Rachel Whiteread at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills

Often, when information is not immediately ascertainable, stories are invented to fill the gap. The Egyptians gave us Nut, the goddess who gave birth to the sun every morning and swallowed it every night. Long before the invention of fMRIs, Freud appropriated stories from Greek myth to give meaning to our cranial matter. In his essay on the Uncanny, Freud fairly warns us of our mind’s ability to ascribe meaning where there is none. In one example, a seemingly random number—62—appears on a room door and a ticket for a coat check.

“…if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains — invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number…”

Rachel Whiteread's Ghost, 1990

In Rachel Whiteread’s obstinate recurrence of interior spaces, viewers scour the void-made-into-object, with their gaze alighting on bits of wallpaper (or soot from the matrix that was a fireplace). Like Freud, we are captivated by a sense of the uncanny, and imagine interiors from visually impenetrable blocks of plaster and concrete. In a way similar to Freud seeing Sophocles in the grey wet folds of the human cortex, viewers are free to assign scenarios and emotional valence to the architectural spaces cast by Whiteread.

In modern brain science, the Id and Ego have their parallels in a limbic system—which generates our emotions, and the prefrontal cortex—which can control and hide our thoughts and feelings from other creatures. When Freud peeled back the skull, he presented us with myth. When Whiteread tore away the outer walls of a row house slated for demolition, the interior is not exposed à la Gordon Matta-Clark, but instead another occluding surface is presented. For Damon Hyldreth, he sees,

“…a reversal of an enclosing, comforting, dwelling, a place of repose and comfort, a symbol of domestic hopes and dreams. What was left was a monument to one’s most private moments but with the privacy stripped bare and petrified. “House” monumentalized the past in a subversive manner, instead of allowing for a connection to and retrieval of the past, “House” subverted the warm cozy memories of home.”

House, 1993

For other viewers, House was brief monument to the losses created by urban renewal and gentrification. Andreas Siekmann more pointedly maps out this process in Trickle Down, showing how public space is gentrified—first using public art and private businesses to lure in foot traffic. Later when private security is brought in for public safety, public space is essentially privatized. House became a de facto monument to what had already been torn town, a cement synecdoche for the rapidly disappearing lower-income housing stock in a mostly ethnic minority London East End community.

But what becomes of the psychodynamic view when Whiteread’s media expands to include translucent polymers? These objects are not visually impenetrable, forcing the viewer to project their own histories and politics onto the surface. In the case of Water Tower (1998) in New York and Untitled Monument (2001) for the empty forth plinth in Trafalgar Square, the object is made inaccessible by the nature of its architectural context. Just as the unconscious can be appraised but remain out of reach, these particular casts appear to float mirage-like; watery apparitions that may be continually approached, but remain forever out of reach.

Water Tower, 1998

The resin casts ask the viewer to contemplate bits of the city’s infrastructure that more often blend into the background (as translucent objects ordinarily would). How does a plinth frame the thing that rests upon it? What do the choices of plinth-objects say about the society that selects them? Untitled Monument's inverted neoclassical form reminds us that myth spun from history wasn't invented by the British Empire.

Untitled Monument, 2001

In the case of the Water Tower, parallels can be drawn to the human body. Without a liver and kidney, humans quickly die of sepsis, poisoned on the cellular level by their own waste. Likewise for the human organisms that animate the brick buildings of Manhattan; the water towers’ ability to hydrate and flush their effluvia into the Atlantic brine, saves the occupants from drowning in their own filth.

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Yet these readings—psychological and social—are not the only ways to interpret Whiteread’s practice. In her current show at Gagosian Gallery, (up through December 20, 2008 in Beverly Hills) Whiteread’s work has taken a turn to the intimate. Working alone—rather than with a bevy of assistants—Whiteread casts the insides of shipping boxes and tubes, transforming them into idiosyncratic shapes, arranged on high shelves.

Drill, 2008

The first impression of Drill (2008) encourages a contextual reading in ways similar to her earlier work. For workers in many quasi-modern institutions built in the last forty years, the structure of David Roland’s 40/4 chair will be a familiar one. While on the surface it represents the modernist aesthetic, its production parallels high modernism’s slide from a Utopic ideal to the capitalist reality of production, storage, and contract furnishings. To underscore this read, the functionality—the seat surfaces—have been removed and replaced by the cardboard tubes ubiquitous to the architect or interior design office. Like the disused stationary bicycle or treadmill that eventually gets repurposed as a valet for dirty clothes, Drill illustrates the crash of modernism's ideals into the hard rock of consumerism.

Juggle II, 2008

But a different read is pushed forward in much of the work here. Unlike her cast voids around books and libraries, the objects that line the shelves on the wall at Gagosian are visually accessible. Often the cuboid and cylindrical forms (cast in pastel shades of plaster and luminous blocks of resin) are sandwiched between cast bronze bookend-like chunks of polystyrene. On close inspection, the molds are from mass-produced shipping materials. Through the wear and tear of transit, the dents and disfigurations have given identical mass-produced forms their own unique qualities. In a similar way that you are a unique individual (just like everybody else), each component is both singular and a signifier of the many. What Allan McCollum has tried to accomplish by way of mathematics in his SHAPES project, Rachel Whiteread has done through the intrinsic inconsistency of the human hand.

Focus, 2008

The parts that make the whole of the shelf works remind an artist of those first drawing and design classes, when one first stopped and looked with purpose at the light and shadow reflected off some basic shapes. These new objects refocus the viewer’s attention on pure form, and the intimate scale draws the viewer in to see evidence of the artist’s hand. 

Running concurrently with the Gagosian show is Place (Village) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston  (through January). Over the course of many years, Whiteread has done for antique dollhouse auctions on eBay what Eli Broad has done for Jeff Koons at Sotheby's. The incongruity between the quasi-minimalism and the quasi-kitsch is not dissimilar to discovering Andy Warhol's extensive collections (from Navajo rugs to cookie jars) upon his death. But the two shows are interrelated as mold and matrix—or art to its shipping container; many of the pieces cast were quirky bits of packing used to cushion her purchases. 

Rachel Whiteread and Untitled (Hive), 2007-08

Upstairs at Gagosian is a trio of larger works. Foundation (2007-08) exhibits the cut and crenelated surface that corrugated paperboard would follow as it's wrapped around a tiny house. The other two are resin casts that glow in the natural light, including a lavender dollhouse (cast from a reproduction from one in her collection) and a honey-colored beehive. Like the MRI, Whiteread’s Neutrogena-hued Untitled (Hive) gives us visual access to the form’s interior. The gabled roof and second-story overhang of Hive is reminiscent of New England colonial architecture, and reminds us that anthropomorphizing happens to insects too.

Ghost Ghost, 2008

On the other side of the room, Ghost Ghost (2008) gives form to the interior of a large two-story dollhouse. At a distance, the minuscule bubbles that hardened between each poured layer of the polyurethane give the appearance of ship lap siding. Around the backside, the miniature home’s stairwell is visible as an apparition in a purple haze.

Ghost Ghost, 2008 (detail)

This new work also presents the opportunity to reappraise Whiteread’s earlier practice in more formal ways. By stopping one’s gaze just before the thingness is manifest, Whiteread’s architectural casts can be read as a series of cuboids, cones, and cylinders. In this new work her vocabulary expands with the articulation of organic and irregular shapes, from Styrofoam peanuts to broken scraps of packaging. The arrangement of parts brings the artist’s voice to the syntax of the assembly, rather than her earlier acquiescence to the preexisting order of cubes—as in a London row house.

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