Arts and Design

‘At last, a lockdown masterpiece’ – Rachel Whiteread: Internal Objects review


I bet plenty of us have grappled with metaphorical ghosts in the loneliness and unease of lockdown, with all that uncomfortable time to think. But Rachel Whiteread has quite literally been coming to terms with her Ghost. In 1990, she showed a sculpture of that name at the Chisenhale Gallery in London. It was bought by Charles Saatchi and became an icon of a new kind of British art. A plaster cast of a room in a ordinary old house, Ghost is a memory of a vanished space, complete with touching archaeological imprints of a fireplace, window and door in its frozen, impenetrable surface. From casting Ghost, Whiteread went on to the next step, casting the interior of an entire vacated family home for her 1993 modern masterpiece, House. It stood like a grey concrete revenant on a London green until the council bulldozed it.

In the pandemic, Whiteread has created two alarming, utterly engrossing sculptures that revisit her first hauntings. These deathly white entities have titles that summon up Ghost and then some. They’re called Poltergeist and Doppelgänger. Not just supernatural entities but nasty ones: active, not passive. Where Ghost, owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, simply stands there refusing access or comment, these haunted huts reach out with branch-like fingers to clutch at you.

They were not cast but assembled. Whiteread exhibits two derelict wooden sheds whose broken timber floors, smashed doors, collapsing corrugated metal roofs and food-can lids enigmatically stuck to shattered walls have been invaded by nature. They are ruins you might come across at the bottom of an abandoned garden or in the tangle of an overrun allotment in a wintry wasteland, except she has enveloped everything in bright white paint. Not a single millimetre of brown wood or silver metal shows through the perfect snowy covering.

Untitled (Crinkle-Crankle), part of Internal Objects.
Untitled (Crinkle-Crankle), part of Internal Objects. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian

Whiteread is going right back to her artistic beginnings, and turning them inside out. The power of Ghost and its big sister House is their tragic impenetrability. Poltergeist, created last year, tears the veil asunder and lets us see inside, through apertures big and small. A husk of a door gives a view over the shed’s ruinous floor. Other holes through bent metal sheeting add further glimpses. It looks like someone lived here. Whiteread is telling a story, and it’s a spooky one. The vanished inhabitant seems to have practised some roughshod religion, nailing flattened cans to the walls as arcane symbols. The tinned food suggests an attempt to survive after some catastrophic global disaster. And the attempt has failed.

It is an apocalyptic shed. Works on the gallery walls confirm this premonition. They had me imagining future archaeologists’ attempts to make sense of our lives. Notepapers are pinned to boards as in a busy home. But the scribblings, the kids’s drawings, they have all gone. The pieces of paper are blank. More disturbing still, they are buried in blocks of transparent resin.

Doppelgänger, 2020–2021.
Doppelgänger, 2020–2021. Photograph: Jill Mead/the Guardian

This has been the strangest year for art. We have been physically closed off from it – and now have the ludicrous situation of such commercial galleries as the Gagosian reopening, while public museums must wait until at least 17 May. In the absence of art, we have argued about it, over public statues and what museums were left by previous generations. But what’s got lost is any sense of art as mystery, as poetry, as the inexplicable.

Here it is. Where Poltergeist lets you look inside Whiteread’s bad dreams, her new masterpiece Doppelgänger, completed this year, lets them explode into space. The shed has burst apart, like a festering wound. Approaching its tangle of stuff, with a makeshift sail of fencing wire flowing above the wreck and roots and branches of trees strewn like bodies on its frail timbers, it looks almost like a raft at sea – specifically, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Approaching, I could swear a tree branch with a finger-like fork splayed out of the assemblage was a human arm dangling in the sea.

The German Romantics coined the term Doppelgänger to mean an uncanny supernatural double of ourselves. Whiteread’s Doppelgänger is the deathly mirror of our common disaster. A broken world, where the last survivors marked time on tinned food until they too were gone and nature overwhelmed their relics of crappy metal. We’re not quite there. But we’ve had a glimpse of the end, as if through translucent layers of resin. This, finally, is great lockdown art.



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.