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LOSS AND MELANCHOLY IN

RACHEL WHITEREAD’S CASTS

By

SHEYDA PORTER

January 2014

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This essay examines the theme of loss and absence in contemporary British sculptor Rachel

Whiteread’s work through examples of some of her artwork. In exploration of these works I will

discuss how Whiteread’s casting process and use of materials are fundamentally related to the psychic

outcome she presents. The aim of this essay is to provide a deeper understanding of Whiteread’s

artistic practice as a sculptor, her technique and her interpretations of everyday, domestic objects.

Whenever Rachel Whiteread’s name mentioned within the psychoanalytic context, Austrian

psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s term ‘uncanny’ is often used to describe the conceptual aspect of her

work. Freud’s ‘uncanny’ (unheimliche) is something that evokes a feeling of uneasiness with its

strangeness and peculiarity, something both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. As ‘un’ is a

negating word in German language, it is supposed to imply the opposite of heimliche (homelike) but

actually means the very word it is negating, therefore these two opposite words end up with a same

meaning: familiar. Although it is difficult to precisely define uncanny due to its strange nature, it can

be said that it draws on a psychological uncertainty. It refers to something unfamiliar arising in a

familiar context and vice versa.

Additionally, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined the term extimacy (extimité) from

intimate also in an effort to explain ‘uncanny’. Lacan, however, is known to have a very complicated

style of writing. To put it simply, extimacy is a term derived from the words exterior and intimacy

and it points out the opposition of psychic exterior and interior. It means the interior exists within the

exterior. This term obscures the distinction between opposites, such as the outer world and the inner,

public and private, objective and subjective, inanimate and animate. Lacan paradoxically defines

uncanny as “the very image of lack”. (1)

Let us take a look at some examples to elaborate this notion;

‘Ghost’, made in 1990, was Whiteread’s first attempt to cast an entire living space. She created this

piece on her own over a period of three months. It is the plaster cast of a living room in an

abandoned Victorian building in North London. When applying for funding for this project she

wrote on application forms that she wanted to “mummify the air in a room”. She covered the

interior walls with plaster. When the plaster dried, she peeled it off the walls and reassembled them

on a steel frame. She never thought about its disorientating effect until she assembled it. Everything

in the room became reversed, inside out. It almost mocks our senses, with the fireplace protruding,

door handles and electrical switches inverted. It has all visual reminders of its occupants with dents in

walls and black burn marks on the fireplace but the life itself is missing. When we consider the

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outcome of this process of turning things inside out, ‘uncanny’ is extremely suitable to explain the

eerie nature of Whiteread’s work. Ghost is both undeniably familiar and somewhat peculiar at the

same time.

Another example to help us understand the effects of uncanny is ‘Untitled’ (House) made in 1993.

It is arguably Whiteread’s best-known work that also won her Turner Prize in the same year. It’s

concrete cast of an entire Victorian house on Grove Road in the East End of London where she also

grew up. Bow Council had, already demolished other homes in the same neighbourhood. The house

she chose to cast was going to be knocked down too. In the making of this sculpture, she first applied

a release agent on the walls then the manually demanding casting process began. After casting the

interiors with liquid concrete and leaving the staircase intact, Whiteread and her assistants got out

through a tiny square on the roof. Once the concrete had set they, have stripped down the house by

hand, brick by brick.

Figure 1

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Figure 2

Figure 3

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This work presents itself as an inverse of a house. The air that was once inside the house was made

solid, negative space was now positive, the private (intimate) space within the walls, were now public

(exterior), its history was presented to us. It showed a peculiarly contemporary haunting.

‘House’ also generated a lot of political debate and it was knocked down only three months after it

was made regardless of the battle she had gone through with the council to save the sculpture. Rachel

Whiteread expressed her disappointment in the following quote:” By the day of 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.” (2)

Figure 4

It is also argued that it was made to draw attention to homelessness and poverty in East London.

“House has been read as calling attention to excessive demolition in the East End of London,

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symbolising the Conservative government’s indifference to new council housing and the lack of vision

and generosity, characteristic of the 1990s.” (3)

Despite all this controversy, she stated that she didn’t have any political motives behind making this

sculpture. Charlotte Mullins wrote that house was a “mute memorial for the area and its history, and

a tomb that visualised the darker side of domestic life”. (4)

Contemporary American artist Bruce Nauman is known to have had a great influence on

Whiteread. ‘Table and Chair’ (1994) was cast in rubber and polystyrene following in Nauman’s

footsteps, who in 1966, made a concrete cast of the space underneath his chair, which more or less

resembled a Minimalist sculpture with its cubic form and greyish colour. His sculpture had an ironic

subtext and was an anti-form gesture and an attack on Minimalist aesthetics, popular in that time.

Both of these sculptures emphasise a sense of nostalgia however, Whiteread’s work opens up different

interpretations to the concept offered by Nauman.

Figure 5

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Figure 6

‘One Hundred Spaces’ (Figure 7) was an installation piece for the “Sensation” exhibition in 1997

that consisted of 100 resin casts of spaces from underneath the seats of old wooden chairs. In

undertaking this installation, Whiteread cast in resin in a scale that no one ever attempted before due

to difficulties managing the medium. It is also known to be the most colourful sculpture that

Whiteread has completed to date. She once stated that she made this piece to confront Neuman. She

wanted to distance herself from these comparisons and she managed this by giving her casts human

attributes. She has given each block a different colour and they have a translucent quality almost like

jelly. Some change colour in different light and angles. They all have their unique characters like

humans, some of them broad others skinny, tall, dark or pale.

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Everyday domestic objects such as tables and chairs are incorporated in our daily lives and routine

so well, they have somehow lost the ability to fascinate us. However, by offering these peculiar

sculptures, Whiteread succeeds in transforming the most mundane objects from our daily lives, into

objects of beauty and mystery.

Figure 7

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Having initially studied painting at Brighton (Polytechnic) College of Art she only began making

casts, especially casts of domestic objects when she was studying an MA course at Slade School of Art

in London. In particular, casts of the air inside hot water bottles she made between 1988 and 1994

successfully illustrate ‘the very image of lack’ as Lacan puts it. It has been said about Rachel

Whiteread that she solidifies the air around objects; she mummifies it in a sense. In her casts, air

materialises, absent becomes present and the negative space becomes positive.

Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek writes: “Most of Rachel Whiteread’s

sculptural work consists of variations on one and the same motif: that of directly giving body to the

void…… When taking a created object (a closet, a room, a house……), she first fills the empty space,

the void in the middle, and then removes that which encircled and thus delineated this central void-

what we get is massive object that directly gives body to the void itself. The standard relationship

between the void and the……shell that created this void is thus inverted: instead of the vase

embodying the central void, the void itself is directly materialized. The uncanny effect of these

objects resides in the ways they palpably demonstrate the ontological incompleteness of reality: such

objects by definition stick out, they are ontologically superfluous, not at the same level of reality as

“normal” objects.” (5)

This is due to the fact that the object used for casting is fundamentally destroyed during the process

and what is presented is a ghostly impression of the original object. In other words in Whiteread’s

practice of creating an art object requires the death of the original. Her final outcome should be seen

as a direct representation of absence and nothingness.

‘Shallow Breath’, which was made in 1988, shortly after Whiteread’s father died, is a response to

her father’s death as the title suggests. Although it resembles a mattress, it is actually an entirely

different object created through a process of destruction of the object used for casting. However,

this loss is immortalised through this process and the object is resurrected. Plaster casts are often used

as moulds for sculptures to be filled in with other materials and it’s a part of a process not a final

outcome. Rachel Whiteread on the other hand, presents them as finished works. When she casts

surfaces of an object, the material picks up details on the surface. Surface contains the history of an

object, its signs of use and shows how people have interacted with it throughout its lifespan. In

choosing to use second hand objects Whiteread believes they all have a personal history.

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Figure 8

Continuing on from the theme of absence, she made ‘Amber Bed’ in 1991 which is a cast of a

double bed in rubber. Because of the flexibility of the material used, it wouldn’t stay vertical like her

previous bed sculptures and kept on sliding down the wall. She then decided that it should stay the

way it is as it looks like a person slumped against the wall. The colour of rubber used resembles that

of human flesh, the creases in the middle are almost like the creases of the belly. The texture on the

surface is achieved by replacing the mattress cover with a really thick woven fabric called Hesian.

Casting the surface of objects is almost an act of mourning over its loss and a melancholic gesture of

honouring its remaining memory. In ‘Shallow Breath’ for example, she suggests the loss of the object

and its memory, just like her father, who in his absence, nonetheless leaves a trace of his absent

existence. We must also consider the anthropomorphic quality of Whiteread’s rubber casts as a direct

result of the materials she has chosen. They prove her keen interest in exploring the relationship

between the inanimate and animate.

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Within this essay I have tried to shed light on Rachel Whiteread’s use of materials and subject

matter. In short, the uncanny feeling and a sense of uncomfortable haunting one experiences when

viewing Whiteread’s casts is not only a result of simply turning things inside out, as easy as it may

seem, but it is also a result of rather complex nature of the human unconscious engaging with her

work. Although she is known to have a formalist approach and has often been associated with

minimalism, her body of work touches upon a very human condition; melancholy.

Let us conclude, here, by saying that Whiteread, with her ‘uncanny’ sculptures in which absent

becomes present, resurrecting everyday objects and familiar places in a fascinating manner. In a

sense they embody the void in our lives in order to signify the emptiness many of us experience from

time to time. Her work goes deep in to the human psyche with its uniqueness. She constantly

reminds us this fundamentally existential question: If one can experience existence (of an object)

through (its) absence, what then, is the quintessence of existence?

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References: (1) Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994, p.9 (2) Mullins, Charlotte, Rachel Whiteread, Tate Publishing, London, 2004, p.56

(3) Walker, J.A, Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts, Pluto Press, London, 1999, p.168 (4) Mullins, Charlotte, Rachel Whiteread, Tate Publishing, London, 2004, p.56 (5) Zizek, Slavoj, The Rhetorics of Power, Diacritics, Spring 2001, Vol 31, No 1, p.99

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List of Illustrations: Figure 1: Whiteread and her assistants working on ‘House’, 1993 Figure 2: Whiteread’s assistant applying liquid concrete on the walls, 1993 Figure 3: Whiteread covering the windows with concrete in the making of ‘House’, 1993

Figure 4: ‘House’ covered in graffiti, 1993, London Figure 5: Bruce Neuman, A Cast of the Space Underneath My Chair, 1966, Concrete

Figure 6: Rachel Whiteread, Table and Chair (Green), 1994, Rubber and polystyrene

Figure 7: Making of ‘One Hundred Spaces’, 1995 Figure 8: Making of ‘Shallow Breath’, 1988

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Bibliography Mullins, Charlotte, Rachel Whiteread, Tate Publishing, London, 2004 Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, The

MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,1994

Walker, J.A, Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts, Pluto Press, London, 1999 Zizek, Slavoj, The Rhetorics of Power, Diacritics, Spring 2001, Vol 31, No 1