Rachel Whiteread

Interview by Michael Archer

from Audio Arts Volume 12, Number 1, 1992

Transcript

Rachel Whiteread’s first international exposure came in Harald Szeemann’s ‘Einleuchten’ at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen in 1989. Since then she has exhibited widely both in Britain and abroad. Notable in Britain was her inclusion in the 1990 British art Show and her work ‘Ghost’ a plaster cast of an entire room, made initially for Chisenhale Gallery, London, and now in the Saatchi collection. Whiteread talks here prior to going as one of the five British artists included in this summer’s ‘Documenta IX’.

Michael Archer: You’ve been selected as one of the five British artists for Documenta. Are you making work for that now?

Rachel Whiteread: Yeah, it’s actually in front of us. It’s a plaster cast of the space underneath the floorboards. It’s probably the most formal thing that I’ve made. I think it’s quite difficult to work out what it is.

MA: It is about a foot thick and it covers most of the floor area of the studio here. It’s in long strips about 15 inches wide, the divides between them, I presume, being the support beams.

RW: The gaps are where the joists were, and there’s an imprint of rough wood on the inside. And then on top there’s this very kind of sensitive colouring that’s come off the underside of the floorboards.

MA: Which space did you use to make this cast?

RW: I didn’t want to use any particular room. I wanted it to work with the space in Documenta. Once I had all the floorboards and joists in the studio, I was able to make a plan of a fictitious space. I did a lot of drawings and spent a long time trying to work out what the space was going to be like. I could have had an area for bay windows and other things which would have made it far more literal.

MA: And that would have been a repeat of your piece ‘Ghost’, which was the cast of an entire room.

RW: This piece actually came from the first showing of ‘Ghost’, at Chisenhale. When I took the piece down, there was a kind of map on the floor of where it was. I was using that kind of idea. And I wanted it to be quite sinister as well, in a way. But, by using plaster, I avoided it being too sinister – you know, like mass murderers burying bodies under floorboards or whatever. I’m going to Berlin at the end of June for a year, and the plan is to start making some work in wax when I’m there. I will probably make another floor using wax: a very yellowy wax which is like ear wax or something, rather than white paraffin wax.

MA: You’ve used plaster for the past few years, but recently you’ve begun to work in other materials as well.

RW: After making ‘Ghost’ I really wanted to do something flexible. I was fed up with the pieces being so fragile. I wanted something liberating. I’ve made about eight pieces with rubber, and I think I will continue using it. I want to build up a vocabulary of materials.

MA: Those rubber pieces, the mortuary slabs, were displayed resting up against the wall so they kind of sank down into the wall and along the floor. There is an awareness of the architecture of the space that you’re viewing it in, which seems very sculptural.

RW: I trained at a painting school but I never really painted, after the first year at the Slade. I was using the floor and the walls. I like to do something that specifically fits in a corner, or something that leans against the walls. The bed pieces that I’ve made in rubber were cast flat, but I knew that they weren’t going to stay like that. I was pretty clear about how much it would sag. But it’s always a surprise when I take the things out of the crate to install them somewhere. I like that change from what you see initially to when I’ve actually installed it.

MA: There seems to be a very strong interest in the relationship of the body to the objects that you use – tables, baths, things like that.

RW: I’ve always used found objects, things made for simple, everyday usage. I mean, for instance, beds are completely international, and you just find mattresses up against the wall or rotting in an alleyway or something. And with the first table piece that I made I wanted to give the space underneath the table some sort of authority. Casting it in plaster monumentalises a space that is ignored.

MA: What exactly do you mean by monumentalise? Are you referring to the traditional idea of sculpture as a sort of memorial?

RW: The first cast furniture piece I made was ‘Closet’, which was the space inside a wardrobe. And when I broke it apart and put it up in the studio I just felt this enormous sense of release, that I’d actually been able to make something that was bigger than I was. I’d been struggling for about six years to do that.. It was quite a revelation in some ways.

MA: Yet it was made in manageable parts.

RW: ‘Ghost’ as well was kind of manageable, you know. We didn’t have to have cranes to put it up. It was just done with ladders and muscles.

MA: That first cast piece, ‘Closet’, was covered with black felt.

RW: Yeah, I wanted to try and make it a kind of blackness. That space inside a wardrobe that maybe you sat in when you were a kid. In some of the later pieces I use different kinds of oils and things for separators during casting, which do different things to the surface. The different materials that I used to box the things in became quite important. With the bath pieces I used shuttering, which is a very rough plywood used when digging holes in the road. I like that idea of this space that you dig into, but I was kind of doing the opposite with it. I’m always very careful with those kinds of details. They’re not accidental. I made five pieces using that space beneath the bed, and I used a very coarse hessian in a couple of them, so that the plaster would pick up the hair. So there’s a really kind of unpleasant, uncomfortable surface.

MA: There’s quite often a tension between an unpleasantness – either in the quality of the surface or in the feelings that you get from the object – and the warm surface of the material itself.

RW: People have different reactions to the surface of the plaster, but I think it’s a very warm material which picks up meticulous detail. There are ten or 12 different plasters on the market, but I basically use two – a superfine casting plaster and a whiter, harder plaster. I have made a couple of pieces in dental plaster, which is very different material, and it’s kind of pink or yellow. But something I’ve never done is colour plaster myself.

MA: So, to come back to this work for Documenta, you say that the format of the piece was worked in relationship to the space where you’ll be showing it in Kassell. Does that mean it’s a site-specific work?

RW: No, it doesn’t. I mean, ‘Ghost’ was made specifically for Chisenhale but now it’s at the Saatchi Collection and it looks great there.

MA: There are little cutout areas in opposite corners of the rectangular block, which allow the spectator to be inside the work; that hasn’t occurred in any of the other things. It’s very much more a relationship between the object and the viewer.

RW: With the bath pieces you got very involved with the internal part of the piece. You came up to this white block and looked into it. There were two pieces that I made with sinks, where you were like a giant looking down on a kind of archaeological landscape or something. I think that is something that just crops up every now and again with the work. But with all the pieces, you can look at them quite formally, or you can get completely involved with the surface, or both. I think it’s always something that’s been in the work.

MA: In one of those bath pieces you laid a sheet of glass over the top of the bath. Why did you do that?

RW: I made three bath pieces altogether. The first one was called ‘Ether’ and it had a plughole in it, which I drilled out so there was a hole going through it. The second one was called ‘Valley’, which had glass on top of it where I wanted to make a kind of space for a body, so the whole thing was like a sarcophagus; I wanted to trap that space so it felt claustrophobic. And then the third one, which also had glass on it, had two holes in the glass and two holes in the plaster so that there was a sense of it breathing. I wanted it to have some kind of relief. I remember seeing a documentary on the crypt at Spitalfields church, and they were clearing out lead coffins, which were completely sealed. The bodies inside them had deteriorated so much that there was just this kind of lumpy liquid sloshing about inside. And there was a big scare about unleashing the plague and other dreadful diseases. That was something I was thinking about whilst I was making these pieces. I wanted an open one, a sealed one, and one that could breathe.

MA: There was an earlier piece, ‘The Door’, which was a cast of two doors put together as one block, which was displayed almost up against the wall.

RW: It goes about a foot away from the wall. You can walk round it, but not that many people can fit through that space. Or you have to cock your head to look at it, in quite an awkward way. After that piece was shown here it was in a show in Berlin called ‘Metropolis’, and one of the curators insisted that the piece went in the middle of the room so that you had a full view of the doors. And I was saying, 'No, this isn’t what the piece is.' And he was saying, 'Yes, it is.' And we had a big row and he told me that he was the conductor and I was a mere musician and should listen to him.

MA: How did you feel that ‘Double Take’ went at the Hayward?

RW: I think there was a very interesting selection of artists, but sadly a lot of good artists didn’t show particularly good pieces. I just think it was a shame for the curators and for London, really. The site-specific pieces were very ambitious, but there were problems with every single one of them. It’s kind of tragic that you try to be so ambitious and the art climate in England is such that everyone tries to stop you at every post.

MA: Do you have any thoughts about the general climate in London particularly, and England generally at the moment?

RW: Someone was asking me the other day if I felt that there was a movement going on in London, or in England? And no, I can’t say I think there is. We’re a product of Saatchi’s Britain – self-made people working very much on their own. I can’t really go into the history of that because it hasn’t happened yet. It’s something that we can only think about 20, 30 years’ time. In the 1980s there was this big kind of art boom; it meant that a lot of things were possible that hadn’t been possible before, or people of my generation hadn’t known about before, which was very liberating. But now there's a very kind of depressed atmosphere, and I actually think that’s good. I think a lot of people were making work for the wrong reasons a few years ago. And now it’s the real doers that are going to stay because it’s much harder.