145» House Rachel Withread Lugar
Fecha
Delegada
2
No
Tecnología
URL
Máquina Arquitectónica
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEtsYIIIfkw
145
Londres (Inglaterra) 1993
Escala
Rachel Whiteread was born in Ilford, Essex, in 1963. Her mother Pat was a Feminist/Socialist artist but at first Rachel wanted to become a doctor. Later she changed her mind and studied at Brighton College of Art as an undergraduate and then as a postgraduate at the Slade School of Art, London. She had her first one-person show in 1988 and within three years she had become a name to reckon with in the art world. In 1992 she spent a year in Berlin on a German scholarship. Her fame and reputation were confirmed in 1993 when she won the Turner Prize, the K Foundation Prize (even though this was for the “worst” artist of the year) and her public sculpture House (1991-94) received massive publicity. There are certain contemporary artists, and Rachel Whiteread is one (Christo is another), who have built whole careers on one idea/ technique. As the artists progress, the concept is generally applied on a larger and larger scale. The idea of using the technique of casting— an ancient and traditional fabrication method—to generate sculptures occurred to Whiteread following a workshop on the subject given by Richard Wilson in Brighton. At the Slade in 1987 she made casts from her own body. Tutors in drawing classes tell their students to pay as
much attention to negative space—the space between objects—as to the objects themselves. In Whiteread’s case, she focused upon the negative spaces inside such things as wardrobes, sinks and rooms by casting their interiors in plaster. Ghost (1988-90), for instance, was a plaster cast of the bedroom of a Victorian house on the Archway Road, North London. Paradoxically, the space was transformed from a void into a sealed block with all the room’s surface details—doors, fireplaces, picture rails, and so on—imprinted on the plaster. The room’s projections and hollows, of course, were reversed in the sculpture. “Melancholy monument” was one critic’s description. An art-historical precedent for casting negative spaces was Marcel Duchamp’s Female Fig Leaf (1951), a plaster cast of a woman’s groin. Such a procedure does not involve certain traditional skills associated with the art of sculpture, that is, modeling or carving, the conceiving and organisation of a sequence of forms in space to represent figures or some kind of narrative. This is because in casting an existing object the shape and iconography are ready-made. This kind of “sculpture” is thus highly conceptual: it depends on the artist’s choice of what negative space to cast and what final material to use. As in the case of House, the artist may not even directly execute the work—that can be contracted out to specialist companies. In so far as the cast is a physical trace of something that previously existed, it is an indexical sign, but it is also an iconic sign because it resembles the original in certain respects. Rachel Whiteread has defended casting against the charge that
Atlas
In 1993 the interior of a house in the East End of London was transformed into a concrete sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. It became notorious, produced very mixed responses and generated much media comment. Despite protests, and to the dismay of many, the construction was demolished in 1994.