Art and Christianity 92The quarterly journal of Art & Christianity Enquiry (ACE) ISSN 1746-6229 Winter 2017

Jonathan A Anderson on Rachel Whiteread 2Ewan King reviews ‘BIBLIOCLASM’ 5John Drury ‘Imagining the Divine’ 8The 2017 ACE/Mercers’ Book Award 11Becky Clark on new glass in churches 16

Rachel Whiteread Stairs, 1995

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construction of the show in favor oftypological arrangement: interiormoulds of cabinetry, beds, water bot-tles, bookshelves, parcels, doors, win-dows, and desks each occupy their ownrespective zones. The space is like amassive specimen display of the vari-ous spatial configurations in whichmodern lives have been lived.

Whiteread’s early works revealmetaphorical orientations in her work

unprecedentedly open. This opennessemphasises the extent to whichWhiteread’s sculptures are themselvesexceedingly architectural: her full-room mould Untitled (Room 101), 2003stands in the center of the gallery along-side her massive, beautiful Untitled(Stairs), 2001. But this open gallery for-mat, wherein most of the works are vis-ible from any location, also de-empha-sises the vaguely chronological

For the past three decades, RachelWhiteread has drawn our attention tothe inconspicuous spaces within,between, and around the surfaces thatshape our everyday lives. Using mediawith an obvious liquid-turned-solidmateriality – plaster, resin, rubber, con-crete, wax, metal – she casts interiormoulds of the discreet spaces beneathbeds, floorboards, tables, and chairs.She solidifies the inner cavities of cabi-nets, shipping parcels, even entirerooms, and makes conspicuous andimpenetrable the passageways throughwhich people normally move. In eachcase, fluid volumes of habitable airbecome uninhabitable solids.

On the one hand, there is somethingcoolly conceptual about all of this,merging the formal and proceduralsimplicity of minimalism and postmin-imalism back into the traditions of rep-resentational sculpture – and doing sowith brilliant concision. On the otherhand, it is precisely this merger thatgives Whiteread’s works a lyrical andprofoundly affecting quality, lacing hercool, anti-expressive forms with con-cerns about temporality, loss, and theurban ‘enframing’ of human life (toborrow Heidegger’s term).

Whiteread’s large retrospective atTate Britain surveys three decades ofher career, offering valuable insightsinto its intellectual and material under-pinnings. The entryway to the exhibi-tion is a kind of antechamber meant toestablish a double framing for the rest ofthe show: a long glass case displaysnumerous found objects, notes, andsculptural studies from the artist’s stu-dio, emphasising the small-scale tactileinvestigations that energise her prac-tice, whereas the walls attest to herlarge-scale public interventions, includ-ing documentary imagery of herfamous House, 1993 in East London,Watertower, 1998 in New York, HolocaustMemorial, 2000 in Vienna, Monument,2001 for Trafalgar Square, and so on.

Passing into the main body of theexhibition, the space opens into a vast1,500m² gallery without almost any ofits usual dividing walls, leaving it

2 Art & Christianity 92 Winter 2017

Feature

An inverted truthJonathan A Anderson gets under the skin of the current retrospective of RachelWhiteread at Tate Britain

Rachel Whiteread House, 1993

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from the beginning. The plaster-castinterior of a fireplace, for example, istitled Cell, 1990; the solidified spacesurrounding a bathtub becomes Ether,1990; the plaster interior of a hot waterbottle is a headless, limbless Torso,1988; the space beneath a twin bed isShallow Breath, 1988. Indeed, the latterwork was made after the death of theartist’s father, establishing an early linkbetween her sculptural proceduresand allusions to death, which subtlypervade her work. Critics have oftennoted the correspondences betweenWhiteread’s mould-making and tradi-tional death masks, even entombment.In her own words, her method func-tions to ‘mummify the air in theroom’,1 preserving the volume of aspace while eliminating all further life-potential within it. And, as powerfullypresaged in House, these interiormoulds usually imply the destructionof the structures themselves. In Unti-tled (One Hundred Spaces), 1995, forexample, a 5-by-20 grid of colourfulresin blocks were cast from the spacesbeneath 100 found chairs – each ofwhich had to be dismantled to beremoved from its mould. Each uniqueblock marks the absence of an individ-ual chair that no longer survives, andgiven the long-established use of

chairs as visual stand-ins for persons(survey Vincent van Gogh to Doris Sal-cedo), it is difficult not to see this as amemorial to anonymous lives. What-ever else they might be, almost all ofWhiteread’s sculptures are deadpanmemento mori (‘remember you mustdie’).

In her catalogue essay, LinseyYoung underscores the social and geo-graphical particularity of Whiteread’sworks: ‘They map a very specific life:one lived within London, or moreaccurately, East London, with itsunruly mess of history, poverty, energyand creativity’ and its particular ‘col-lective experience of urban dwelling.’2

Though often overlooked inWhiteread’s work, this ‘unruly mess’includes thick religious histories. Oneof her most important sites is the build-ing she converted into her BethnalGreen studio in 1999: she cast massivesculptures from the stairwells in thisbuilding, from many of its rooms, fromits dilapidated flooring (including thealuminium Untitled Floor (Thirty-six),2002, and so on. The artist was, in herown words, ‘combing the [building’s]surfaces for its history’.3 And, impor-tantly, this history includes religiouscommunities that were grappling withthe meanings of human living and

dying: originally a Baptist church, thebuilding had, after the war, been con-verted into a Jewish synagogue andthen into a textile warehouse.

Briony Fer argues that Whiteread’swork ‘sets sculpture very decisively ona temporal axis’,4 but this axis extends,not only in a retrospective direction,toward lost histories. The very logic ofmould-making is also future-orientedin the sense that moulds are tradition-ally preparatory for casting furtherforms. Whiteread presents the mouldsthemselves for consideration, but pre-sumably she does so (at least partially)for the sake of the ways the absent orig-inary structures (and their histories)are reproduced – or ‘recast’ – in view-ers’ imaginations. This imaginativerecasting raises profound questionsabout the contingency of the liveswe’re living: we glimpse particularpasts that could have been otherwise,futures that might be lived otherwise.These works thus urge us toward inde-terminate futures: they are deadpanmemento vivere (‘remember you mustlive’), testing the hopes and/or dreadby which we imagine our ongoing col-lective shaping and reshaping of life.Further, and with wilder abandon, onewonders if the temporal axis ofWhiteread’s work includes (faintly) an

Rachel Whiteread Untited (Pink Torso), 1988

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eschatological horizon. The inside-outspecificity of her works holds open thewonderfully ludicrous notion that hersource objects – this bed, that home,those chairs, these lives – might some-how be reconstituted around thesemoulds. Indeed, Whiteread’s ghostly,mummified spaces seem to haunt theouter limits of what might be hopedfor: is it possible to imagine the ‘unrulymess of history’, of which these formsare artifacts, as not only memorialis-able but as somehow redeemable?

Jonathan A Anderson is an AssociateProfessor of Art at Biola University

1. Charlotte Mullins, ‘Traces of Life’, in

Rachel Whiteread, exh. cat. (London: Tate,

2004), 23–24.

2. Linsey Young, ‘The Power of Things’, in

Rachel Whiteread, ed. Ann Gallagher and

Molly Donovan, exh. cat. (London: Tate,

2017), 164.

3. Whiteread, quoted in Briony Fer, ‘Eyes

Cast’, in ibid., 135.

4. Fer, ‘Eyes Cast’, 137.

‘Rachel Whiteread’ is at Tate Britain 12 Sep-

tember 2017 – 21 January 2018, and tours to

21er Haus Vienna (March – July 2018),

National Gallery of Art in Washington (Sep-

tember 2018 – January 2019), and Saint Louis

Art Museum (March – June 2019).

Rachel Whiteread Untitled (one hundred

spaces), 1995

Crossings: Art and Christianity Now40 contemporary artists explore the Crucifixion Now and Resurrection Now in this major two-part exhibition at Southwell Minster

10 February – 10 May 2018Opening event 7pm Friday 9 FebruaryFree entry, exhibition guide £5

Artists presenting new works, include: Biggs and Collings, John Newling, Tai-Shan Scheirenberg, Matthew Krishanu, Susie Hamilton, Enzo Marra, Mark Cazalet, Michael Cook, Deb Covell, Thomas Hall, Tom Ormond, Richard Meaghan, Kaori Homma, Siku, Ellie Howitt, Sophie Hacker, Iain McKillop, Sarah Shaw, Hilary Tinley, and others.

There is also a comprehensive programme of supporting events including music, lectures, workshops, quiet days and a conference: The Spirit In Art Now.Saturday 10 March, £20 includes lunchSpeakers include: Matthew Collings (artist, critic and broadcaster), Prof. Alison Milbank, Dr Richard Davey,Mark Cazalet, and JF Martel (Canadian filmmaker and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice)

Book tickets on 01636 812933 cathedralshop@hotmail.co.uk

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