Rachel Whiteread : House, London (1993)
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Rachel Whiteread. House (October 1993). (Grove Road, London, E3.) Lokrete with metal armature. (Destroyed January 1994.)
By calling attention to the demolition of houses in the East End, the sculpture indicted the Conservative government’s indifference to the need for new council housing for the homeless. Eric Flounders and his colleagues were Liberal Democrats and there was no love lost between them and the Labour Party in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. (This may help to explain Flounders’s antagonism towards House.) However, while such meanings could be derived from House with some effort, arguably the political dimension of the sculpture was overstated, a case of “reading in” or analysing the physical and social context of the work rather than its actual content. After all, the work itself made no explicit condemnation of the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats; it made no specific proposal as to how social change could be achieved.
Local “psychogeographers” (a Situationist term) pointed out in a newsletter that it was the council which, by serving a possession order on Sidney Gale, the 71-year-old, ex-docker resident in 193 Grove Road for decades, had transformed his private, domestic space into public space against his will. (Gale’s opinion of Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture was: “If this is art, I’m Leonardo da Vinci.”) They also accused Whiteread of “imperialism”, of “robbing those who once lived in Grove Road of their own past” and “replacing it with a supposedly ‘higher set of values’”. Furthermore, they compared her House unfavourably to a tree house built and occupied by environmental activist who were resisting roadbuilders who cut down trees. For the activists, the company Tarmac was an enemy force, whereas for Rachel Whiteread it was a collaborator. In short, they were highly critical of Whiteread’s politics.
There is ample evidence of the intense public interest aroused by House. Unlike so many public sculptures, it evoked a positive emotional response. One reason for this was its simplicity and popular character, that is, everyone can relate to the experience of living in houses. In Andrew Graham-Dixon’s opinion, “House was stubbornly unheroic and democratic: an image of how we all live, caught between solitude and sociability...”
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