Rachel Whiteread's 'House'. LondonReview by: Richard ShoneThe Burlington Magazine, Vol. 135, No. 1089 (Dec., 1993), pp. 837-838Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/885799 .

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS

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53. 1932 (Au Chat Botte'), by Ben Nicholson. Oil and pencil on board, 92.5 by 122 cm. (Manchester City Art Galleries, exh. Tate Gallery, London).

ironic in so far as their naivety is entirely at odds with the sophistication of the still lifes. Despite Lewison's emphasis on the landscape affinities of the late reliefs, the theme emerges from this exhibition as a subsidiary one in Nicholson's art.

In the majestic still lifes which he began to make in 1949, the table - fractured, multi-legged, vertical or horizontal - is both converted into and set within the landscape, less a support for objects than a zone of creativity, an evocation of the artist's private space, the studio. Unlike the still lifes of the 1930s these are un- gendered, the objects becoming linear echoes of cubist vessels, enlarged almost

to mural scale. They presage a return to the formalism of the late reliefs, though perhaps we may read, in the intensively worked surfaces where colour and support are united, an oblique reference to the rhetoric of the gesture, an unacknowledged incursion of the body. Unfortunately the drawings of the later years are largely omitted, though there is enough to show that as an idiosyncratic architectural draughtsman Nicholson was unparalleled, revealing the same qualities of engagement as in the paintings of 1931-33.

Nicholson's status remains unresolved by this admirable exhibition and must perhaps await further study of the archival material. It indicates that he was a more complex and richer artist than the formalist account has allowed. What is clear is that we should look much more closely at his relationship with cubism and especially Picasso; we may then come to situate him within 'English cubism' rather than under the well-worn but restrictive rubric of a 'St Ives artist'.

MARGARET GARLAKE

IH. READ: Art and Industry, London [1934], p.39. 2Idem: Contemporary British Art, Harmondsworth

[1951], p.32. 3Virginia Button's essay 'Spreading the Word' is a detailed study of Nicholson's attention to the many 'publications that helped to consolidate his reputation'. See the present exhibition's catalogue: Ben Nicholson. By Jeremy Lewison, with essays by Virginia Button, 277 pp. incl. 135 col. pls. and 135 b. & w. ills. (Tate Gallery, London, 1993), ?19.95. ISBN 1-85437-130- 4. Subsequent references are to this catalogue unless otherwise stated. 4It travels to the Musee d'Art Moderne, St Etienne, 10th February to 25th April. Further paintings were to be seen at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, 5th October to 6th November; a selection of etchings was at Marlborough Graphics, London, 16th September to 15th October. 5Housed in the Tate Gallery Archive, it is due to become generally available in 1994. 6He wrote of his mother, Mabel Pryde, who gave up her career for her children: 'I owe her absolutely everything' (letter to H. Read, 25th September, 1944, Tate Archive). 7E.g. in N. LYNTON: Ben Nicholson, London [1993], p.91.

54. 1968 (Delos 2), by Ben Nicholson. Carved board, 204 by 118.6 cm. (Private collection; exh. Tate Gallery, London).

8Compare Auberge de la Sole Dieppoise 1932 (see H. READ: Ben Nicholson, Paintings, Drawings, Reliefs, London [1948; 1955], vol.1, no.63) where the head is more recognisably Hepworth's and where Nicholson's much-cited formal explanation (p.210) equally applies. 1932 (head with guitar) (no.22) shows a comparable head and painted guitar on a table. 9In 1933 (collage with Spanish postcard) (no.39) the guitar is signalled by the upended postcard on which buildings replicate its shape, a particularly cubist, punning use of collage. '01932 (painting) (no.21) and 1933 (composition in black and white) (no.41) repeat the theme of the outlined body on a notional table which frames it and on which it is incised: the fabric of 'body' and 'table- support' are identical. Lewison acknowledges the possibility of human imagery, referring in the latter to 'the incised circle representing either the aperture in a guitar or a breast' (p.215). " The Stones of Rimini in which Stokes set out his distinction between carving and modelling was first published in 1934; Nicholson's 'first completed relief was made by December 1933, but he designed the jacket for the book and they could have discussed its content prior to publication. Stokes understood carving to be a gendered (male) activity: 'Man, in his male aspect, is the cultivator or carver of woman who, in her female aspect, moulds her products as does the earth'. 'The stone block is female'. 'The sculptor is led to woo the marble.' (ed. New York [1969], p.110-11).

London Rachel Whiteread's 'House'

By the time this review appears, Rachel Whiteread's House may have been demol- ished.* This would be a great shame, for it is a haunting and effective public sculp- ture perfectly suited to its site (Fig.55). Grove Road, in the Globe Town area of Bow, East London, is a typical street in its mix of open space and new and old build- ings, re-shaped by Second War bombing and subsequent piecemeal development. Of the original late nineteenth-century terrace along the west side, only three of the houses remained. It was here that Whiteread, a Londoner born in 1963, chose to carry out her most ambitious work so far, no less than a complete casting in concrete of the inside of one of the houses. The then shell of the original building, including doors and window panes, was removed, leaving a slightly smaller edifice than was originally there. The house is entirely typical of the neighbourhood, with its bay window and front door perched above street level to provide a capacious basement, and a lean-to at the back leading onto a narrow strip of garden (now part of the surrounding grassed-over public space).

The casting process reveals the house's numerous small fire-grates which jut out from one side; some colouring from the interior walls has adhered to the concrete; window panes thrust out from their glazing bars. Everywhere, inverted details add disorientation to the utterly familiar out- line. The work echoes the potency of demolition sites where fireplaces, wall- paper, brackets and fixtures are momen- tarily revealed as one house follows another, felled by sledgehammer and ball-and-chain. The cast itself is the colour of the dust that follows demolition and its planned destruc-

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS

55. House, by Rachel Whiteread. 1993. Concrete. Installed November 1993, at Globe Road, Bow, East London.

tion underlines the element of time that is crucial to Whiteread's conception.

House is a memorial to memory, an East End family home (latterly 'an eyesore') in which the spaces actually lived in constitute the work, rather than the bricks and mor- tar that sheltered its residents. It does not commemorate public events or individual achievements - for all we know any kind of unsavoury or banal life may have existed here. Some people have seen the work as a memorial to the kind of life lived in the area, as a survival from the Blitz, as an embodiment of tenacious hanging on. Certainly House has about it both seediness and hauteur as, for the last time, transformed, sepulchral, it rears its pale bulk above the street in a defiant gasp before it too be- comes simply a memory. At the same time it seems to speak, paradoxically, of reti- cence, of keeping itself to itself- how often were curtains twitched at these windows, how often was a knock at the door ignored? Its inviolability is exposed from the space being turned inside out, its living history entombed in concrete. It is a fragile monu- ment, both eloquent and inscrutable.

Whiteread's triumph in House lies in her having produced, through the most straightforward of means, an object both general and highly particular in its reson- ance. Tampering with little, she has ap- plied the process of casting, familiar from

all her work, in order to see what would happen. She did this in her 1990 Ghost, her one-room interior of a north London house, and she has done it to the humblest of objects such as a hot-water bottle - with astonishing results. Her choices com- bine formal simplicity, demotic images and a complex possibility of feeling. She can be bleak but the anxious dereliction of her images is a taste worth acquiring. She is urban and contemporary in her sensibility but illumines a shared domestic past with no trace of nostalgia or sentimentality. Rooms, baths, furniture encapsulate col- lective memory yet spark in each viewer a volley of subjective allusions. At the same time she has a clear-eyed concern for the integrity of the object as object, not as metaphor, chameleon or poetic half-breed. In House, her most spectacular work to date and one with a show-stopping am- bition as befits its site, she has fused public and private, materiality and memory, brute fact and poignant evocation. I hope the sculpture remains.

RICHARD SHONE

*If it is allowed to stay, House can be seen near the corner of Grove Road and Roman Road, London E.8.. It is the result of a commission from Artangel and Beck's. A publication recording the work is due out in early 1994.

Birmingham Canaletto and England

Canaletto and England (to 9th January) is a splendid exhibition with which to open the former Gas Hall as an extension of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The new areas have been so arranged as to provide a spacious setting for an outstanding display of works of art: sensibly chosen, lucidly spaced and sensi- tively lit while allowing one - quite a rare experience nowadays - to see drawings clearly. It could be claimed that such large pictures as Canaletto's Old Horse Guards (no. 19) and its original companion, Samuel Scott's Tower of London (no.45), are hung a shade too low. The eye should look along the greensward or the water rather than down on to it.

If British Gas also sponsored the excellent catalogue, which is practical in scope and size, it is further to be congratulated. The editors, Michael Liversidge and Jane Far- rington, have been at pains to provide in- formation and comments essential for the 'general reader' and sensitive interpretation for the advanced student. That they have omitted almost entirely conventional cat- egories of information on provenance, 'lit.', and exhibition history is understandable and is only momentarily frustrating in looking at the works by Canaletto himself. All the works shown are illustrated.

The entries on the main groups of pic- tures and drawings - and this is, above all, an exhibition in which the drawings are of supreme importance - are interspersed with brief essays. Liversidge provides a very good account of Canaletto's work in England. He rightly points to Canaletto's painting for Northumberland House as 'a key work in the development of the urban street scene in English topography' and it is profoundly to be regretted that neither this picture nor the no less crucial - and enchanting - Windsor Castle was lent by the Duke of Northumberland. They had been lent without demur to the great exhi- bition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1989. Brian Allen's account of Venetian painters in England in the earlier eighteenth century is an equally useful summary of their activities and, in particular, of their standing, aims, patrons and success (or lack thereof). David Alexander's piece on Canaletto and the English print market is particularly useful in this context, although no prints are included in the exhibition. Mark Hallett's essay, 'Framing the Modern City', is less illuminating. He bases his thesis on the remarkable statement that Canaletto enjoys today 'a curiously inert and undeveloped identity in the history of art' and claims that art-historians recently have concentrated on establishing a secure chronology, ignoring by implication the research done by Corboz and others on Canaletto's method. And it is difficult to read with sympathy a piece which claims that, in the great Whitehall and the Privy Garden (no.9) from Goodwood, Canaletto is offering 'a new pictorial definition of aristocratic authority in the metropolitan environment', a reconciliation between 'signs of elite status with the spaces of

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