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.)
However, there was no consensus as to its aesthetic and social value or its meaning. Brian Masters found House “chilling ... necrophilic in concept and effect... there was not a flicker of life about it, no echo of the human presence which would normally have imbued it with charm, with character, with health; it was white, stark, ghostly and obviously dead”. Other responses ranged from the usual—“This isn’t art... a lot of rubbish... a joke... a monstrosity... experimental nonsense”—to the view that it was “beautiful... extraordinary... fantastical... a modern masterpiece”. What was unusual was the fact that opinions did not fall into familiar categories: art world opinion versus those of laypeople, because some locals liked and welcomed the sculpture while others detested it; opinion in the art world was similarly split. As James Lingwood, a director of Artangel, observed, responses did “not divide conveniently into local against national, public against private... Such binary oppositions could neither explain nor contain the multiple shades of opinion and sentiment which House engendered.” Lingwood also questioned the received idea that art did or should aim to achieve a consensus because, in his opinion, no work of art could succeed in pleasing everyone.
Arguably, House was overrated by its art world enthusiasts—witness the excessive praise and over-elaborate discourse of interpretation found in a Phaidon Press book published in 1995. (The commissioners and sponsors of such sculptures have so much invested in them that they cannot stand back to judge the works dispassionately. Rachel Whiteread’s dealer Karsten Schubert also contributed support and he cannot be considered a disinterested party. He is now her ex-dealer because, in 1996, Rachel Whiteread shifted her allegiance to another gallery. Schubert was so upset he closed his gallery.) The sculpture’s celebrity surely stemmed from a unique concatenation of circumstances: the Turner and K Foundation awards, the Channel 4 television coverage, the newspaper articles and cartoons, Eric Flounders’s unrepentant philistinism, plus the short life, large size, street location, emotional resonance and accessibility of the sculpture itself. For all that, it was an intriguing artefact that could usefully have been left in place for a number of years rather than a number of weeks.
Although Rachel Whiteread was distressed by the intense media pressure that fame and success brought in its wake, it did bolster her international reputation. For instance, she subsequently won a competition to design an important public memorial to the Holocaust in Judenplatz, Vienna. Plans for this monument—a concrete cast of the inside of a library—caused even more controversy in Vienna than House did in London because of the legacy of anti-semitism and quarrels between various interest groups and political factions within Austria. Its construction, therefore, was postponed many times. However, in 1998 it was announced that the memorial would be built.
Notes:
> Sarah Kent. “Home Work”. Time Out, (27 October - 3 November, 1993), pp. 22-3.
> Sarah Dunant (chair). Discussion about House with Rachel Whiteread and Richard Cork, The Late Show. (BBC2, 24 November 1993).
> “Housey! Housey!” London Psychogeographical Association Newsletter, 5, (1994), p. 1.
> James Lingwood (Ed.). House (London: Phaidon Press/Artangel Trust, 1995); this book contains several essays and it reproduces many of the articles and letters that appeared in the press.
> Andrew Graham-Dixon. A History of British Art. (London: BBC Books, 1996), p. 200.
> Lynn Barber. “The Observer Interview: In a Private World of Interiors”. Observer Review, (1 September 1996), pp. 7-8.
> Lynn MacRitchie. “The War Over Rachel”. Guardian, (5 November 1996), p. 9.
> Simon Hattenstone. “From House to Holocaust” (interview). Guardian (31 May 1997), p. 3.
> “The Monument” (Vienna). The Works, (BBC2, 18 October 1997).
> Kate Connolly. “Clash Over Holocaust Memorial”. Guardian, (22 November 1997), p. 5.
> Brian Masters. “This Bust...” Observer Review, (29 March 1998), p. 5.
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