of translucent clear resin shimmering on a
events of life, providing the water for washing and metal truss above a building as if it had suddenly been
drinking, cooking and cleaning. Like the Victorian shorn of its container and still hovered in place. Under
terrace in London, they represented a piece of history the hot summer sun it glowed like an apparition,
80 81
WATER TOWER 1997 [58]
Varnish, ink, collage on graph paper
149.9 X 213.4 (59 X 84)

The Museum of Modern Art, New

York

}
|
{
WATER TOWER 1997 [59]
Correction fluid ” varnish, ink on
graph paper
149.9 X 213.4 (59 X 84)
The Museum of Modern Art, New
York

”
UNTITLED (DOUBLE) 1998 [60]
Plaster and polystyrene
72.1 X 228.9 X 65.1
(28 3/g X 90 Vg X 25 5/g)
Private Collection
 UNTITLED (ROUND TABLE) 1998 [61]
Plaster and polystyrene
70 X120 X 120 (27 Y, X 471/, X 47 V,)
Private Collection

a blue-tinged impossibility against a clear sky. When quieter than a library, the plaster muffling footsteps.
the clouds rolled over, it all but disappeared, and at No books could be taken off the shelves to be read at
night it was cloaked in darkness. home; no librarian was needed to date-stamp them. It
In a book that accompanied the project, Whiteread was a Marie Celeste ofa library, a relic in which all the
included a range of photographs that she described as pages had turned to dust and just the white skeleton
source material. Water, in all its guises, was the of the spaces above and below them was left. Only the
common theme - clouds, steam from city grates, trace of afew page-edge indexes gave any indication
crystallised patterns of snowflakes, rain, tornadoes, as to the type of books they had once been. The
Niagara Falls and icebergs. She also showed how millions of words that had formed the books from
water can appear to bend objects through refraction, which she cast had been destroyed in the process of
its transformative power not just restricted to its own their removal from the plaster.
properties but also changing those of things around it. Other smaller book pieces were included in the
Pictures of ectoplasm and spiritual happenings run show. Untitled (Fiction) (fig.63) comprised three
alongside those of water, a further indication that the empty shelf-like forms reminiscent of her first book
way in which the tower disappeared and reappeared piece. But unlike the bleached plaster of Untitled
was an integral part of the work. It was a ghost ofits (Three Shelves), Untitled (Fiction) is as colourful as a
former self, inaccessible to the public (who could only Paul Klee watercolour. Whiteread used the absorbent
view it from the ground) and liable to vanish from properties of wet plaster to suck the colour from
sight at any moment. cheap novels, whose edges were tinted canary yellow,
Eighteen months before Water Tower was cerise, turquoise. Like the 1950s stain paintings of
‘installed, towards the end of 1996, Whiteread American artist Morris Louis, the colour became part
changed her London dealer. Previously she had been of the support, in this instance the plaster. Bands of
represented by Karsten Schubert, and her early colour lie in the plaster, resembling layers of sedi-
commercial shows in London had been held at his ment, each absorbed at different rates like a scientific
first-floor gallery on Foley Street. But in October 1996 chromatography test; yellow rises the furthest, while
she moved to the Anthony d’Offay Gallery on Dering pink and blue barely leave the edges where the books
Street, and in October 1998 she held her first solo once lay. As with all scientific tests, Whiteread had to
show there. work hard to ensure that the conditions were just
The largest work in the show was Untitled (Book right — if the books and plaster connected at the wrong
Corridors) (fig.64). If Untitled (Paperbacks) had been a time, the transference of colour would not take place.
domestic library, Untitled (Book Corridors) repre- Whiteread’s solo show at the Anthony d’Offay
sented a public one. Back-to-back shelves that reached Gallery was held as her Holocaust Memorial floun-
above head height ran in narrow rows down the dered on the table in Vienna. The frustration caused
width of the gallery. The books had been ripped out to by the endless delays and hurdles placed before her
leave repeated patterns of white spaces like empty was evident in her book pieces, which by the time the
tombs, and there was an uncanny silence as you Holocaust Memorial was unveiled in 2000 had
walked up and down the tightly packed rows. It was become increasingly violent in their manufacture.
UNTITLED (ELONGATED PLINTHS)
1998 [62]
Plastic and urethane foam (three
elements)
Overall dimensions: 67.3 X 376.6 X 221
(26 ¥, X148 Y, X 87)
Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Foundation Purchase 1999
UNTITLED (FICTION) 1997 [63]
Plaster, polystyrene and steel
97-5 X 193.5 X 25-5 (38 3/g X721/, X10)
Private Collection

Whiteread had been asked to relocate her proposed

Holocaust Memorial to another square out of the old
Jewish quarter. But her sculpture had been conceived
in response to the very specific site of the Judenplatz,
and she refused. As Richard Serra had said before he
lost the battle in 1989 to keep Tilted Arc (his most
famous public sculpture) in place in the Federal Plaza
in New York: ‘to move the work is to destroy the
work’. Whiteread held her ground, and the project
finally progressed, one step closer to its inauguration.
During 1998 and 1999, Whiteread continued the
investigation of plinths that she had started in 1996.
Untitled (Elongated Plinths) 1998 (fig.62) was also
shown at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery. Three pale
plastic forms stretched along the ground, the length of
bodies, like coffins sealed in wax, a site of death as
well as immortality. The following year she made
Untitled (Pair), again using mortuary slabs to create
the work; this time a simple concave slab created the
smooth plaster top of one, reversed on the other to
form a subtly convex shape.
In October 2000, Whiteread’s Holocaust Mem-
orial, her first permanent public sculpture, was finally
unveiled in Vienna’s Judenplatz. It had taken five
years from winning the competition to its inaugura-
tion, and she had had to fight every step of the way.
But while the finishing touches were being made to
this memorial, Whiteread was suffering more frus-
tration with regard to another public sculpture,
Monument, a temporary work made for the empty
fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
Overall dimensions: 222 X 427 X §23
g X 168 Vs X 205 7/g)
Private Collection

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HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL 1995-2000

This extract is taken from an interview by Craig Houser, published in the catalogue for
Whiteread’s 2001 Guggenheim exhibition, Transient Spaces.

CRAIG HousER In October 2000, after five years in the making, your Holocaust Memorial
was finally unveiled in Vienna’s Judenplatz, which is largely a residential square.
For the project, you created a single room lined with rows and rows of books, all of it
rendered in concrete. There is a set of closed double doors in front, and the names of the
concentration camps where Austrian Jews died are listed on the platform surrounding
the memorial. The piece is located near the Holocaust Museum in Misrachi Haus, and
sits to one side of the Judenplatz, directly above the archaeological site of a medieval
synagogue. How did you get involved in the project, and what was on your mind as
you created the piece?

RACHEL WHITEREAD When I came back from Berlin [after an eighteen-month DAAD schol-
arship there], Iwas asked to make a proposal for the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna.
I had never been to Austria, and I looked at this project and thought, very innocently,
that Vienna would be an equivalent to Berlin, and it would be an interesting place to
try to make a memorial to such atrocities.
In Berlin, I did a lot of reading. I also went outside the city and visited some concen-
tration camps and thought long and hard about what had happened and how people
have dealt with the Holocaust. I was very interested in the psychology of that experi-
ence, and the repercussions of it within the city.
When I went to Vienna, I didn’t realise that the politics would be so different from
the politics in Berlin. And I didn’t think for a moment that my proposal would
actually be chosen.

cH Why was that?

rw There were twelve to fifteen international artists and architects who had been asked
to submit proposals, and I was a baby compared to most of them. In the end, I was
selected, which was a mixed blessing. It entailed five years of very, very difficult
problems — with the city, the bureaucracy, and the politics. Luckily, |worked with
some really great architects there; if it wasn’t for them, I probably would have been
crushed by the whole experience and might have just given up. I can’t say I enjoyed
 making the piece at all, though I’m very proud that it’s there.

cH In making the casts of books

for the memorial, you did it differently from most of your
other book pieces. Instead of doing negative casts — showing the space around the books
— you created positive casts. The leaves of the books protrude toward the viewer, and we
end up seeing what appears to be a library from the outside. What is the significance of
these positive casts?

rw When I was making this piece, I was thinking about how it might be vandalised, how
it could be used without being destroyed, and how it should be able to live with some
dignity in the city ... 1knew my piece was going to be a memorial, and I wasn’t quite
sure if it would be respected. So I made replaceable book pieces that are bolted from
the inside, and a series of extra pieces to serve as replacements if necessary, in case
there is some terrible graffiti.

cH So the reason for creating positive casts was a means to overcome the threat of
vandalism.

rw They are also much easier to read as a series of books, and I didn’t want to make some
thing completely obscure. Imean, some people already think it’s an abstract block that
they can’t really understand; others think it’s an anonymous library. It also looks quite
like a concrete bunker.

cH The bunker is a means ofprotecting oneself. I see the piece as a metaphor for protection
on many levels.

rw I wanted to make the piece in such a way that all the leaves of the books were facing
outward and the spines were facing inward, so that you would have no idea what the
actual books were.

cH Why did you want to hide the names and titles of the books?

rwI don’t think that looking at memorials should be easy. You know, it’s about looking:
it’s about challenging; it’s about thinking. Unless it does that, it doesn’t work.
cH The library you've created seems institutional. The books are all the same size, placed
in neat, even rows, and they fill the walls side to side. They look systematised.

rw The original books for the cast were made from wood, so they are completely
systematised.

cH So nothing was ever really ‘documented’.

rw No. There’s nothing real about that piece at all, in a way. The doors were constructed;
I constructed the ceiling rose. It’s all about the idea of a place. Rather than an actual
room, it’s based on the idea of a room in one of the surrounding buildings. It was
about standing in a domestic square amidst very grand buildings, and thinking about
what the scale of aroom might be in one of those buildings. I didn’t ever want to try
to cast an existing building.

cH Other art and architectural projects related to the Holocaust were created at the same
time as yours. Does your piece relate to Micha Ullman’s Bibliothek, 1996, a memorial
against Nazi book burnings in Berlin? Or Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, 1997
in Berlin?

rw No. In terms of other works, I actually think the memorial has far more in common
with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. When I was think-
ing about making the Holocaust Memorial, I spent a week there, and visited Lin’s
memorial twice. I wasn’t interested in the politics related to the monument, but the
way people who are alive today respond to it, reacting to something that may be
within their history or within their own family’s history. Lin’s piece showed incredi-
ble sensitivity and maturity.
When I visited concentration camps, I was more interested in how people responded
to the camps than in the actual places. I spent a lot of time just watching people. I
watched kids picnicking on the ovens, and other people stricken with grief. I saw
grandparents with their grandchildren, having the most appalling experiences, trying
to somehow tell this younger generation about the past.
 cH So now that the memorial is completed, how has it been received?

rw I’m very surprised. It’s actually very moving how people have reacted to it. I had
expected graffiti, but people have been leaving candles, stones and flowers on the
memorial. I think it’s already become a ‘place of pilgrimage’. People come into the city
and go to Judenplatz specifically to see the memorial, the museum in Misrachi Haus,
and the excavations of the medieval synagogue underneath the square. If I’ve in any
way touched people, or affected a certain political force in Austria, I’m very proud to
have done that.

92 93
HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
1995/2000 [65]
Judenplatz, Vienna
Mixed media
390 X 752 X1058
(153 5/g X 296 V,X416 7/g)
 =
eee

AE
ee

maa
mea | HA

ee
mon IAT
oo
mens i
mem
MONUMENT 2001 [66]
Trafalgar Square, London
Resin and granite
900 X 510 X 240
(354 5/g X 200 7/g X 941)
Private Collection
 HOME TRUTHS

As Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial was finally lar bronze lions. Whiteread was initially sceptical
unveiled, her series of bookshelves and libraries came about putting a sculpture in the square, but after
to an end. Some of her pent-up frustration had been spending a day observing comings and goings in the
dissipated by the physical action required to tear the area, she began to see the plinth as a formally interest-
books from their plaster moulds. Towards the end of ing piece of architecture, a foil to the busy transitory
the series she had started using hardback books, as in nature of the square that at that time functioned as a
Untitled (2000) (fig.68), that required even more glorified roundabout.
brute strength to remove them, often leaving torn Whiteread’s sculpture was the third and final work
shards of covers and pages still embedded. There is to appear on the plinth, and followed Mark
something geological about these late shelf pieces. In Wallinger’s life-size statue of Christ, Ecce Homo, and
Untitled (Library) (fig.67), 1999, the more rigid spines Bill Woodrow’s large bronze tree, Regardless of
of the original hardback books have left a distinct History. After studying the pace oflife in the square,
outline written into the plaster, like the crumbling Whiteread wanted to create a ‘pause’, a quiet
edge of a cliff-face or cave entrance. The plaster hangs moment. The empty plinth already had a certain grav-
in calligraphic stalactites, as if the words from the itas of itsown, so Whiteread used its muted monu-
books have been transformed over time into script- mentality to create her work, an eleven-and-a-half
like loops and whorls that now hang over the void left tonne cast of clear resin that replicated the plinth
by the books themselves. itself, aping its dimensions — 9 x 5.1 x 2.4 metres — but
As Whiteread was bringing this series of sculp- presenting it as a reflection ofitself. It was as ifagiant
tures to a close, she was working on a large resin cast mirror had been placed on top of the plinth, reflective
for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square (fig.66). side down, and you stared up at a reversed copy ofit,
Though it was called Monument, the work was every- seemingly palpable but ultimately an illusion.
thing a monument was not — it was temporary, non- Since it is a listed monument (paradoxically, given
specific and near-transparent. It was a ghostly reflec- that it has never been occupied), Whiteread was
tion of the plinth, a doppelganger of the architecture unable to cast directly from the plinth. She therefore
that had been designed to showcase bronze statues of had to build a replica and create a mould from this. It
war heroes, not a replica of itself. was the largest artificial resin cast ever made, and
The fourth plinth series of temporary public sculp- Whiteread used all her experience gained from cast-
tures was suggested by the Royal Society for the ing Water Tower in 1998 not only to convince engi-
Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce neers and fabricators that the cast was possible, but to
(RSA) to fill the plinth that had remained vacant ensure that the sculpture didn’t crack or shrink as it
throughout its 158-year existence. The other three was created. The mould alone took four months to
plinths hold bronze statues of King George IV, make, and with the research and development that
General Charles Napier and General Henry Havelock, went into casting the sculpture, it was delayed by
and all four were part of Charles Barry’s design for the almost a year. But in June 2001 it was unveiled, and
square in 1841. They are dwarfed by the vertiginous remained on the plinth for five months.
96 97 Nelson’s Column, flanked by Edwin Landseer’s popu- Monument replicated the horizontal blocks of the
UNTITLED (LIBRARY) 1999 [67]
Plaster, polystyrene and steel
368 X 530.6 x 244.5 (145 X 209 X 96 Y,)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund,
2000
UNTITLED 2000 [68]
Plaster, polystyrene and steel
92 X 120 X 22 (36/,X 471/, X 85/g)
Private Collection

a3
ea
Mil Lan é
em ME ao ns Pst
UNTITLED (CAST IRON FLOOR) 2001
[69]
Cast iron.and black patina, 99 units
Overall dimensions: 1X 502 X 4n
(8g X1973/, X1617/g)
Private Collection
 Carl Andre
STEEL ZINC PLAIN 1969 [70]
Steel and zinc plates
9 x 184x184 (3x72, X72)
Tate. Presented by Janet Wolfson
de Botton 1996

original plinth, its indentations and cornice-like the entrance to the first gallery, hoping that visitors
edges, yet it was transparent and seemingly light as would walk on it before they realised it was there. She
opposed to solid stone, as if it were made of ice or air. had been investigating the space beneath our feet
It was a positive recreation of the plinth on which it throughout the 1990s, in her series of casts of the
stood (rather than a negative cast like the one she had spaces under and over floorboards. But since 1999 she
made inside the water tower) but it had been inverted; had been casting floors in bronze and iron, creating
instead of tapering towards the top, as the plinth did, metal prints of the inverted surfaces of tiled rooms
it defied gravity, gently swelling as it rose away from and wooden floors, such as Untitled (Cast Corridor)
its solid twin. In Monument, Whiteread has seem- 2000 (fig.71). The first work in this vein was Untitled
ingly frozen the air above the original plinth and (Bronze Floor) 1999-2000, supposedly made for the
forced us to consider the two objects — the historic Haus der Kunst in Munich to inaugurate its new
piece of the square’s furniture alongside the translu- building. Whiteread took a print of the old gallery’s
cent resin replica —as one. The fabric of the city could floor, and relocated it to the new one, transferring
be seen through its sheer walls, while it seemed to seventy years’ worth of marks and scratches in the
dissolve in front of your eyes, as ephemeral as a original stone floor to the pristine new space. The
dream. To make eleven-and-a-half tonnes of resin bronze surface was treated with a wax-based patina,
appear as a mere echo of something solid was a grand and the public was invited to walk across it. As in
illusion. Monument spoke of our fascination with Untitled (Cast Iron Floor), this surface subsequently
immortality, of the desire to live forever. It was a rubs off over time to reveal the tiny protrusions that
confluence of Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo: our egotisti- have been created by negative casting. Where
cal ambition to see ourselves immortalised on a hammers were dropped from ladders, or furniture
pedestal alongside the generals, translated into a scored grooves in the floor, the reversed-out indents
ghostly sculptural echo of ourself. Yet in its form it stood proud of the overall surface.
appeared coffin-like, a glass tomb akin to Lenin’s, a Initially, Whiteread’s metal floors seem to have
mausoleum worthy of another Victorian construct of much in common with Carl Andre’s series of floor
immortality, Highgate cemetery. pieces from the 1960s. But while his smooth tessella-
Two weeks after the sculpture was unveiled, tions of bronze and copper speak physically about
Whiteread’s first solo show in a public London gallery form and weight and the charged air above them,
opened at the Serpentine. Unlike her exhibition at Whiteread’s floors are imprinted with past life. With
Tate Liverpool in 1996, she did not use this opportu- each footstep that falls on them they continue
nity solely to look back on her career, but presented to develop, a little more of the specific history of
new work in two of the four main gallery spaces. At each floor shining through, buffed to a sheen like
the entrance to the Serpentine Gallery, the smooth the hands and faces of religious statues touched
parquet had been partially covered with a series of a thousand times.
slightly uneven, wobbly cast-iron squares, the dark Whiteread’s other major new work in the
surface marked out like floor tiles. Whiteread deliber- Serpentine exhibition filled the central atrium. It was
ately placed Untitled (Cast Iron Floor) 2001 (fig.69) in a cast of a staircase, Untitled (Upstairs) (see p.110).
UNTITLED (CAST CORRIDOR) 2000
[71]
Cast iron (24 units)
Overall dimensions: 1.5 X 226 X 405
(3/, x 89 X159 2)
Private Collection
Like corridors, staircases are places of transit, non- terracotta floor of the synagogue; Untitled (Upstairs)
places where you rarely pause. But Whiteread had from the staircase leading up to the first-floor apart-
started to pause there herself, to look at these spaces ments. Whiteread also cast the other two concrete
that others took for granted, to access routes that were staircases that she found in the building (figs.72-3), as
never noticed. She had once again chosen to map the well as each apartment in its entirety.
overlooked, and now -— for the first time — she had Since the day in 1990 when Whiteread had entered
used her own home as subject matter. Both Untitled her studio and, looking at Ghost, realised that she had
(Cast Iron Floor) and Untitled (Upstairs) were cast become the wall, she had thought about how to reveal
from a disused synagogue in Bethnal Green in East the wall space to the viewer. In House, the internal
London, which Whiteread and her partner Marcus walls had remained to support the sculpture; in
Taylor bought in 1999 to convert into studios and a Untitled (Room) they had been removed, so that the
home. It was a building rich in history. Although resulting cast functioned like Ghost, positioning the
located in an area that was once the heart of the Jewish viewer on the outside looking in. But with her casts
community in London, the synagogue started out as a of the two apartments in the synagogue, Untitled
Baptist church. The synagogue, built in the early (Apartment) and Untitled (Rooms), Whiteread finally
1900s, was bombed in 1941, and the present brick- found a way of revealing the slim spaces that
built synagogue reconstructed in 1957, but since the divide bathrooms from kitchens, bedrooms from
1970s it had been used as a textiles warehouse. When neighbours.
Whiteread received the keys, musty rolls of spangly _ The two flats had been shoehorned into the syna-
fabric and patterned silks filled the ground floor. She gogue, and were very basic, comprising a series of
spent a month going through them and getting to small rooms linked together by a narrow corridor.
know the building, reading its past through its They reflected the economic hardship of post-war life
contents and surface detail. in the East End, and had been unoccupied for decades
As Whiteread soaked in the history she had inher- when Whiteread first saw them. She cast them in
ited — the central hall with its Star-of-David stained plasticised plaster, a robust material with the tough-
glass and its chandeliers, the two cramped apartments ness of fibreglass, and the blank release agent she used
that once belonged to the Rabbi and caretaker, the meant that the final sculptures showed little trace of
narrow stairs down to the basement — she started to the lives that had once been lived out within each
think about the logistics of taking casts from a build- space. With these casts, Whiteread wasn’t focussing
ing that she was soon going to renovate and change. on her own life or the lives of those who once lived
The casts she took in the first year she was there, there, but on the physical space of the rooms in rela-
beforethe building was refurbished, were to become tion to each other and to us. Each is a sealed chamber,
her record of the building’s past. Like photographs or with no gaps between the panelled sections in which
prints that she could archive, they would allow the they were made, the ceilings cast to ensure no way in
history of the building to live on long after the flats or out. Between them is a slender void, a wall of air
had been removed, and her own apartment installed that slices between the solid forms. Here, electric
there. Untitled (Cast Iron Floor) was taken from the sockets and skirting can be glimpsed, the only block-
UNTITLED (BASEMENT) 2001 [72]
Mixed media
325 X 658 x 367 (128 X 259 X 144 Y,)
Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin

104 105
UNTITLED (STAIRS) 2001 [73]
Mixed media
375 X 550 X 200
(147 5/g X 216 Y, X 86 5/g)
Tate. Purchased with funds provided
by the National Art Collections Fund
and Tate Members 2003
 age between each room caused by the casting of the from top to bottom. Stairs are not places in which you
space between the doorframes. In this complex exten- can be passive and stationary, but are sites of move-
sion of all Whiteread’s architectural work from the ment and dynamism, diagonals of space that cut
1990s in which voids became solid, we are not the through a building, linking floors and people. They do
wall, but we can see the wall; here, solids also become not exist in their own right, but are connectors, frag-
tangible voids. ments of a building that offer transition rather than
Untitled (Apartment), along with Untitled (Base- finality.
ment) (fig.72) — a cast of one of the three staircases in Whiteread cast the three staircases in panels. All
the building — was exhibited for the first time in three stairwells were topped and tailed with doors,
Berlin. Whiteread had been offered a solo show at the allowing her to tie off each sculpture at both ends. For
Deutsche Guggenheim that was to tour subsequently the first time, Whiteread used scale models to grasp
to the Guggenheim in New York. Both galleries have how each solidified space would look, turning them
very distinctive architecture, to which Whiteread over to alter their shape and function, working out
initially felt that she should respond. But she realised how the final sculptures should be positioned. In
that her own architecture would form a counterpoint doing so, she moved away from presenting casts of
to the grandeur of each site, and her casts from the real space in a perceptually challenging yet ultimately
synagogue formed the centrepiece of the show honest way, to playing with the spatial casts to create
Transient Spaces. new shapes and forms. In short, she moved from the
While Whiteread’s casts of the apartments laid to real to the illusory.
rest her desire to cast walls, her stair pieces such as To place architectural sculptures in a closed-in
Untitled (Basement) also allowed her to resolve her gallery space is to distance them from their place of
decade-long ambition to cast staircases. Ever since origin. The whole apartments seen in the
House she had wanted to cast stairs, filling sketch- Guggenheim and — in 2002 ~ at Tate Britain, took on
books with endless drawings of them. She blacked out new life as both abstract spaces and places in which to
postcards of cityscapes leaving only the steps visible, live. But with the stair pieces, Whiteread distanced
floating in the darkness; she photographed stairs the work still further, swinging whole sections back to
worn down with use, and stairwells tacked onto the mirror others, splitting straight flights of steps in two,
outside of buildings. But it was only when contem- twisting access doors and landings.
plating the stairs in the synagogue that she was able to Stairs have always been seen as illusory places,
resolve the problem of just how to cast such a percep- long before Escher drew endless puzzle-like construc-
tually tricky space. tions of them. They are the sites of visitations from
The novelist A.M. Homes wrote of Whiteread that God in Renaissance paintings and from ghosts in
she could imagine her swallowing plaster if she were Victorian horror stories. Moving staircases in fiction —
able to, in order to cast herself. Casting the staircases from Borges’s The Tower of Babel to J.K. Rowling’s
of her own building is perhaps the architectural Harry Potter— are designed to disorientate, and illus-
equivalent. Stairs are the throat of a building, the place trate that nothing is as it seems. Staircases often
106 107 through which everyone and thing must pass to go feature in films as the creaking construct of horror, or
the scene of transition from life to death (the mini- was up for demolition. Room 101 entered the collec-
mum dimensions of a domestic Victorian staircase tive memory when Orwell’s book 1984 was published
were those required to allow three pairs of men to in 1949. In the novel, Room 101 is the place of no
carry a coffin down it). Whiteread’s staircases are return, a room so feared that even a whisper of it
highly complex sculptures that are impossible to caused the comrades in Big Brother’s doublethink
navigate. They seem illogical, their reconfigurations regime to tremble and faint. As the interrogator
taking reality to a place so far removed that the mind O’Brien says to Winston, the central character in the
cannot bring it back. book, who is eventually sent to Room 101: “You asked
Whiteread cast two further staircases in 2002, this me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you
time based on a fire escape at Haunch of Venison, a knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The
large commercial gallery in London. Untitled thing that is Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’
(Domestic) was shown in Whiteread’s solo show, By the time Whiteread entered the BBC’s Room
which inaugurated the space. Haunch of Venison is 101, located at the end of a lengthy corridor and bomb-
located in a house that was once used by Nelson to damaged in the war, it had long since ceased to be an
recuperate after battle, but Whiteread’s decision to office and had become a haven for boilers and ventila-
cast from the newest addition to the building — the tion shafts. Whiteread stripped the room and, overa
fire escape — pointed to her waning interest in the six-week period in April and May 2003, cast it in its
specific history of buildings, and the waxing of her entirety. In 1984, Room 101 is buried deep under-
investigation into pure form. As with Monument, she _ ground; it turns out not to be a baroque torture cham-
was unable to cast on site, and had to reconstruct the ber as Winston had feared but a prosaic and window-
stairwell in her studio as a full-scale model in order to less room. Whiteread’s cast (fig.74) has also been
cast from it, using rough-grained scaffold board to blinded; each window is filled in and divided by elab-
create the stairs, laying metal runners on the treads, orate frames, a central cross scored into each one. It is
and distressing the lino that covered them. It was a a detailed cast, with recessed spaces where pipes once
film set of a staircase, a flight of stairs that had never ran, a door unable to lead anywhere. It is the Room 101
been used but looked well-worn. Although full-size, of the mind, unnerving in its claustrophobic finality, a
lying on its back its use was negated, the zigzag of the sealed tomb where all our worst fears are hiding. For
stairs running helplessly along the ground. in 1984, itis not Room 101 in itself that is terrifying, it
While Whiteread’s work has increased in scale — is the fears you bring to that room that destroy you.
from libraries to staircases and whole apartments - And, as with all of Whiteread’s work, it is what you
she has recently returned to studying her drawings, bring to her sculpture that ultimately gives it its
sketchbooks and photographs, looking for a way in intense, arresting power.
which to scale her work back down. But in 2003 she
was offered the chance to cast another room, this time
at the BBC’s Broadcasting House. It was Room 101, ——__.
—

once thought to have been George Orwell’s office

when he worked there during World War II, and it
UNTITLED (ROOM 101) 2003 [74]
Mixed media
300 X 500 X 643
(118 x 197 X 253 3/g)
Private Collection

a
“Y
si
UNTITLED (UPSTAIRS) 2000-1

When Whiteread bought a disused synagogue in Bethnal Green in 1999, she felt drawn
to map the building as a way of getting to know it.
When I started thinking about the building, Iwas combing every surface of it thinking
about how we would change it to house the studio and meet my needs for both working
and living. But Iwas also combing the surfaces
for its history.
I began by thinking about the minutiae of the building, in terms of how one might
change it and translate it into something more modern. I was really considering it in terms
of living there, possibly
for the rest of my life. Ihad never really thought about the details
ofaspace in this manner before, except in terms of sculpture. So while I was busy being
totally absorbed with the building and thinking about working with architects, I became
drawn to the idea of creating a series of works related to the apartments, the staircases, and
the floors.
Whiteread’s work has often been linked to printmaking, to taking an impression of
one surface and presenting it — in reverse — on another. The three stair pieces that she cast
from the former synagogue before converting it, lifted prints of the treads and locked
them into plasticised plaster for posterity.
I was delighted when Ifigured out how to make these works. Even though I've changed
the building I still have a record of its past. Whether the pieces end up in Europe or America
or in storage in my studio, it’s satisfying to have made these impressions of a building that
I’m probably going to be involved with for the rest of my life. P've never really done that
before. Whenever I make a piece, the original objects are essentially destroyed.
Casting from the building wasn’t a simple process. For one thing, Whiteread had to
work out how to cast entire structural components without destroying them. She had
done this on a smaller scale in Ghost, whose panelled form is in part replicated in all the
synagogue works, since Whiteread had to extricate the casts from their mould through
domestic-scaled doorways and corridors. But the stair pieces presented another compli-
cation —a conceptual as well as physical problem that Whiteread solved with ‘crazy
gymnastic backward thinking’:
Physically and intellectually I couldn't work out how to do it. It took a long time to get
the kind of knowledge of how to do something like that without actually destroying the
staircase.
In fact, casting stairs had been on her mind throughout the 1990s, since the days
of House.
When I made House, the one thing that frustrated me was the staircase — we had to cut
 it in half, and cast around it, so the staircase was still in position when the work was
finished.
Of the three pieces cast in situ — Untitled (Basement), Untitled (Stairs) and Untitled
(Upstairs) —it was the latter that she felt should exist on its own asa singular piece of
sculpture, without the accompanying cast suite of rooms (taken from the flats for the
Rabbi and the caretaker) that were exhibited alongside the other two stair pieces.
Untitled (Upstairs), exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 2001, was the tallest piece. Its
bottom door lay horizontally like the lid of a coffin, placed on top of a plaster tomb that
was cast from the entranceway to the staircase. A short flight of five stairs ran up toa
square landing, a longer flight ascending vertically towards a pulpit-like form that leant
against the wall. In contrast to Untitled (Stairs), which has a bulky symmetry and fans
UNTITLED 2000 [75]
Ink on postcard out like two splayed saw-blades, and Untitled (Basement), which hugs the ground,
14.7 X 87 (53/, X33/g)
Private Collection Untitled (Upstairs) soars skywards.
Untitled (Basement) is much more polite in its objectivity. Untitled (Upstairs) works
differently, and I think it’s partly due to the volume and the height, and being able to actu-
ally walk underneath it. But I also feel that it does something uncanny. It inverts your sense
ofplace. It’s almost like some of my very early pieces in the way it surprises people by turn-
ing the world inside out, which is what I understand people found so arresting. I think that
Untitled (Upstairs) has done exactly that, due to a large degree to its scale. There’s confu-
sion about its relationship to the original stairs. You have this awkward lump that’s sort of
sticking up. Lfind it an incredibly uncomfortable, powerful and strange object, and I'm still
trying to figure out why.
Untitled (Upstairs) and the other staircases in the series mark a distinct change in
Whiteread’s work. For while she had constructed and manipulated space before — fabri-
cating an interior for Untitled (Room), constructing a plinth for Monument, blocking in
each bathtub from which she cast — the stairs actually announce themselves as fictional
places, puzzles with no solution. In part it was the construction of 1:10-scale models of
each staircase that allowed her to work on this aspect. The whole staircase suddenly
became malleable in her hands, its orientation changeable. But it was also due to the fact
that, because you can see a flight of steps running along the surface of the plaster form,
you read it as the original staircase. However, as with the majority of Whiteread’s work,
what you are actually seeing is the space from inside, in this case the interior of a stair-
well. And by tipping up and turning on its head the orientation of the original staircase,
Whiteread ensures that your mind cannot keep up with the perceptual tricks that the
110 111 work plays out.
UNTITLED (UPSTAIRS) 2000-1 [76]
Mixed media
320 X 780 X 410 (126 X 307 X 161)
Private Collection

Whiteread is pleased with the disorientation caused by these works — something that
she herself felt as Untitled (Upstairs) was reassembled for the first time in the central hall
a?

of the synagogue that forms her studio — since it suggests that viewers are experiencing ;
the work physically. When the show transferred to Edinburgh, where the gallery ceiling __
was much lower than the Serpentine’s central atrium, Untitled (Upstairs) was turned on a P
its side. This transformed the sculpture, its lofty stairs now runningalongtheground
more like a geometric puzzle than a staircase. EB =
—

But I’m not trying to make an Escher drawing in which you have this annoying psycho-
logical game where you’re trying to traipse your way around one of his puzzles. For meit’s
a physical experience. a= =
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AN UNTIMELY DEATH: A CONTEXT FOR RACHEL WHITEREAD

\\
 In George Orwell’s 1984, Room 101 is a subterranean Younger — who was seventeen at the time of the erup-
tomb, a place from which you can never escape. It is a tion and whose uncle, Pliny the Elder, lost his life
place where only the worst things in the world come trying to rescue trapped relatives from Vesuvius’s
true, and top of the interrogator’s list of ‘worst things’ reach — wrote of the cloud that mushroomed from the
is being buried alive. top of the volcano:
The fear of being buried alive has rippled through Its appearance can best be expressed as being like an
fiction, film and psychoanalysis since the first human umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of
remains at Pompeii were discovered in the mid-eigh- trunk and then split off into branches, I imagine
teenth century, Fuelling the fear were subsequent because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and
excavations in Egypt and China, where thousands of then left unsupported as the pressure subsided ... In
skeletons were found in chambers surrounding the places it looked white, elsewhere blotched and dirty,
tombs of kings and rulers, seemingly buried alive as according to the amount of soil and ashes it carried
part of the funeral rites. with it.
A popular reading of Whiteread’s House was that it The ash fell on Pompeii, covering temples, homes,
conveyed this idea of living interment. Whiteread brothels and shops, preserving sculptures and wall
herself talked of ‘“entombing’ the rooms, and she and paintings, worktops and signposts, wheel ruts and
her team had to escape from the concrete-filled struc- pedestrian crossings, but, most dramatically, killing
ture through a small hatch in the roof. This led colum- thousands ofpeople.
nists and cartoonists to speculate on what, or whom, Caught up in the fringes of the great cloud’s
might have been left inside when it was sealed up. descent, Pliny the Younger and his mother tried to
Indeed, Whiteread’s work in general — with its all- run into the hills to escape it, but “we were enveloped
pervasive sense of untimely suffocation, of the claus- in night — not a moonless night or one dimmed by
trophobic smothering of social space and conse- cloud, but the darkness of a sealed room without light
quently life, of memories trapped within — taps into ... from time to time we had to get up and shake [the
this collective fear of feeling, seeing, experiencing our ashes] off for fear of being actually buried and crushed
own burial. As Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his short under their weight.’ This account of his survival must
story “Premature Burial’: “To be buried alive is, echo the experiences of those who were not so lucky,
beyond question, the most terrific of ... extremes the thousands of inhabitants who were literally
which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.’ buried alive in Pompeii.
The initial excavations were carried out in 1748,
THE DARK CLOUD uncovering buildings under several metres of pumice.
In AD 79 Pompeii was a thriving seaside resort for Work began in earnest a decade later, and soon young
wealthy Romans, with a population of 20,000. But men on the Grand Tour, who had previously been
with the sudden eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the limited to the study of Greek and Roman artefacts,
great smothering clouds of ash and pumice that fell on flocked there to marvel at the realities of the past
Pompeii, all life in the town was obliterated. Pliny the uncannily brought back to life. But it would be

Cartoon by Kipper Williams,

published in Time Out, 3-10
November 2003 [77] the LADY=«"~ WIMP
AS A WORK OFART, THERES JUST _,
ONE THING SPOILS IT FORME
GA

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CHEL WHITE
REAIp
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114 115
another century before Giuseppe Fiorelli, director of the earth at the foot of acolonnade, bringing the girl
excavations, discovered a way to preserve the ‘bodies’ back to life in their writings. As Chateaubriand said,
they found there. The Romans had long since decom- ‘Death, like a sculptor, has moulded his victim.’ There
posed in their airless tomb, and only human-shaped was, and still is, a morbid fascination with seeing
holes found in the solid volcanic layer pointed to their these casts made from real people. The moulds from
positions. Into these Fiorelli poured plaster of Paris, to which the human casts were made were once-
create solid casts of these ghostly outlines, the original removed from life, and allowed poets, writers and
moulds then chipped away to reveal the bodies. artists to romanticise about the people who had once
As with Whiteread’s sculptures, the history-rich filled them. But still there remained the frisson of fear,
original had to be destroyed to reveal a cast of the with Vesuvius ominously silent in the not-so-distant
space within. background.
Eighteenth-century art historians such as Johann Freud, in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny’, said that “to
Joachim Winckelmann had obtained their knowledge some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake
of Roman life chiefly through statuary depicting offi- is the most uncanny thing of all’, and described the
cials and dignitaries or mythological gods and concept as a ‘terrifying fantasy’. His coupling of these
goddesses. These sculptures were often fragmented two words makes apparent the seduction of the
and usually bleached white, the bright colours of the Pompeii casts, the idea that untimely death can be
original pigments long since eroded away. They led to erotic, as it was for Chateaubriand and Gautier, and
an idealised reverence for the elegance and classicism has continued to be for subsequent generations of
of a world built, it was supposed, out of order and writers. The protagonists in the novel Crash 1973, for
harmony. But while the casts made of the former example, written by J.G. Ballard (one of Whiteread’s
inhabitants of Pompeii were also colourless, they favourite authors), got their kicks from haunting car
were everything the sculptures were not. They wrecks, looking for dead victims:
captured the folds of real Roman tunics as they bulged The whiteness of his arms and chest and the scars
at the waist; they traced the lines of sandals, the curls that marked his skin... gave his body an unhealthy and
of hair and the grimaces on individual faces as they metallic sheen, like the worn vinyl ofthe car interior.
gasped their last breaths. All possible shapes and These apparently meaningless notches on his skin, like
sizes, lying lifeless where they had fallen, these bodies the gouges of a chisel, marked the sharp embrace of a
were the exact reverse of Pygmalion’s perfect marble collapsing passenger compartment, a cuneiform ofthe
sculpture that sprang to miraculous life. flesh formed by shattering instrument dials, fractured
The architectural theorist Anthony Vidler devotes gear levers and parking-light switches. Together they
a whole chapter of his book The Architectural described an exact language of pain and sensation,
Uncanny 1994 to Pompeii’s live burials. He cites the eroticism and desire.
nineteenth-century writers Francois René de A similar duality is present in much of Whiteread’s
Chateaubriand and Théophile Gautier, who both work: an initial sense of seductive familiarity with the
fantasised about the imprint of a girl’s breast found in everyday forms; a disturbing feeling of exclusion and

Naples, Italy, 1961. Archaeological

workers extract the mummified
bodies of two adults and three chil-
dren from their earthen mould [78]
Karl Pavlovic Briullov
THE LAST DAY OF POMPEI! 1833 [79]
The State Russian Museum

116 117
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 loss when the inside-out conceptualism of each that would be needed to walk up and down the treads,
sculpture reveals itself and the destruction ofthe orig- casting a solid from a void just as the archaeologists
inal object is understood. created Romans from their imprints. Whiteread’s city
Freud was himself haunted by dreams of being is perpetually being buried, spaces becoming filled up
buried alive, and deconstructed his own subconscious like the town of Argia in Italo Calvino’s fictional
fears in his opus The Interpretation of Dreams of 1899. account of Marco Polo’s travels in Invisible Cities
But while the human voids at Pompeii were cast by (1972): “What makes Argia different from other cities
early archaeologists — air made solid as in Whiteread’s is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are
series of Torsos cast from hot-water bottles — the chief completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to
archaeological sites were architectural. In much of the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in
Whiteread’s work, whole rooms, buildings or apart- negative.”
ments have been solidified, and Pompeii is indexical Eight years after the discovery of Pompeii, reports
in a similar way to her working method: the two reached England of acontemporary tragedy, again of
forms — positive and negative, mould and cast imprint death by suffocation, in Calcutta. According toa sole
— form a snug whole before they are separated. report published by a survivor in 1758, 146 people had
While all towns entomb themselves over time — been imprisoned in a small, windowless, airless
the Roman spa at Bath is six metres below street-level dungeon at Fort William. Overnight, 123 of them
today — Pompeii sank without trace in just one day. As died. The story of the Black Hole of Calcutta — while
it was slowly being uncovered, Wilhelm Jensen wrote now thought to be an exaggerated account — so
in Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy, in 1903: “What had captured the imagination that it remains in the
formerly been the city of Pompeii assumed an entirely English vernacular today. Edgar Allan Poe’s most
changed appearance, but not a living one; it now famous short story, The Pit and the Pendulum, a
appeared rather to become completely petrified in Gothic tale published in 1842, summed up the popu-
dead immobility. Yet out of it stirred a feeling that lar fear of claustrophobic incarceration. The prison in
death was beginning to talk.’ Traces of everyday life which the story is set is windowless, the air inky
left on the walls or the ground hinted at the everyday black, the walls slowly moving in and compressing
nature of events prior to the eruption — a wall half the space left within the room. Looking at Closet, or
plastered, the remains of food in the bottom of jars on Untitled (Black Bed), memories of the absolute fear of
a serving counter, a loaf of bread scored into eight solid blackness often experienced as a child crowd in
pieces in an oven. Similar traces have been left on like the walls of Poe’s dungeon.
Whiteread’s rooms, such as the soot and paint in Cell
(fig.81), Ghost and House. With Whiteread’s work, TOMB RAIDERS
the past domestic life of the space has also been exca- Egyptian excavations had begun halfa century before
vated, but it is encased like a fossil in limestone, its Poe’s story was written. While Egyptology initially
once-dynamic spaces now smothered. Even her involved measuring and documenting objects and
recent series of staircases denies access to the space artefacts on the surface — including the Rosetta Stone

CELL 1990 [81]

Plaster
123.2 X 125.7 X 52
(48%, X 49 Y, X20 1)
Private Collection

118 119
during Napoleon’s first Egyptian expedition of 1799 — rooms Whiteread has spent many hours). False Door
soon temples were being dug from the sand, and the is panelled on only one side, and — like a false door in
tombs of the Valley of the Kings were being explored. a tomb -— its ‘access point’ is not visible to those
The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who lived approaching from outside. Positioned less than a foot
much ofhis life in Italy (land of the Grand Tourists) from the wall and presenting a blank face of six sheer
and died aged thirty in 1822, wrote of the fascination blocks to the viewer, not even the hole where the
ofthe British with the Egyptian past in ‘Ozymandias’: handle should connect through the door punctures
I met a traveller from an antique land the facade. This door is not to be used physically, but
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone occupies the realm of the imagined.
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, For Egyptians, life on earth was only one step in an
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, eternal cycle, hence the immense rituals practised for
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, the highest level of society: mummification alone
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read took seventy days. People flocked to see these
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless exhumed mummies — most notably Tutankhamun’s
things... in 1922, discovered by Howard Carter. When
These hard-stone figures in porphyry and marble, Tutankhamun’s mummy and artefacts were first
ancient echoes of a lost empire, were found all over exhibited at the British Museum in 1972, people
Egypt, especially within or surrounding the queued for hours for a glimpse of the bandaged eight-
Pyramids. For it was in the Pyramids that the een-year-old king, whose body was remarkably still
Pharaohs lay, mummified for the afterlife, their vital preserved after three-and-a-half thousand years.
organs carefully stored in Canopic jars, food and drink Stories of mass sacrifice following the death of a
piled high in outer chambers, with hundreds of dead leader also surfaced in China, as ancient burial sites
servants and soldiers lying nearby to serve and service were excavated. The remains of servants, grooms and
them on the ‘other side’. On finding these endless warriors were found alongside horses and carriages in
bodies in the chambers circling the royal tombs, sunken buildings surrounding the main tomb. While
archaeologists surmised that they must have walked it transpired that the Egyptians had taken poison and
into each Pyramid and been bricked in, buried alive to the Chinese were killed before being buried, the idea
accompany the Pharaoh on his journey to eternal life. that they had been entombed alive lived on in
Once dead, the ancient Egyptians believed, the people’s subconscious.
Pharaoh would come out ofhis tomb via a number of
false doors painted on the inside of his sarcophagus BEYOND THE GRAVE
and carved on the inside of the inner chamber. In Britain, people may — on the whole — only have
Whiteread cast her own False Door in 1990 (fig.82), been buried after they were dead, but corpses rarely
the pale flaky plaster reminiscent of the chipped stone had a peaceful existence. By the nineteenth century,
of the False Door of Kaihap, from c.2450 BC (fig.83), graveyards had become so overcrowded that bodies
now in the British Museum (in whose Egyptian were often moved and stacked one on top of another.
FALSE DOOR 1990 [82]
Plaster
214.5 X 40.5 X 101.5
(84 /, X16 X 40)
British Council Collection

The False Door of Kaihap c.2450 BC

in the Egyptian Galleries at the
British Museum [83]

120 121
To avoid this, the wealthy paid a premium to be walls of Ghost, the book-studded mausoleum of
buried under the flagstones of churches. In 1843 a Holocaust Memorial and many of her casts of tables,
parliamentary committee officially recommended the monumental despite their domestic scale.
installation of cemeteries. Seen by the church as Tombs, graveyards and cemeteries have been the sites
godless — they were commercial ventures, often sited of cinematic resurrections since film began, most
far from any parish church — cemeteries nevertheless notably in the Boris Karloff horror The Mummy of
revolutionised death in Victorian England. 1932 and the Hammer classic of the same name made
Highgate cemetery (fig.85) opened in 1839, and in 1959. They are the locations where life and death
soon became the de rigeur place to bury your loved most easily commingle in the mind, changing places
ones. The western sector was designed with sweeping in your imagination. Other films have tackled the
avenues and tall trees. Rows of Gothic Revival theme oflive burial, from the 1917 silent movie Buried
mausolea were placed on the hillside, and catacombs Alive to the 1988 film The Vanishing, directed by
were created below ground level, encircling the Cedar George Sluizer. And, as with all of the sites mentioned
of Lebanon. Cremation was not made legal until 1902, — the smothered rooms of Pompeii, the airless Black
and consequently bodies were buried in ornate, Hole of Calcutta, Egyptian and Chinese tombs with
windowless tombs. In the twentieth century burial their solid windowless architecture —a solid darkness,
space was becoming scarce, and interest in the as made palpable by Whiteread in Closet or Untitled
Cemetery was declining, and in 1975 the west ceme- (Black Bed), is linked with the claustrophobic fear of
tery closed. Only the dedicated work of hundreds of suffocation, of dying an unnatural death. In Poe’s ‘The
volunteers brought back some semblance of the Cask of Amontillado’, 1846, he translates this fear into
Gothic grandeur it had once possessed, and allowed it a long walk down into a dank, nitrous dungeon, the
to reopen — for visitors if not corpses. Whiteread was would-be killer leading his drunk associate further
one of those volunteers, a teenage helper hacking under the city until they reach the final tomb-like
away at the fingers of thorny brambles that smothered chamber, which is full of human remains. In it,
the graves, witnessing the vandalism that had dese- a recess has been left ‘between two of the colossal
crated so many of the tombs, their stone doors cracked supports of the roof of the catacombs, and was backed
and caved in, dark glooms of space welling up behind. by one of their circumscribing walls of solid granite’.
While no-one was knowingly buried alive at The killer thrusts the drunkard into the recess, and
Highgate, several bodies — including Rossetti’s wife chains him to the wall. Then, slowly, he bricks him in.
Elizabeth Siddall and Mary Shelley’s parents — were It was now midnight, and my task was drawing
disinterred, and the stories that surrounded the grave- to a close. Ihad completed the eighth, the ninth, and the
yard must have intrigued the young Whiteread, who tenth tier. I had finished a portion ofthe last and the
was terrified of, yet intrigued by, these gaping houses eleventh; there remained but a single stone to befitted
of the dead. This overpowering architecture of death andplastered in. But now there came from out of the
has had repercussions that have affected much of niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head
Whiteread’s work, including the flaky tombstone ... Iforced the last stone into its position; I plastered

MAUSOLEUM UNDER CONSTRUCTION

1992 [84]
Screenprint and mezzotint on paper
56 x79 (22x31)
Tate. Acquired by purchase and gift
from Charles Booth-Clibborn in
memory of Joshua Compston 1997

—_
 it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old
rampart of bones. For the half of acentury no mortal
had disturbed them. In pace requiescat!
While much of Whiteread’s work initially talks of
memory and memorialising, it is the physicality ofits
production, the dense materials — plaster, concrete,
resin — used to smother forms, and the emphatic
deadening oflived-in space that sends dark shudders
down the spine,and quickens the onlooker’s breath.
Life has been snuffed out with all the finality of
Vesuvius’s downpour.

Highgate Cemetery [85]

View ofthe inside of the Catacombs
from above the entrance view from
the North East. Photographer
unknown

ize 123
 Rachel Whiteread: Hayward Gallery, London
Skulpturen/Sculptures, Kunsthalle, 1991 Metropolis, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin
Basel, ICA Philadelphia, ICA Boston Broken English, Serpentine Gallery,
Rachel Whiteread: Drawings, Luhring London
Augustine Gallery, New York Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober,
Rachel Whiteread: Sculptures, British Reinhard Mucha, Charles Ray and
School at Rome Rachel Whiteread, Luhring Augustine
Rachel Whiteread: Untitled (Floor), Gallery, New York
Karsten Schubert, London Turner Prize Exhibition: lan Davenport,
1996 Rachel Whiteread : Demolished, Karsten Anish Kapoor, Fiona Rae, Rachel
Schubert, London, in collaboration with Whiteread, Tate Gallery, London
Charles Booth-Clibborn Confrontaciones 91: Arte Ultimo
Rachel Whiteread: Sculptures, Luhring Britanicoy Espanol, Palacio Velazquez,
Augustine Gallery, New York Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
Rachel Whiteread: 1992 Doubletake: Collective Memory And
Skulpturen/Sculptures 1988-1996, Max Current Art, Hayward Gallery, London
Gandolph Bibliothek, Salzburg; Herbert Young British Artists |,Saatchi Gallery,
von Karajan Centrum, Vienna London
Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life, Tate Skulptur Konzept, Galerie Ludwig
Gallery, Liverpool Krefeld
1997 Rachel Whiteread, Palacio Velazquez, Documenta IX, Kassel
Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid London Portfolio, Karsten Schubert,
British Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice London
Water Tower Project, Public Art Fund, The Boundary Rider, Sydney Biennale,
New York Sydney
Rachel Whiteread, Anthony d’Offay 1993 In Site: New British Sculpture, National
Biography Gallery, London Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo
1999 Rachel Whiteread, Luhring Augustine Then and Now: Twenty-Three Years at
1963 Born in London Gallery, New York the Serpentine Gallery, Serpentine
1983-5 Brighton Polytechnic (Painting) 2000 Holocaust Memorial, Judenplatz, Vienna Gallery, London
1985-7 Slade School of Fine Art (Sculpture) 2001 Monument, Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Made Strange: New British Sculpture,
1992-3 DAAD Scholarship, Berlin Square, London Museum Ludwig, Budapest
1993 Awarded the Turner Prize Rachel Whiteread, Serpentine Gallery, The Sublime Void:An Exhibition on the
1997 Awarded the Venice Biennale Best London, Scottish National Gallery of Memory of the Imagination, Koninklijk
Young Artist award Modern Art, Edinburgh Museum voor Scone Kunsten, Antwerp
Lives and works in London Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces, Whiteness and Wounds, The Power
Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Plant, Toronto
Solo Exhibitions Guggenheim, Bilbao, Solomon R Turner Prize Exhibition: Hannah Collins,
Guggenheim Museum, New York Vong Phaophanit, Sean Scully, Rachel
1988 Carlisle Gallery, London 2002 Rachel Whiteread, Haunch ofVenison, Whiteread, Tate Gallery, London
1990 Ghost, Chisenhale Gallery, London London 1994 Visione Britannica: Notions of Space,
1991 Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol 2003 Rachel Whiteread, Luhring Augustine, Valentina Moncada Gallery, Rome
Rachel Whiteread: Sculptures, Karsten New York, NY Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists
Schubert, London Rachel Whiteread, Koyanagi Gallery, and Minimalism in the Nineties, The
1992 Rachel Whiteread: Recent Sculpture, Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, New York
Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York Room 107, Victoria & Albert Museum, Artists’ Impressions, Kettle’s Yard,
Rachel Whiteread: Sculptures, Sala London Cambridge
Montcada de la Fundacié ‘La Caixa’, 1995 Ars 95, Museum of Contemporary Art
Barcelona Selected Group Exhibitions and Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
Rachel Whiteread: Sculptures 1990-1992, Five Rooms: Richard Hamilton, Reinhard
Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1987 Whitworths Young Contemporaries, Mucha, Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola and
1993 Galerie Claire Burrus, Paris Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Rachel Whiteread, Anthony d’Offay
Rachel Whiteread: Sculptures, Museum‘ 1988 Riverside Open, Riverside Studios, Gallery, London
of Contemporary Art, Chicago London Here & Now, Serpentine Gallery,
House, commissioned by Artangel and Slaughterhouse Gallery, London London
Beck’s, London 1989 Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Art Brilliant: New Art From London, Walker
Rachel Whiteread: Zeichnungen, DAAD Gallery, London Art Centre, Minneapolis, Contemporary
Galerie, Berlin Einleuchten, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg Arts Museum, Houston
1994 Rachel Whiteread: Works on paper, 1990 British Art Show, McLellan Galleries, Prints and Drawings: Recent Aquisitions
Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne Glasgow, Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds, 1991-1995, British Museum, London

AS -
 Carnegie International 1995, Carnegie Contemporary Art from 1960 to Now, James Yood, ‘Rachel Whiteread:
Museum ofArt, Pittsburgh MoMA, New York Museum of Contemporary Art’,
International Istanbul Biennale, \stanbul HouseShow: The House in Art, Artforum, Jan.
Foundation for Culture & Arts, Istanbul Deichtorhallen, Hamburg Rachel Whiteread: Gouachen, exh. cat.,
Drawing the Line, Whitechapel Art 2001 Century City, Tate Modern, London DAAD Galerie, Berlin. Essay by Friedrich
Gallery, London, Southampton City Art Public Offerings, LA MoCA, Los Angeles Meschede
Gallery, Southampton Collaborations with Parkett: 1984 to Rachel Whiteread Plaster Sculptures,
1996 Un siécle de sculpture anglaise, Galerie Now, MoMA, New York exh. cat., Karsten Schubert and Luhring
Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris 2002 The Photogenic: Photography Through Augustine Gallery, New York. Essay by
Mahnmal und Gedenkstatte fur die Its Metaphors in Contemporary Art, David Batchelor
Jiidischen Opfer des Naziregimes in ICA, Philadelphia Rachel Whiteread: Sculptures, exh. cat.,
Osterreich 1938-1945, Kunsthalle Wien, Thinking Big: Concepts for 21st century Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
Vienna British sculpture, Peggy Guggenheim Interview by Iwona Blazwick
Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art Collection, Venice, Italy \jsbrand van Veelen, ‘Rachel Whiteread:
ofthe 1990s, Hirschhorn Museum and Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 2oth Van Abbemuseum’, Flash Art, May-June
Sculpture Garden, Washington Century, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Les Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘This is the
1997 Skulpture Projekte, Munster, Germany Abattoirs, Toulouse, France house that Rachel built’, Independent, 2
Sensation: Young British Artists from Jeff Wall and Rachel Whiteread, Kukje Nov.
The Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy Gallery, Seoul John McEwan, ‘The house that Rachel
of Arts, London, Hamburger Bahnhof, 2003 Days Like These, Tate Britain, London unbuilt’, Sunday Telegraph, 24 Oct.
Berlin, Brooklyn Museum ofArt, New James Hall, ‘I can’t go on but...’,
York Selected catalogues, books and articles Guardian, 4 Nov.
Art from the UK, Sammlung Goetz, 1994 House, Artangel Trust, London
Munich 1990 Ghost, exh. pamphlet, Chisenhale Peter Fleissig (ed.), Invisible Museum:
1998 Wounds, Moderna Museet, Stockholm Gallery, London. Text by Liam Gillick Seeing the Unseen, exh. cat., Thirty
Displacements: Miroslaw Balka, Doris Liz Brooks, ‘Rachel Whiteread: Shepherdess Walk, London
Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, Art Gallery Chisenhale’, Artscribe, Nov.Dec. Parkett No.42, ‘Lawrence Weiner and
of Ontario, Toronto Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘An Artist’s Rachel Whiteread’, Zurich. Texts by
Toward Sculpture, Fundagao Calouste Impression’, Independent, 3 July Adam Brooks, Trevor Fairbrother,
Gulbenkian, Lisbon Andrew Renton, ‘Rachel Whiteread: Richard Francis, Daniela Salvioni,
Real/Life: New British Art, Tochigi Chisenhale’, Flash Art, Oct. Rudolphe Schmitz, Dieter Schwartz,
Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Neville Wakefield and Simon Watney
Fukuoka Art Museum, Hiroshima City 1991 Broken English, exh. cat., Serpentine Rachel Whiteread:
Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery, London. Essay by Andrew Sculptures/Skulpturen, exh. cat.,
Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, Graham-Dixon Kunsthalle Basel; ICA, Boston; ICA
Ashiya City Museum ofArt Liam Gillick and Andrew Renton, Philadelphia. Essay by Christophe
Claustrophobia, |kon, Birminham; Technique Anglaise: Current Trends in Grunenberg
Middlesborough Art Gallery, Mappin Art British Art, London and New York Jean-Pierre Criqui, ‘Rachel Whiteread:
Gallery, Sheffield, Dundee Michael Archer, ‘Ghost Meat’, Artscribe, Kunsthalle, Basel’, Artforum, Nov.
Contemporary Art Centre, Cartwright summer issue Judith E. Stein, ‘Rachel Whiteread:
Hall, Bradford Anthony Bond (ed.), The Boundary Insitute of Contemporary Art’, Artnews,
Thinking Aloud, Kettle’s Yard, Rider: 9th Biennale ofSydney, exh. cat., summer issue
Cambridge, Cornerhouse, Manchester, Sydney Sarah Kent, Shark Infested Waters,
Camden Arts Centre, London Lynne Cooke and Greg Hilty (eds.), London
1999 House ofSculpture, Modern Art Doubletake: Collective Memory and Lynn Zelevansky (ed.), Sense and
Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, Museo de Current Art, exh. cat., South Bank Sensibility: Women Artists and
Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Centre, London Minimalism in the Nineties, exh. cat.,
Mexico Liam Gillick, ‘Doubletake’, Art Monthly, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Threshold: Invoking the Domestic in March Adrian Searle, ‘Rachel doesn’t live here
Contemporary Art, John Michael Kohler Robert Taplin, ‘Rachel Whiteread at any more’, Frieze, Jan./Feb.
Arts Center, Sheboyga Luhring Augustine’, Art in America, 1995 Excavating the House, VHS video and
Ten for the Century: a view of sculpture Sept. audiotape, Institute of Contemporary
in Britain, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sarah Kent, ‘Rachel Whiteread’, Modern Arts, London. Contributions from Jon
Sea Painters, summer issue Bird, Mark Cousins, James Lingwood and
2000 Le Temps, Vite, Centre national d’art 1993 Karin Hellandsjo (ed.), In Site: New Doreen Massey
culture Georges Pompidou, Paris British Sculpture, exh. cat., Museum of James Lingwood (ed.), House, London.
Ant Noises, Saatchi Gallery, London Contemporary Art, Oslo Essays by
Jon Bird, Doreen Massey, lain
Between Cinema and a Hard Place, Tate Beryl Wright (ed.), Rachel Whiteread, Sinclair, Richard Shone, Neil Thomas,
Modern, London exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Anthony Vidler and Simon Watney
Open Ends: 11 Exhibitions of Chicago Rachel Whiteread: House, VHS video,
 Artangel and Hackneyed Productions, Sylvester’, tate: the art magazine, spring Wolfsburg
London Robert Storr, ‘Remains of the Day’, Art Rachel Whiteread, exh. cat., Haunch of
Rachel Whiteread: Sculptures, exh. cat., in America, April Venison, London. Essays by Christiane
British School at Rome. Essay by Pier Jane Burton, ‘Concrete Poetry’, Artnews, Schneider and Susanna Greeves
Luigi Tazzi May 2003 Lesley Garner, ‘Home truths,
Lynne Cooke, ‘Rachel Whiteread’, Louise Neri (ed.), Looking Up: Rachel Independent Magazine, 15 Feb.
Burlington Magazine, April Whiteread’s Water Tower, Public Art Days Like These, exh. cat., Tate Britain,
1996 Lynn Barber, ‘In a private world ofinteri- Fund, New York. Texts by Neville London. Text by Clarrie Wallis
ors’, Observer,1 Sept. Wakefield, Tom Eccles, Luc Sante and
Rosalind Krauss, ‘Making space matter’, Molly Nesbit Copyright credits
tate: the art magazine, winter issue Andrea Schlieker, /udenplatz: Place of Works by Rachel Whiteread © Rachel
Mark Cousins, ‘Inside outcast’, tate: the Remembrance, Museum Judenplatz, Whiteread 2004
art magazine, winter issue Vienna Carl Andre © ARS, NY and DACS,
Adrian Searle, “World ofinteriors’, Adrian Searle, ‘Austere, Silent and name- London 2004
Guardian, 17 Sept. less’, Guardian, 26 Oct. Eva Hesse © The Estate of Eva Hesse.
Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life, exh. Euan Ferguson, ‘Deadly Art of Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/London
cat., Tate Gallery Liverpool. Essays by Remembrance’, Observer, 29 Oct. Gordon Matta-Clark © ARS, NY and
Fiona Bradley, Stuart Morgan, James E. Young, At memory’s edge: after- DACS, London 2004
Bartolomeu Mart, Rosalind Krauss and images of the Holocaust in contempo-
Michael Tarantino rary art and architecture, New Haven and Photographic credits
Tim Hilton, ‘Of Innocence and London All photographs courtesy Anthony
Experience’, Independent, 22 Sept. Sincerely Yours: Rachel Whiteread, exh. d’Offay, London, except:
David Batchelor, ‘Rachel Whiteread’, cat., Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Courtesy the artist: 2, 4,5, 6, 9,10, 16, 26,
Burlington Magazine, Dec. Art, Oslo, Norway. Essay by @ystein 27, 34, 49, 58, 59, 65, 81, 84
William Feaver, ‘Rachel Whiteread’, Ustvedt Ben Blackwell,3
Artnews, Dec. Anda Rottenberg (ed.), Amnesia, exh. © Bettman/CORBIS, 78
1997 Rachel Whiteread, exh. cat., Venice cat., Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen British Council Collection, 82
Biennale, British Council, London. Rachel Whiteread, exh. cat., Serpentine © Copyright The Trustees of the British
Interview by Andrea Rose Gallery, London and Scottish National Museum, 83
Patricia Bickers, ‘Last Exit to Venice’, Art Gallery, Edinburgh. Essays by Lisa Corrin, © Crown Copyright, National
Monthly, July—Aug. Patrick Elliott and Andrea Schlieker Monuments Record, 85
Simon Hattenstone, ‘From House to James Beechey, ‘Materials Girl’, Financial Anthony d’Offay, London/Mike Bruce,
Holocaust’, Guardian, 31 May Times Weekend, 16 June 47, 50, 53, 62, 64
Tom Lubbock, ‘The shape ofthings Rose Aidin, ‘A sculptor who casts a long Anthony d’Offay, London/Volker
gone’, Modern Painters, autumn issue shadow’, Sunday Telegraph, 17 June _ Naumann, 41
Claire Doherty (ed.), Claustrophobia, Charlotte Mullins, ‘Exposed: the space Anthony d’Offay, London/Ellen
exh. cat., kon, Birmingham beneath the stairs’, Independent on Labenski, 72
Towards Sculpture, exh. cat., Centro de Sunday, 17 June Anthony d’Offay, London/Richard
Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigao, Richard Cork, ‘Transfixed by baleful Stoner, 51
Lisbon. Text by Rui Sanches stairs’, The Times, 27 June Haunch of Venison, London, 52, 66,
Displacements, exh. cat., Art Gallery of Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces, Haunch of Venison, London/Marian
Ontario. Essays by Jessica Bradley and exh. cat., Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Harders, 57
Andreas Huyssen Essays by Lisa Denison, Craig Houser, Gagosian Gallery, London, 74
Real/Life: New British Art, exh. cat., Beatriz Colomina, A.M. Homes and The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and
Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, Molly Nesbit David Zwirner, New York, 28
Fukuoka Art Museum, Hiroshima City Paul Schimmel (ed.), Public Offerings, Lee Stalsworth, 8
Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, © The State Russian Museum/CORBIS,
of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Ashiya City Los Angeles 79
Museum ofArt. Essays by James Roberts Double Vision, exh. cat., Galerie fur Tate Photography, 70
and Andrea Rose Zeitgenosaische Kunst, Leipzig. Essay by Marcus Taylor, portrait, p.124
Thinking Aloud, exh. cat., Kettle’s Yard, Andrea Schlieker Jonty Wilde, 39
Cambridge, Cornerhourse, Manchester, Uta Grosenick (ed.), Women Artists in © Kipper Williams, 77
Camden Arts Centre, London. Essay by’ the 2oth and 21st Century, Cologne
Nick Groom Lynn Barber, ‘Someday my plinth will
Rachel Whiteread, exh. cat., Anthony come’, Observer Magazine, 27 May
d’Offay Gallery, London. Text by A.M. 2002 Rachel Whiteread, exh. cat., Kukje
Homes Gallery, Seoul. Essay by Patrick Elliott
Marcus Field, ‘Feeding Frenzy’, B/ueprint, Henry Meyric Hughes and Gijs van Tuy!
Dec. (eds.), Blast to Freeze: British Art in the
“Carving Space: Interview with David 2oth Century, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum
Index F
mortuary slab series 33, 61, 63, 67; figs.23, 24, 41, 44,
False Door 120; fig.82 46
A False Door ofKaihap 120; fig.83 The Mummy 122
Acconci, Vito felt 11, 18-19; fig.15 Muswell Hill 7, 23
Seed Bed 40 fibreglass fig.22
alchemy 63 Fiorelli, Giuseppe 116 N
aluminium fig.80 floor series 7, 40, 46, 63, 101; figs.29—33, 45, 69 Nauman, Bruce 39
Andre, Carl 8, 40,101 Flounders, Eric 54 A Cast of the Space Under My Chair 72-3
Equivalent VIII 12 Fort 14, 23; fig.13 New British Sculptors 8
Steel Zinc Plain fig.70 Freud, Sigmund New York 78, 81, 85; figs.57—9
anthropomorphic content of Whiteread’s work The Interpretation of Dreams 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich 48
26, 33,35 ‘The Uncanny’ 30, 16,119
Artangel so furniture series 7, 1-12, 14, 18-19, 23, 30, 33, 34-5, 39, O
59, 61, 79-3377; figs.9, 11-15, 39, 40, 42, 43, 51,54, Orwell, George
B 60, 61 1984 78,108,115
Ballard, J.G. Ovid
Crash 116 G Metamorphoses 30, 63,101
High-Rise 48, 49 Gautier, Théophile 116
Barthes, Roland Ghost 23-4, 26, 39, 48, 49, 50, 52, 61,104, 110, 119, 122; Pp
Camera Lucida 40 fig.16 painting 7-8
bath series 24, 26, 67; figs.17, 18, 47, 48 Glacier Man 26 photography 30, 39, 67, 85, 107, 108; figs.27, 49, 84
beds and mattresses 11, 12,19, 24, 26, 30, 34-5, 59 glass 26, 59; figs.1, 17, 18 Piero della Francesca 23
119, 122; figs.9, 19-22, 26 Gormley, Antony 8 plaster 11-12, 24, 34,59
Berlin 46, 48,59 plastic fig.62
Black Hole of Calcutta 119, 122 H plinth series 63, 67, 87, 97, 101; figs.44, 46, 62, 66
body, casts from 8, 11; figs.4,7 Hecker, Zvi 67 Pliny the Younger 115
Bonnard, Pierre 24,26 Heizer, Michael Plutarch 63
bookshelves series 68, 77-8, 85, 90-5, 97; figs.50 Double Negative 39 Poe, Edgar Allan 63
53, 55, 56, 64, 65, 67, 68 Hesse, Eva 8 ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ 122-3
Borges, Jorge Luis 68,107 Sans II
fig.3 The Pit and the Pendulum 19
Bourgeois, Louise 39 Highgate cemetery 22-3, 101, 122; fig.85 ‘Premature Burial’ 115
Brighton Polytechnic 7, 8 Hirst, Damien 24, 33 polystyrene 67
Briullov, Karl Pavlovic Hoffmann, E.T.A. Pompeii 115-16,
119, 122, 123
The Last Day of Pompeii fig.79 The Sandman 30, 33 positive casts 91
bronze 101 Holocaust memorial 67-8, 77, 85, 87, 90-5, 97, 122;
buildings, casts from 23-4, 39-57, 104, 107-12; figs.1, figs.s5o, 65 R
16, 34-8 Homes, A.M. 107 Rae, Fiona 24
Buried Alive 122 hot water bottle series 7, 11, 12, 33, 119; figs.2, 5, 6,10, release agents 14, 48, 52
25 resin 59, 61, 63, 70-3, 78, 81, 97; figs.2, 33, 39, 40, 43,
€ House 39, 46, 48-9, 50-7, 59, 67, 78, 104, 107, 10-11, 45, 51, 57, 66
Calvino, Italo 115, 119; figs.35—-8 Rosetta Stone 119
Invisible Cities 19 Houser, Craig Rowling, J.K. 107
Carlisle, Barbara 11 Whiteread interview 90-3 rubber 24, 26, 33, 34-5, 59, 61, 63, 67; figs.19, 20,
Carter, Howard 120 Hume, Gary 24 22-24, 26, 30, 33, 40-42, 44
cast iron 101; figs.69, 71
Cell 119; fig.81 I S
Chateaubriand, Francois René de 116 Ilford 7 Saatchi, Charles 23, 33
Chinese tombs 120, 122 Salcedo, Doris 12
cinema 63,122 Untitled (1995) fig.12
Closet 11-12, 18-19, 26, 50, 59, 67, 78, 119, 122; fig.15 Jensen, Wilhelm Sartre, Jean-Paul
Collins, Hannah 48 Gravida: APompeiian Fancy 119 Being and Nothingness 49
colour in Whiteread’s work 61, 63, 67, 70, 72, 85 Schubert, Karsten 85
concrete 50, 52, 68 K Scully, Sean 48
copper fig.4 K Foundation 54 sculpture 8, 1-12, 18
correction fluid 46; figs.32, 58,59 Kabakoy, Ilya 67 Serra, Richard
Cragg, Tony 8 Tilted Arc 87
Craven, Wes 63 E Shallow Breath 11, 12,19, 34, 35; fig.9
landscape as subject 7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe
D Le Corbusier 48 ‘Ozymandias’ 120
DAAD International Artists’ Exchange Scholarship lead 7-8 Slade School of Fine Art 7, 8,11
46,59 Lin, Maya Sluizer, George 122
Davenport, lan 24 Vietnam Veterans Memorial 92 Smithson, Robert
death masks 40, 46 London, Mausoleum Under Construction fig.84 Spiral Jetty 39
Demolished 67; fig.49 Louis, Morris 85 stair series 7,104, 107-8, 110-12, 119; figs.72, 73, 75, 76
Dexter, Emma 23 Study for Floor 46; fig.32
d’Offay, Anthony 85 M surfaces in Whiteread’s work 14.
drawings 7,39, 46, 59, 107, 108; figs.32, 58, 59 Mantle 1, 12,14, 19; fig.1
r
Matta-Clark, Gordon 39
E Reality Properties: Fake Estates 81 Table and Chair (Clear) 59, 61, 70; fig.40
Egyptian tombs 119-20, 122; fig.83 Splitting 39, 40; fig.28 Table and Chair (Green) 61; fig.42
Epstein, Jacob Middlesex Polytechnic 7 Taylor, Marcus 104
Jacob and the Angel 67 Minimalism 8,12,72 titles 19, 26
Escher, M.C. 107, 112 Monument 7, 63, 87, 97, 101, 111; fig.66 Torso 11,12, 19, 26; fig.10
Ether 24, 26, 61 torso series 26, 33, 119; figs.10, 25
Turner Prize wax 8,11, 40, 59; figs.4, 7, 29
awarded to Whiteread (1993) 48-9, 54 Whiteread, Karen 7
shortlist (1991) 23, 24 Whiteread, Lynne 7
Whiteread, Pat 7
U Whiteread, Thomas 7,12
Untitled (drawing) fig.75 Wilding, Alison 8,1
Untitled (2000) 97; fig.68 Wilson, Richard 7
Untitled (Air Bed II) 30; fig.20 Winckelmann,
Johann Joachim 116
Untitled (Amber Bed) 24, 26, 34-5, 59; fig.26 Woodrow, Bill 8
Untitled (Amber Floor) fig.30 Regardless of History 97
Untitled (Amber Mattress) 26; fig.19 Wright, Frank Lloyd
Untitled (Apartment) 104,107 Falling Water 39
Untitled (Basement) 104,107, 11; fig.72
Untitled (Bath) 24, 26; fig.18 vi
Untitled (Black Bath) 67; fig.47 Yellow Leaf 14, 23, 50; fig.12
Untitled (Black Bed) 30, 119, 122; fig.22 Young British Artists 24, 33
Untitled (Book Corridors) 85; fig.64
Untitled (Bronze Floor) 101
Untitled (Cast Corridor) 101; fig.71
Untitled (Cast Iron Floor) 101,104; fig.69
Untitled (Clear Slab) 33; fig.23
Untitled (Clear Torso) fig.2
Untitled (Domestic) 108
Untitled (Double) fig.60
Untitled (Elongated Plinths) 87; fig.62
Untitled (Fiction) 85; fig.63
Untitled (Floor) (1992) 40; fig.31
Untitled (Floor) (1994-5) 63; fig.45
Untitled (Floor/Ceiling) 46; fig.33
Untitled (Library) 97; fig.67
Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) 63, 70-3; figs.51, 52
Untitled (Orange Bath) 67
Untitled (Pair) 87
Untitled (Paperbacks) 77,78, 85; figs.53, 55
Untitled (pillowcase, hot water bottle, coathanger
and water, 1986) 11; fig.6
Untitled (Resin Corridor) 78
Untitled (Room) 46, 48, 49, 59, 104; fig.34
Untitled (Room 101) 108,11; fig.74
Untitled (Rooms) 104,107; fig.
Untitled (Round Table) fig.61
Untitled (Rubber Double Plinth) 63, 67; fig.46
Untitled (Rubber Plinth) 63; fig.44
Untitled (shirt, hot water bottle, coathanger and
water, 1986) 11; fig.5
Untitled (Six Spaces) 61; fig.39
Untitled (Slab) 61; fig.41
Untitled (Slab I!) 33; fig.24
Untitled (Stairs) 104, 11; fig.73
Untitled (Ten Tables) 77; fig.54
Untitled (Three Shelves) 77-8, 85; fig.56
Untitled (Torso) 33; fig.25
Untitled (Twenty-Five Spaces) 61, 63; fig.43
Untitled (Twenty-Four Switches) fig.80
Untitled (Upstairs) 101,104, 10-13; fig.76
Untitled (wax and copper, 1987) 1; fig.4
Untitled (Wax Floor) 40; fig.29
Untitled (wax, plaster and carpet, 1987) 11; fig.7
Untitled (White Sloping Bed) 24
Untitled (Yellow Bath) 67; fig.48
Untitled (Yellow Bed) 26, 30; fig.21

Vv
Valley 26, 61; fig.17
The Vanishing 122
Venice Biennale
prize 77; fig.55
Vidler, Anthony
The Architectural Uncanny 116

W
Wallinger, Mark
Ecco Homo 97
Water Tower 7,78, 81, 85, 97; figs.57—9
Water Tower (drawing) fig.s9
Water Tower (drawing and collage) fig.58
 :v7 PAULA. sean.Fionacasera
sJEFF WALL Craig Burnett
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“She shows us the unseen, the inside-out, the parts that go

unrecognised. A.M. Homes, novelist

Rachel Whiteread has single-handedly expan:

parameters of contemporary sculpture with h
outer and inner spaces of familiar objects, so
quiet monochrome, sometimes in vivid jewel
She won the Turner Prize in 1993, the same ye
-large- scale public project, House, a concrete cz
“nineteenth-century terraced house in Londo
Further site-specific projects include Holocau
in1 Vienna s Judenplatz and Water Tower in N en
“With 100 colour illustrations, this book by writer, disor
and broadcaster Charlotte Mullins is the first significant
surveyto examine Whiteread’s career to date.

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UK £14.99 |US $27.50 CANaa 95
SBN °78-1-85437

a ¢
MODERN ARTISTS
%/ 781854"37519 \ Series Editor: Lewis Biggs,
= -_ Director of the Liverpool Biennial