The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Rachel Whiteread · House, 193 Grove Road, Bow, East London · a cast in concrete of the interior of a Victorian terraced house, the last of its terrace still standing, made by spraying concrete inside the stripped house and then removing its brick, its roof and its outer fabric, so that the space of its rooms stood solid on the house’s own foundations, every inner surface turned outward · made in the autumn of 1993, commissioned and produced by Artangel, and demolished by order of the local council in January 1994 · the unit scored is the work as made and as recorded: the cast as it stood on its site, and the record of photographs, press and television coverage and one book through which it now stands; nothing of the cast survives
Mode
A temporary public sculpture at the scale of a dwelling: the interior of one house cast in concrete on its own site, its outer fabric removed, commissioned to stand for a season and not kept
Mythos
The death mask, taken from a dwelling at its ending; the house as the first figure of the self and the family, turned to the tomb; the unhomely made literal, a presence that is only the shape of an absence
Phase
Made in the autumn of 1993; ridiculed and fought over in the council and the press through the winter; demolished by order of the council in January 1994; now held in record
Presentation
A solid of grey concrete standing alone on cleared ground, the shape of a house with none of its openings: windows as blind slabs, fireplaces as projecting blocks, door frames, skirtings, sockets and switches as recessed or raised marks on the skin
Register
A cold, funereal, uncanny grandeur; the stillness of a mausoleum, and the small shock of the familiar seen from the wrong side
Scale
One house, the last of its terrace, on one site, for one winter
Governing Proposition
In the autumn of 1993 Rachel Whiteread filled the inside of a Victorian terraced house in Bow, East London, the last of its terrace still standing, with concrete, and then had the house taken away from around it. What stood on the foundations at 193 Grove Road was the space of the rooms made solid, every inner surface turned outward: blind slabs where the windows had been, fireplaces jutting as blocks, the marks of door frames, skirtings, sockets and switches on a grey skin. It could not be entered. It stood through the winter on cleared ground while it was ridiculed and fought over in the council and the press, and in January 1994 the council had it demolished. The wager of the work is that one operation, fill the space and remove the walls, applied to one ordinary house at the moment of its ending, will make the home visible as the thing nobody outside it sees, and that a monument to an erased street can itself be erased and still stand, in its record.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Rachel Whiteread, born in London in 1963, made House in the autumn of 1993 at 193 Grove Road, Bow, in East London. The house was a Victorian terraced house, and it was the last of its terrace still standing. The work was commissioned and produced by Artangel, under James Lingwood, to stand in public on the house’s own site. Three years before, in Ghost (1990), Whiteread had cast in plaster the interior of a single room in a house in north London. House took that method from one room to a whole dwelling, and from the gallery to the street.
The operation was one. The inside of the house was stripped back and sprayed with concrete; then the brick, the roof and the outer fabric were taken away, and what was left stood on the house’s foundations: the space of its rooms made solid, every inner surface turned outward. The window openings came out as blind slabs. The fireplaces came out as blocks projecting from the wall. Door frames, skirtings, sockets and switch plates came out as recessed or raised marks on a grey skin. Nothing on it opened.
Each part of the result is set by the house, not by the artist. The fireplaces, the window bays, the stair and the switches are there because the house had them, and none could be absent without falsifying the cast. Take away the site, and the work is an object in a gallery, a large Ghost. Take away the fact that this was the last house of its terrace, and it loses its witness. Take away the public ground, and it loses the dispute through which it spoke. What could have been otherwise is the choice of this house over another, and circumstance made that.
Movement II
It stood alone on cleared ground through the winter, a grey mass with the shape of a house and none of its openings: the scale of a dwelling at the density of a tomb. The photographs of it in winter light, against the towers beyond, carry a dread close to the sublime of ruins. On its faces the inside of the house can be read from outside, the fireplaces and the stair standing out where they had been set in, and the effect recurs as a small shock each time it is seen: the familiar from the wrong side. There is a stillness in it near the mausoleum.
The elevation is real, and it is of one kind. It is sustained rather than renewed, and the response it draws is often nearer to unease and recognition than to transport. It is known now only through photographs, which carry the image and not the weight. What the walk round it gave, the mass, the weather, a house the size of a house that could not be entered, is not in them.
The making is exact where it bears load. The house was chosen for standing alone. The method carried a plaster cast of one room to a concrete cast of a dwelling, and the engineering let a cast of space stand on its own when the walls were gone. The surfaces were kept faithful, so that a fireplace, a window frame or a switch reads at once, and the concrete was left grey, neither polished nor dressed. The hand, by the nature of the method, is the house’s as much as the artist’s: the surface is an impression, without the finer finish of her casts in resin and plaster, and the repertoire, decisive as it is, is narrow and was used once at full scale.
Movement III
Casting is the technique of the death mask, and the work is a death mask of a house: the impression of a dwelling taken at the moment of its ending. The house is the first figure of the self and of the family, and by one operation, without allusion, it becomes the tomb, the dwelling of the dead. The unhomely is made literal, the home turned inside out. The ghost of the earlier title remains here as structure: a presence that is only the shape of an absence. Take away the death mask and the work is a sculpture of a house; take away the tomb and it is a block.
These are built, not brought by the viewer. What holds them is the particular. This was one ordinary house at 193 Grove Road, kept so faithfully itself that it bears little more, and the funerary reading is shared with the whole art of casting.
The form is what the work knows. As a gallery object, a cast of a house would know about space; on its site, as the last of its terrace, it knows about this house, this street and their erasure. As a carving or a model it would represent a house; as a cast it is the house’s own impression, every mark indexed to the lives lived against it. Permanent, it would be a memorial; temporary, it enacts the loss it records, and its demolition completes the form. Even its survival as photographs suits it, a house remembered by images of it. The temporariness was a condition of the commission as much as a choice, and the cast of one room in Ghost already knew much of this.
Movement IV
What the work brings into the open can be stated. The inside of a home, which nobody outside could see, was made public and solid and turned to face the street; what it showed was not the lives but the room they left, the space as a thing. It showed the home as absence: the windows blind, the door a block, dwelling disclosed by being made impossible. And it showed the East End in its clearances: a terrace of working families demolished street by street, its last trace made a monument and then, by the same council, removed. Much of the force is mood, elegy and the uncanny, and the social condition is carried partly by circumstance, not built by the form.
The circumstance was loud. The work was ridiculed and fought over in the council and in the press, and the quarrel became part of what it said: a city arguing over whether its own memory was worth keeping, on the object itself. On the evening of 23 November 1993 Whiteread received the Turner Prize, the first woman to do so, and on the same evening the K Foundation named her the worst artist of the year. What she brought to that ground was the casting of negative space, which Bruce Nauman had made a sculptural act in the 1960s, the Minimalist block, and the British public monument placed by commission. The departure was of scale and of place, not of kind, since the method was hers and proven: a proposition of the studio set at the size of a dwelling, on its site, in public, without permission to stay.
One law governs it: inversion and removal. A light switch, the smallest trace of a hand on a wall, and the council’s order that pulled the whole down obey it alike, for every element is what is left when something is taken away. The rooms are solid because the air was replaced; the house is visible because its walls were removed; the windows are blind because the glass is gone; the street is gone because the terrace was cleared; and the work is now record because the work is gone. The interior is outside, the private public, the absent present, the dwelling a tomb. The range runs from the mark of a fitting to a city’s housing policy, though some of it is supplied by circumstance, the council and the prize, rather than governed by the work.
Movement V
In January 1994 the council had it demolished. It had stood for a matter of weeks, and nothing of it remains. What stands is the record: photographs of the work on its site, the press and television coverage of the dispute, and a book published by Artangel with Phaidon in 1995. The record carries the form clearly, the inversion, the mass and the site. It does not carry the encounter: the mass in its weather, the walk round a house that could not be entered. That is a larger loss than for a work that consists in a choice. A monument to an erased street was itself erased, and the record is the form it now takes.
Its force is a reorganisation of the public monument: made by casting absence, temporary by design, of an ordinary dwelling and not of a hero, standing for a vanished street. It made negative space a public and architectural language, and the temporary commission in public a form that could carry national argument. Its reach grows on in the maker’s own later memorial work; it is among the references of the counter-monument and the memorial of absence since; and Artangel’s later ambitious temporary commissions took their standing from it. The reach is chiefly British and memorial. The questions it keeps open are real: a memorial to what, a house, a class or the act of dwelling; whether the demolition was its defeat or its completion; who owns a city’s memory. Much of the return is to the episode and its debate, and the photographs, once read, read the same.
Beside it on this desk stand A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, at 8.0, a temporary work destroyed by design and known by record, which it passes on survival and on law; The Weather Project, at 7.7, and The Gates, at 7.4, other temporary works it stands above; Spiral Jetty, at 8.5, a larger claim on its field, which still stands; and the Jewish Museum Berlin, at 8.6, whose voids share its idea of absence in a building that stands. It sits in Tier IV, held from the summit on every condition of the Epochal Gate. The last house of a terrace was filled, its walls were taken away, and in January the council took away the rest.
Act III · The Twelve
The work is one operation applied to one thing: fill the space, then remove the walls. Each part of the result is set by the house and not by the artist. The fireplaces, the window bays, the stair and the marks of the switches are there because the house had them, and none could be absent without falsifying the cast. Take away the site and the work becomes an object in a gallery, a large Ghost; take away the fact that this was the last house of its terrace and it loses its witness; take away the public ground and it loses the dispute through which it spoke. Even its brevity reads as required: a monument to an erased house, itself erased. What yields is the choice of this house over another, which circumstance made.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What the work brings into the open can be stated. First, the private space of a home made public and solid: the inside of a terraced house, which nobody outside could see, turned out to face the street, and what is shown is not the lives but the room they left, the space as a thing. Second, the home as absence: the windows are blind and the door is a block, so that dwelling is disclosed by being made impossible. Third, the condition of the East End in its clearances: a terrace of working families demolished street by street, and its last trace made a monument and then, by the same council, removed. Held below the gate because much of the force is mood, elegy and the uncanny, and the social condition is carried partly by circumstance rather than built by the form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is real and of one kind: a cold, funereal, uncanny grandeur. A grey mass stands alone on cleared ground with the shape of a house and none of its openings, the scale of a dwelling at the density of a tomb. The photographs of it in winter light, against the towers beyond, carry a dread close to the sublime of ruins, and the fireplaces and the stair, legible on the outside, give a recurring small shock: the familiar seen from the wrong side. There is a stillness in it near the mausoleum. What holds the axis is frequency and register: one effect, sustained rather than renewed; a response often closer to unease and recognition than to transport; and a work known now only in reproduction, which carries the image and not the weight.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Here the archetype is built, not evoked. Casting is the technique of the death mask, and the work is a death mask of a house: the impression of a dwelling taken at the moment of its ending. The house is the first figure of the self and the family, and by one operation, without allusion, it becomes the tomb, the dwelling of the dead. The unhomely is made literal, the home turned inside out, and the ghost of the earlier work stays here as structure: a presence that is only the shape of an absence. These are load-bearing. Held below the gate because the particular, one ordinary house at 193 Grove Road, is kept almost too faithfully particular to bear more, and the funerary reading belongs to the whole art of casting.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The inheritance: the casting of negative space, which Bruce Nauman had made a sculptural act in the 1960s; the Minimalist block and its refusal of the figure; the British public monument, and public art paid for and placed by commission. The departure: to take a proposition of the studio and the gallery, space as solid, and set it at the full scale of a dwelling, on its own site, in public, without permission to stay, so that the sculpture is also an event in a city’s life. The stake was real and was paid: the work was ridiculed, fought over in the council and the press, and pulled down. Held below the gate because the method was her own and proven in Ghost three years before: the swerve is of scale and of place, not of kind.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. As a gallery object a cast of a house would know about space; on its site, as the last of its terrace, it knows about this house and this street and their erasure. As a carving or a model it would represent a house; as a cast it is the house’s own impression, every mark indexed to the lives that made it. Permanent, it would be a memorial; temporary, it enacts the loss it records, and the demolition completes the form it would otherwise only describe. The inversion is the instrument: the space lived in made the thing that cannot be entered. Held below the top because the temporariness was a condition of the commission as much as a choice, and the cast of one room in Ghost already knew much of it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: thirty-three years, and the axis is partly forecast. The questions it has sustained are real. Is it a memorial, and to what: a house, a class, a way of life, the act of dwelling? Was its demolition a defeat or its completion? What is a public sculpture that cannot be kept, and who owns a city’s memory? Is the uncanny it produces Freud’s, or something social, the unhomely of a housing policy? It has stayed in the writing on British art, on memorials and counter-monuments, and on art and the city. But return is now only to a record: no one can go back to the object, and the photographs, once read, read the same. Much of the return is to the episode and its debate rather than to the work’s surface.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The field is British and European sculpture and public art of the early 1990s. Intrinsic force: a real reorganisation of the public monument, made by casting absence, temporary by design, made of an ordinary dwelling and not of a hero, standing for a vanished street. It made negative space a public and architectural language rather than a studio one, and it made the temporary commission in public a form that could carry national argument. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it grows on in the maker’s own later memorial work; the counter-monument and the memorial of absence of the decades since have it among their references; Artangel’s later model of ambitious temporary commissions took its standing from it. The reach is real but chiefly British and memorial, and a line of artists naming it as their starting point is not shown.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at thirty-three years, as made and as recorded. Form: the defining form is legible in the record, and the photographs carry the inversion, the mass and the site clearly. But much of what made the work was its presence on the ground, its mass and its weather, the walk round it; the record holds the image and loses the encounter, a larger loss than for a work that consists in a choice. Presence: continuous in British art’s account of itself since the 1990s, carried by one book, photographs and the story of its destruction; that fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: wholly gone, by demolition within weeks. The span alone would place the figure well above this one; the clear and abundant record holds it near 8.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged as command of casting, to the same standard as any medium. The decisions are exact and load-bearing: a house chosen for standing alone; a method, concrete sprayed inside an emptied shell and the shell then taken away, carried from a plaster cast of a single room to a whole dwelling; surfaces kept faithful to the house, so that a fireplace, a window frame or a switch reads at once; the grey of the concrete neither polished nor dressed. The engineering that let a cast of space stand on its own when the walls were gone was achieved. Held below the top because the hand, by the nature of the method, is the house’s as much as the artist’s: the surface is an impression, the finer finish of her casts in resin and plaster is absent, and the repertoire is narrow, used once at full scale.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a light switch, the smallest trace of a hand on a wall, and the council’s order that pulled the whole down. They obey one law: inversion and removal. Every element of the work is what is left when something is taken away. The rooms become solid because the air is replaced; the house becomes visible because its walls are removed; the windows are blind because the glass is gone; the street is gone because the terrace was cleared; and the work becomes record because the work is gone. The interior is outside, the private public, the absent present, the dwelling a tomb, and nothing breaks the law. The range is wide, from the mark of a fitting to a city’s housing policy. Held below the top because some of that range is supplied by circumstance, the council and the prize, rather than governed by the work.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held, in one object: the family and the private life, in the shape of the rooms they lived in; labour and class, in the Victorian working terrace; the city and the state, in the clearance and the council’s will; history, in an old house at the end of a street that had lost its neighbours; death and memory, in the death mask and the tomb; and art and its public, in the dispute that was part of the work’s life. One cast touches them all, because the house is where they met. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that most of them are present as absence and by implication: no person, no story, no nature but the cleared ground around it, no sacred order except as the funerary reading brings it. A wide field held by one form, as a single object can.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.6, then The Inevitable at 8.5, and The Unconcealment and The Made at 8.2. A form in which the cast on its site knows this house and its erasure, and the demolition completes what it records; one law of inversion and removal running from a light switch to the council’s order; parts set by the house and not by the artist, so that almost nothing can be taken away; a disclosure of the home made public, solid and impossible to enter; and a making exact in choice, method and surface.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: the family, class, the city, history, death and the public held by one cast, but most of them as absence and implication, with no person, no story and no nature but the cleared ground. Next above it, The Bottomless Well at 7.7: real questions, partly forecast at thirty-three years, returned to only through a record that reads the same. Then The Sublime and The Imperishable at 7.8: one cold grandeur, sustained rather than renewed and known now in reproduction, and a form legible in an abundant record whose object and encounter are gone.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.2, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.1, The Swerve at 8.0 and The Imperishable at 7.8 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below The Bottomless Well at 7.7, against 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.8, an average of 8.067 that displays 8.1, in Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, where the work’s disclosure, archetype, swerve and reach stand a step below the bar and its survival as record further, and the aggregate, short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work’s record; the work was demolished in January 1994 and cannot now be seen. It is known well in its form, its method and its history, through photographs and accounts, and thinly in its dimensions and the details of its engineering; where a judgment turns on presence on the site it is held more loosely. The work scored is House, by Rachel Whiteread (born 1963), commissioned and produced by Artangel: the concrete cast of the interior of the Victorian terraced house at 193 Grove Road, Bow, East London, made in the autumn of 1993 and demolished by order of the local council in January 1994, as made and as recorded, the cast as it stood on its site and the record through which it now stands. Nothing of the cast stands; what stands is the record, the photographs of the work on its site, the press and television coverage of the dispute, and the book published by Artangel with Phaidon in 1995. The loss is weighed on survival in proportion to what it takes, and on no other axis. Ghost (1990), the plaster cast of a room that established the method, and Whiteread’s later public works are context and are not scored. No words are quoted but the title. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions and weight of the cast, the number of storeys and rooms cast, the armature, the engineers and contractors, the exact dates of completion and of demolition and how long it stood, the sponsor, the editors and contributors of the 1995 book, the dates and votes of the decision to demolish, the intended use of the cleared ground and the history of the house’s last occupant, words reported painted on the work, the sum of the K Foundation’s award, which of Nauman’s casts first took negative space as its subject, the names of the later memorials, and the present whereabouts of Ghost.