All it takes is a couple of dollars and a five-minute ferry ride to sail from the southern tip of Manhattan to a dramatically different world: leafy Governors Island, right in the middle of New York harbour. Once an army base and a military prison, the island fell into weedy neglect after the Coast Guard left in 1996. But following its transfer to New York State, a firm of Dutch landscape architects has made it into a park for day-trip recreation, complete with stunning wrap-around views of the southern tip of Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey.
A toasty August morning found hundreds of schoolchildren on the island rambling, bike-riding, shooting down a giant slide, slurping soda pop. None of them was paying much heed to a pale grey hut standing on the slope of one of the island’s new hills, raised from the demolition debris of pulled-down buildings. On a site full of abandoned structures: two churches, a theatre, long lines of brick-faced barracks, the pitch-roofed hut on the hill must seem like just another left-behind ruin. A moment’s sustained look, however, reveals something odd: blank windows that project from the exterior rather than being set into it. The phantom shack is Rachel Whiteread’s Cabin: the latest of her negative casts of interior space and one of the most spellbinding things to be seen anywhere in New York.
It’s easy enough to misread Whiteread, especially if all you’ve seen are photographs of her monumental inside-out rooms, stairwells and, in one stupendous case, an entire house. Blind, filled windows (only Michelangelo did those on the staircase of the Laurentian Library in Florence), interior air and space translated into a solid mass, can give the impression of forbidding impenetrability, a tomb-like hermetic sealing. And, indeed, intimations of mortality are never far from Whiteread’s instincts and thoughts. Embankment, her colossal 2005–06 installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, was prompted by her artist mother’s death. She and her twin sisters were ‘so devastated we couldn’t pack her house up. It took us about a year to get around to it and when we did I found an old Sellotape box, used for decorations. I pressed it flat and brought it back to the studio and so it [Embankment] came from that.’ A box of grief, then, mountainously multiplied. ‘There should have been more,’ she tells me in her Camden Town studio, a big light-drenched space filled with pieces from every stage of her career, including the hypnotic drawings that are her elegant forethoughts. ‘But, Rachel, there were hundreds,’ I say. ‘Well, thousands actually,’ she says in reply (14,000). ‘Still, there should have been more.’
Even so, and despite her volunteering as a teenager for a job at Highgate Cemetery, I think of her work as dominated by memory rather than memorial, and marked by traces of warm life as much as chill death. On Governors Island you make your way through a jungly mass of rambling roses, flocks of tortoiseshell butterflies flitting through them, and the immediate impression is not of abandoned dereliction but human occupancy, as if someone has only just departed. Everything on and around the cabin is marked by domestic use: the grain on the wooden shingles; the gaps between them now extruded like blisters appearing on weathered timber, the bricks on the hearth climbing the chimney wall; a perfectly rendered bolt-slide on the door; window curtains that in reverse have become corrugated but still give the illusion of shifting softly in the breeze. Scattered around the building, half-hidden in the scrub, are Whiteread’s bronze casts of the casual detritus of shack life: a spoon, beer cans, indeterminate bits of machines; the casual rubbish of the homesteader-squatter as if turned into throwaways by a modern Bernini.
Cabin is not some sort of hermit’s retreat (any more than Thoreau’s Walden home in the woods – the prompt for her work – was a flight from society). Standing on its hill directly facing the Statue of Liberty, the little smoke-grey dwelling seems in active dialogue with the forest of commercial towers looming over the water, since 9/11 inescapably imprinted with memories of destruction and disappearance. Nothing could be more eloquent about two radically opposed ways of living, the imagined freedom of the homestead and the pullulating empire of capitalist hustle.
What Cabin is not is minimalist, in the sense that bone-dry exercises in sculptural austerity – Donald Judd’s cubes or Carl Andre’s bricks – have made a fetish of planing away all signs of the artist’s mark. Critics and art historians reluctant to abandon the tag have pigeonholed Whiteread as ‘post-minimalist’ or a ‘minimalist with heart’ – a coinage she quite likes but one that doesn’t do the difference adequate justice. Whiteread’s surfaces are all facture: heavily imprinted with life-traces (even her mattresses cast in resin or rubber are often coloured with simulacra of human staining). Her sculptures are never self-contained. They are saturated with memory, and overflow with social comment and personal narrative. Many of them, such as Cabin, look solitary but, in fact, never are; they always imply habitat, always infer something bigger in space and time, namely the ramshackle lives of all of us. That is why they are so easy to connect with and why they pack such intense emotional power. Whiteread’s great pieces are sighs made tangible.
So only if you were expecting a tight-lipped guardian of emptiness made solid form would it come as a surprise to discover that, in person, Rachel Whiteread is warmly voluble, the stories of her life and work told in the north London-speak of my own childhood and punctuated with bursts of merry laughter. But then her work is the opposite of disembodied.
‘When I was a student at the Slade [School of Fine Art], I used my body quite a lot; I cast bits of me – a few friends have got them – bits of leg and back and arm. There were caretakers that had my breasts on the wall of their hut.’ She laughs one of those big rosy-faced laughs. One of the attractions of the Slade was the accessibility of the anatomy school. ‘I remember drawing a brain and holding it afterwards. What a weird feeling that was.’
Lately her body has been through it a bit. Last year in Greece, an erupting gall bladder came close to doing her in altogether. She is fully recovered but has to abide by a recuperative diet. ‘No alcohol, then?’ I sympathise. ‘Oh, no, alcohol’s fine.’ ‘No coffee or tea?’ ‘No, they’re okay; just no milk . . . well, I suppose sheep’s or goat’s milk would be alright.’ This sounds like the kind of regimen unlikely to interfere with her easy-going humour and compulsive work habits. The prospect of her big retrospective, opening in mid-September, is the best kind of tonic. But even the generous exhibition spaces of Tate Britain can only accommodate one of her monumental casts, Room 101 – the negative of an entire room. It will, though, have a rich collection of smaller objects, many from her own personal collection and at least as dear to her: the curiosity cabinet of her own memories – the cavity of a spoon cast in bronze, for example.
For a long time now Whiteread has been the visual poet of urban flotsam. Heaps of belongings discarded on the street, grungy mattresses and upended tables always made her curious about the lives of which the used-up objects were the visible residue. Leaning against a wall of her studio is her Rosebud: a talismanic object found on the beach when, before the Slade, she was a student at Brighton College of Art; a petrol can flattened by a heavy vehicle and tossed away for the sharp-eyed artist to nab and that she has used as a plate to make a print. She freely acknowledges the part her father and mother played in these archaeological wanderings. Her father Thomas was a geography teacher at school and then polytechnics, fine-tuned to the eloquence of space. ‘At the bottom of our garden’ in Ilford ‘was a field, and beyond that a Roman road. We would walk on the Roman road and my dad would talk about it.’ Then, with gangs of friends from school, she explored scattered treasure: post-Second World War Portakabins, rusting farm machinery. Both her parents were drawn to the verges where town life overflowed into the country. Her mother Pat collaged diapositives of ‘crap people had deposited – petrol pumps that no longer worked, oil spills’ onto her landscape paintings.
The Whitereads were north London boho Labour Party campaigners so, inevitably, she and her sisters were sent to the pioneering Creighton comprehensive in Muswell Hill, where they’d moved from Ilford. ‘That must have been exciting,’ I offer. ‘It was awful,’ she shouts, and then sighs, ‘truly awful, shoved together’, albeit with good intentions, from secondary modern and grammar school halves that never properly fitted. ‘But I kind of loved it; it was a big world soup, fights all the time, influxes of Bangladeshis, Greeks, Turks, Romanians, a really interesting bunch of people all thrown together. I wasn’t good at school. I didn’t behave or sit down, I mucked about, doing what I could do to get by.’ And precisely because her mother was a painter, she wanted nothing to do with art. Until, in the sixth form, she discovered the art room. ‘I discovered what I wanted to do and was addicted to it.’
After school she went to Brighton College of Art, an inspired choice since, although she entered as a painting student, some of Britain’s most original sculptors were teaching there, among them Phyllida Barlow, Antony Gormley and Alison Wilding. Something had happened to the work of British women sculptors since the abstract refinements of Barbara Hepworth, and that something was a kind of dramatically expressive untidiness; a massing up of uncontainable forms; strong visual rhetoric often made from modest materials. Pretty soon Whiteread was embarking on her own experiments, borrowing an empty room at the top of the college – ‘a window, a door, an alcove’ – and papering the white walls black, hanging rolls of masking tape (‘like bats, organic’) from the ceiling. She tells me she didn’t really know what she was doing. ‘I wasn’t trying to make sculpture; I was trying to make a collage in space, freeing things up in my mind.’ Barlow and Wilding were sufficiently struck by its off-kilter drama to bring students working in more conventional forms to come and be provoked. She took to walking the South Downs and the beach (‘I have always liked weather’) struck by the ‘lines’ made by washed-up scrap metal and torn-apart tyres. ‘That’s when I realised I wasn’t interested in just making something that goes on a wall.’
At the Slade, Whiteread began to raid the bank of childhood memory; some of it repressed, of how our bodies first experience the space around them: what we grow into, and what we shrink from. Whether or not the attraction of secret enclosures, at once sheltering and dangerous, are responses to expulsion from our first in utero berthing, there’s no doubt that children like to hang out in hidden spaces – underneath tables or desks or inside the kind of wardrobe where the child Rachel spent a lot of time. But reconstructing furniture as lodging would have been banal doubling. Instead, Whiteread hit on the possibility of making the interior of the space visible and solid by filling it with plaster. What she calls her ‘Eureka moment’ took the form of a cast of the interior of a wardrobe that she then mantled in a covering of light-sucking black felt. The effect of Closet, as everyone who has ever written about her work has noticed, was what Freud called unheimlich – the uncanny sensation of being simultaneously homely and unhomely, invitational and locked-off. Though Bruce Nauman, whose work she had seen at a show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, had cast The Space Under My Chair in 1965, nothing like the sustained series of such creations that followed had ever been attempted.
The spell cast by these works – the revelation of a parallel universe of domestic life, its daily respirations made solid – got Whiteread her first solo show just eighteen months after graduating from the Slade, precisely because she refused to fit the categories designated by contemporary art criticism. ‘There was a guy, a really nasty guy, who wanted to buy the whole show, £200 each. I kept it all,’ she says, smiling at the memory. She wasn’t interested in pure form, but impure associations. The cluttering of memory had its consummation when she cast an entire room of a house in the Archway Road, every detail – electrical outlets; soot clinging to the fireplace – preserved. Ghost was like a reverse studiolo, fastidious intaglio replaced by equally scrupulous reverse imprinting, and worked with the same exhaustive handcraft, lugging all that plaster up the steep hill. But ‘I knew exactly what I’d done; it was quite other-worldly; I knew it was special; that it was the germ of something.’
Ghost landed in a Thatcherite Britain in which demolitions as well as constructions were just the latest chapter in a long history of woundings and scarrings on the body of cities. In the raw spaces opened by bombing or areas where docks and factories were going out of use, commercial towers and luxury apartment blocks were rising. An earlier generation of tower blocks built in the 1960s was showing its age. Beneath them, whole terraces were being levelled. The social geographer in Whiteread now connected with the poet of abandonment to tackle the ultimate challenge in urban memento mori. ‘James Lingwood [of Artangel, which specialises in art in unexpected places] came to me and said, “Is there anything you want to do?” To someone still in their twenties, this was amazing. “Yeah, I want to make a house,” I said.’ Since it wouldn’t survive the casting, it had to be uninhabitable and she found what she needed on a street in Bow, east London, where the house of a retired dockworker, scheduled for demolition, stood with just two half houses on each side.
It seemed perfect. The former occupant, Sidney Gale, who’d built DIY cocktail bars in his shed in the 1970s, warmed to the unexpected attention. But soon enough the Promethean project began to attract a glare of publicity, not much of it sympathetic. The Young British Artists, of which Whiteread is generationally a member, had not yet emerged as the sensational enfants terribles of the art world. For most people contemporary art was incomprehensible, or possibly a great con, and an easy mark for the tabloids. Ten years before, Tate’s purchase of Carl Andre’s floor-array of ultra-minimalist bricks had drawn a tidal wave of angry derision. When they got wind of House, the tribunes turned the same sort of enraged sneering on Whiteread. Art? My arse! Local politicians in Tower Hamlets went along for the ride. Woundingly, and although Whiteread made sure to return personal objects, medals and the like, that she had found while working on the cast, Gale joined the chorus of chortling hatred. Et tu, Sidney? House emerged from its cast like a disinterred body, eerily beautiful, a perfectly formed spectral twin but also a poignant emblem of a vanishing world of terrace life.
It stood for just eighty days but Whiteread says, although ‘I sealed the building off myself and loved every inch of it’, she was ‘sick to death of it’ well before its end; the hostile publicity making it ‘virtually impossible to go have a quiet moment with it’. All the dusty, toxic labour of making it against the storm of hostility made her physically ill. ‘Did Artangel look after you?’ I ask. ‘They tried to but it made them ill too.’ On the day of the demolition, she just ‘toughed it out; wore a hat and scarf and just stood there’ at the centre of all the nightmare circus.
Almost all art aims to nail the fugitive passing of time. But in Britain, mulling over what-has-been is the national psyche. This instinctive fit with a culture of disappearances and recollections made House one of the great works of British self-recognition. Despite the publicity ordeal, ‘I was extremely proud of it and I still am.’ Would she have liked it if it had been permanently spared the wrecking ball? ‘Oh, I think it would have been a very sorry thing.’ How about making something like it? ‘Sometimes I think I could make something which could live on in this country,’ she says reflectively.
But the next big challenge came from elsewhere. The tabloids’ target was catnip to the art world, and the afterburn of House inevitably produced other commissions involved with collective memory, none more challenging than an invitation from the city of Vienna to enter a design competition for a memorial to the 65,000 Viennese Jews murdered by the Nazis. Whiteread had lived in Berlin for a year and a half and become deeply interested in the memory traces of the Holocaust (or their absence). ‘I went to a number of camps for my own personal research, so I was very clear about what I could touch and what I knew about. If I hadn’t had that experience, I would never have tried to make a Holocaust memorial.’ Above all, she knew that enormity on that scale defies any kind of figurative representation adequate to its horror. Whiteread had admired Maya Lin’s abstract response to memorialising the fallen of the Vietnam War and came up with a design generated naturally from her work with negatives: a concrete library of vanished books, their spines towards the hidden wall, deckled page-ends projecting towards the viewer. When, to her genuine astonishment, she was actually awarded the commission, she plunged into it with tragically informed energy. The result is absorbingly elegiac, an evocation, not so much of a multitude of books as of their readers and everything they had brought to European civilisation.
But though Whiteread’s strongest works play for high stakes, moral as well as aesthetic, she couldn’t have anticipated the intensity of local resistance. Much of Vienna preferred to forget. And there were misgivings on the part of figures prominent in the commission, especially the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, to the emblematic, rather than figurative, character of the design. At the unveiling ceremony, Whiteread was asked if she herself was Jewish. Virtually simultaneously, Wiesenthal, who had an arm round her shoulder, said ‘yes’ while she said ‘no’. Abruptly his avuncular arm dropped from her shoulder. ‘I don’t blame him. He was on a mission and he was duped.’ But he never spoke to her again and she has never returned to Vienna.
After that experience, ‘I had to be dragged kicking and screaming’ into another Holocaust commemoration: the project, launched last year, for a memorial and learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens overlooked by the Palace of Westminster. Whiteread’s design is an ingenious doubling of an already standing monument to the slavery abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton, but with lantern lights illuminating the learning space below, though it’s up against stiff competition including (full disclosure) one with which I’m associated.
Inevitably, before we part, we try to speak about the horror of Grenfell Tower, its charred architectural inside-out still standing, a colossal black tomb, above west London. Snagged in her memory is the series of prints she made in the 1990s called Demolished of the organised destruction of Hackney tower blocks. Before they were demolished, Whiteread asked to tour the doomed blocks, climbed twenty-eight storeys to the top floor, then descended to inspect on the ground floor the tied bundles of dynamite laid so the buildings would crumple in on themselves. The recollection trips painfully over itself. For once, with Grenfell on our minds, words fail us both.
But for all her reflectiveness on the play between vitality and mortality, her studio is packed with beautiful things, large and small, delicate and powerful, some of them in the bright colours she has recently worked with and many of them going to the Tate Britain show. As if to correct clichés about her having one string to her bow (however beautifully played), she contrasts herself with artists such as Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin (both admired), who really did do only one thing. ‘Look around,’ she says, ‘and you’ll see silver, bronze, wax, resin, paper. I’ve made this language and now I can play around with all the elements.’
She does indeed engage in her own way with almost all the materials fashioning the lived spaces of the world. But in a contemporary art culture where forgettable whimsies jostle for their tinny fifteen minutes, she is always going to go for subjects, big or small, that cut to the quick of human existence: time, memory, the space we inhabit, and what remains when it’s our turn to head for the exit. ‘I always wanted to confer immortality on the quotidian,’ she says. And after all, making the ordinary extraordinary is itself the true work of art.