The Present Body, the Absent Body, and the Formless

Abstract

Rachel Whiteread's House was always a troublesome work. Its construction in 1993 in London's East End neighborhood of Bow opened a major public debate. Many concerns were raised anew, including complaints against the state of housing and against right-wing conservative racism, issues about the history of the local community and a lost “way of life.” Its destruction three months later only further fueled the existing complaints as well as the ongoing “public sculpture aesthetics” controversy that had surrounded its well-publicized life. Materialized as a palpable imprint of absence, House also seemingly materialized burning issues in British politics, imprinting itself onto the public consciousness. While much of the public furor that accompanied House vanished with the work almost a decade ago, it remains ever present in the arena of contemporary art theory, albeit on a different note. The questions that House raised about the articulation of memory as a displacement of past into present, the tracing of absence, and the dialogue between the viewer's body and the materiality of the object remain as pertinent as ever for any serious study of sculpture and memory. It is in this context that I propose to revisit House, with the hope of productively reopening some of these questions.