Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment is a view of a mind at work
Still breaking the mould
Britain’s biggest art mystery was solved yesterday - Rachel Whiteread has filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with thousands of boxes. Why? She talks exclusively to Gordon Burn
But Whiteread’s cardboard boxes are to boxes what Carl Andre’s notorious Tate firebricks are to … well, bricks. “I wanted to start with something that was as dumb and inert as I could find that wasn’t a brick,” she says, perhaps pointedly. The maker of House and the Holocaust Memorial, she speaks as somebody who has been through the wringer of public controversy. In the weeks leading up to the unveiling of her Turbine Hall installation, she has been desperate to avoid cooked-up tabloid outrage of the kind that led to Andre’s bricks being doused with blue vegetable dye and to the conservative commentator Paul Johnson referring to supporters of contemporary art as “brickies”.
For the time being, she remains “completely braced”. “In the early stages, when I was still making collages and just working all this stuff through,” she says, “I had to try to figure out whether or not it was really dumb; just too stupid to do - ‘Is that all she could come up with, a cardboard box!’ But after about three months mulling it over, it struck me that if I could find a way of making these boxes in totally mass production, then I could make it work. So that you could make the inside of the Turbine Hall almost like landscape, as well as like this massive storage area.
“I don’t think it’s going to be like a room full of cardboard boxes. It’s going to be a room, I would imagine, full of light and space and built elements, and you’ll figure out what they are, but it might take a bit of time to do that. It’s going to be a spectacle, and theatrical, and it has to be. It’s the only way to deal with that space. And I have to make that jump. That’s what I’ve done. And that is how it has to be done.”
Whiteread lives and works in a former synagogue in east London. Parts of Bethnal Green have been “chi-chified”, as she describes it, but it remains raw. “We still have prostitutes standing on our corner, and people crapping round the back of buildings,” she says. “The charms are still there.”
But inside her own space the atmosphere is almost sepulchral. The studios are big and airy and silent. She has made it that way. She started out on her own with small objects and pieces of furniture that she had foraged for in local junk shops or dragged in off the street. She cast their insides and undersides in damp-looking, mottled white plaster whose surfaces registered all the signs of wear and tear - dust, snot, wads of gum, dents and makeshift repairs - that the bric-a-brac had accumulated in the course of its life, and which would have remained unrecognised, and certainly unmemorialised, without her intervention.
She associated the casts of wardrobes, tables and sad single beds that were among her earliest pieces with her childhood in Muswell Hill in north London; working alone in her studio, casting objects with which she was familiar, connected her to her family. Yellow Leaf, for example, was the cast of a table similar to the Formica-topped extendible one that her grandmother had kept in her kitchen. Shallow Breath was the cast of the underside of the bed on which, according to her mother, she was born.
Her eureka moment came in 1990 with Ghost, a plaster cast of the “mummified air” inside a room in a Victorian house in Archway Road, similar to the one in which she grew up. Ghost looked like a catafalque or a tomb. There were echoes of Reginald Christie and 10 Rillington Place. She once worked in Highgate cemetery fixing lids back on to crumbling coffins, and she would go on to explore an interest in the macabre, with urine-coloured castings of mortuary slabs and hair-clogged sinks. When I was working on a book about the West murders in Gloucester in the mid-90s, she indicated that she might be interested in visiting the house in Cromwell Street where a number of bodies of girls and young women had been buried under the patio and in the cellar, but then apparently had second thoughts. “While I was deliberating about whether to go or not, I dreamed that I was a wall in the house, like the image in Polanski’s Repulsion,” she later said. “I dreamed I witnessed the horrific events of the past 15 years. I woke up screaming and decided not to go.”
Charles Saatchi bought Ghost. Whiteread was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 1991, and became the first woman to win it two years later. It was then that the art world - “a carnival with a casino attached”, as somebody once described it - came slowly seeping, and then rushing in. 1993 was also the year of House, a project with serious political and social overtones that nevertheless saw her catapulted out of the arts ghetto and into the maw of the tabloids, an arena where Damien Hirst and his more frolicsome contemporaries were already at play.
Unlike them, Rachel Whiteread didn’t go to Goldsmiths. This was more or less the first thing she ever said (hissed, really) into my tape recorder. She went to the Slade. Nevertheless, along with Hirst, she was part of Young British Artists 1 at the Saatchi gallery in March 1992, the show that gave a name to a new, cocky, very un-English approach to making art, and history will always lump her in with the YBAs. And for a while, like everybody else, she was swept up in the mood of boosterism and celebration. “But I just wasn’t from that same mould, you know?” she says now. “I just had come from a different place.”
Her mother Pat was an artist, a socialist and a great supporter of the feminist cause. Her father was a geography teacher who later worked as a polytechnic administrator, and was a lifelong supporter of the Labour party. Their serious approach has rubbed off and has earned Whiteread a reputation in some quarters as an earnest individual. I recently ran into the photographer, Johnnie Shand Kydd. He was looking triumphant. “I’ve just been to take a picture of Rachel,” he said, “and I got her to smile!” In 1997, Shand Kydd brought out a collection of pictures taken in the eye of the Britart maelstrom, and although she was around - “I partied along with everybody else. We all partied hard” - Whiteread doesn’t crop up in any of them. (Well, there is one, but it’s a straightforward, straight-faced portrait in her studio.)
The truth is she is warm, if slightly guarded, and laughs easily. “I think the difference between me and some of the other YBAs was that I was ambitious for the work, and not ambitious for myself. You know, personally. And I think that’s quite a big difference. Of course, it was interesting watching people like Damien really playing the media; just working out how to do it, and doing it. And he did it very well, actually. I just wasn’t so interested in all of that.”
Interestingly, she makes a link between her own generation and British artists of the prewar years, and nominates an unexpected pacesetter: Henry Moore. “A few years ago I went to Moore’s studio, and it’s kind of fascinating going there, because you see there’s a few sheds and outbuildings that have fake skies painted on the walls on the inside. And I was asking: ‘What’s that about?’ And they said, ‘Oh, that’s for the maquettes.’ They used to make the maquettes, then photograph them very low, like Albert Speer when he wanted to persuade Hitler to build whatever. Then Moore would go over to Canada, America, Australia, with the photograph, and say, ‘I’ve got one of these, one of these, or one of these. Which one d’you like?’ So he was the first British artist, I would say, that . . . you know, a hustler. People that really know how to get it all working for them. It’s why there’s a Henry Moore on every street corner in every city.”
She says that after she had completed the Holocaust Memorial for Judenplatz in Vienna in 2000, she felt she was under great pressure to become, in the Moore tradition, a career memorial-maker. “But I don’t do that. I don’t work like that. I’ve made four public sculptures, and people think you’re producing products. But I think a lot of the time, making good pieces of work is a completely cathartic process. It’s about the whole life; its about all experience; it’s about everything that happens. And if you can channel it out somehow . . .”
The Holocaust Memorial was a draining experience. It was a political and bureaucratic minefield, and took five years to achieve. At the same time, the 13-tonne sculpture that she had been commissioned to make for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, the plinth itself inverted and cast in Perspex, was being dogged by what seemed like insurmountable technical problems, and she was constantly flying around the world repairing pieces and installing shows. When she moved house, she made the decision to step away from her role as hands-off executive “producer” of large public sculptures and to go back to her original, solitary studio practice. “I was feeling, not that my touch had necessarily gone, but it was all a bit out of control and I just wanted to go back into the studio. I think I wanted this studio to be my studio, rather than me and my assistants. I didn’t want all the chaos of the last place. It was mine, and I wanted it to be mine; and to do that, I had to physically make the work in it, and so it was a case of trying to work out what that was.”
Fixed to the wall of the room that fills the upper space of the former synagogue in Bethnal Green are two mementos of Whiteread’s past: one is the battered box her family’s Christmas decorations used to be stored in while she was growing up. The other is a set of photographs of the interiors of three cardboard boxes, ascending in size, each box containing a broken Pyrex bowl. This is an artwork made by Pat Whiteread, who went into hospital for a standard investigative procedure two years ago, but died.
Whiteread was devastated by her mother’s death, which happened to coincide with other major upheavals in her life: moving house, moving studio, the arrival of a son. “My mother’s house was still full up of stuff. And my house was still full up of stuff from having moved and still having the builders in. So I was in this place of literally not being able to unpack my life, my mum’s life - my parents’ lives.
“She’d lived where she was for about 10 years; not really a long time. But a lot of stuff that she’d never unpacked from before just stayed in the basement. So there was layers of stuff down there that was very peculiar going through. All our toys. All very mouldy. Everything I looked at looked like a still from a film. A film of my life. And I felt I was going mad. Because every single thing had a significance - connections and associations which you couldn’t stop. And I really thought: I’m going to go insane here if this carries on. It did subside. But you know in movies when they do a fast flashback of things, like in Terminator … If that had gone on for a long period, I think I would have ended up in therapy. Because I really was thinking: I can’t live the rest of my life having to repeat these memories. I really couldn’t do that.”
The realisation that the cardboard boxes, where much of her past and present life were stored, could be turned into sculpture, crept up on her slowly. She started to become more interested in what had once been in the boxes - cans of soup, bolts of material - than what they currently contained. “I love it when there’s been a circular object, whatever it is, inside,” she says, “and it’s been moved around a lot in transit, so you get these beautiful drawings, circular shapes.”
She had been looking for an object that she could build with and use as a standardised unit, much as Carl Andre had used bricks. She went into what she describes as a “casting frenzy” as soon as she realised cardboard boxes were it. “I became fixated. Looking for boxes, finding very specific ones, working with them, crunching them up more.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, she collects dolls’ houses, old used ones that she buys on eBay. And the boxes they come in - “like a TV box that may have been totally reconfigured - they’ll cut a bit, and then they’ll stick a bit down … They’re people who don’t have any idea about three-dimensional things and practicalities, and the way they do it is in such a fantastic, bodgy way” - have provided her with some of her favourite moulds.
The castings in the installation at Tate Modern are light, translucent skins, which she believes will illuminate the space. The sculptures she has made for her show that opens at the Gagosian gallery in London later this month, on the other hand, are heavy plaster casts. “This is much more my sculpture,” she says, unlocking a ground-floor door. “This is what I do in the studio.”
It looks like a storeroom at first: dusty white boxes piled on pallets and stacked under cheap tables and chairs. Your eye skids over it. There is little sense of display. You can’t tell it is the work. But then its slowness starts to resonate - to impose itself, really. And you are reminded of the groupings of plain flasks and bottles painted for decade after decade in the middle of the last century by Giorgio Morandi, who was nicknamed il monaco, “the monk”. Also of the blank windows of House.
“I had a few years where I was feeling … I suppose a bit mid-career,” Whiteread says. “It happens with everybody who’s been doing anything a certain amount of time: you start scratching your head. And I feel I have refreshed myself”.
? Rachel Whiteread’s exhibition at the Gasgosian gallery, Britannia St, London WC1, runs from Oct 19 to Dec 3
