Rachel Whiteread

The Unilever Series: Rachel Whiteread. EMBANKMENT.

Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. 11 October 2005 – 2 April 2006.

Rachel Whiteread is concerned with space. Primarily the spaces we use and inhabit, hence her most famous work House – a true-size moulded reproduction of the interior of a London terraced house erected in a park in Mile End in 1993 (and which was, despite winning the Turner Prize, lovingly torn down by the local Liberal Democrat council after only 11 weeks – never trust a Liberal.)

Her new work, Embankment, is a massive Unilever-sponsored installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and deals in a persuasive and intelligent way with two kinds of space, exterior and interior. At first site the impression is of Yosemite National Park made from sugar cubes. Everywhere there are slabs of white, icy material forming both regular and haphazard blocks which, at the sides and towards the rear rise up like mountains to a height of 12 metres. Visitors will be able to approach from two directions – either down the long ramp from the main entrance, in which case the first experience is of relatively low blocks under the balcony area leading through a labyrinth towards the more massive sections, or at second floor level where one looks down as if onto a valley landscape, seeing other visitors wandering along the canyon trails. However at close quarters things change. The individual blocks of translucent white polyethylene which comprise the entire exhibit are not plain cubes: they all have repeated moulded characteristics. They are in fact exact reproductions of the insides (again, the negative to positive transformation is of great interest to Whiteread) of ten different cardboard boxes which the artist used in an off-hand, almost random fashion as the starting point of the work. Running one’s fingers along these surfaces, there are ridges, indentations and other irregularities, giving them an individual character, yet they have been mass-produced more than a thousand-fold.

So, the work is massive, playful and thought-provoking. What did those boxes contain?, who were they carried by?, how long did they store whatever they stored? So many small interiors now combine to make a huge exterior, which in turn contains us as we walk through. And there is the added irony that industrial processes were required to realise this very personal expression.

But one has misgivings. Is there not a feeling of So what? The work is designed to fill a particular space for a particular time (and will, incidentally, be ground down and re-cycled at the end of its term), so does not have the gravity of some of Whiteread’s best pieces like Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust. And one cannot help feeling that Warhol used the idea of repetition towards a more cogent end. Also, if we did not read the notes, would the impact of Embankment be the same? Does the poet have to explain the poem? And finally, is the artist’s vision sufficiently focussed? Some of the assembled blocks imply icebergs, others a city, whilst others still the wilds of nature. However, whichever kind of landscape you think you’re in, it’s definitely worth a stroll.

© Graham Buchan 2005