Rachel Whitehead, Contained in the Tate?
Arhan Virdi
The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Rachel Whitehead is the sixth artist to receive the Unilever Series commission to fill the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The theme for this year’s project, "Inside Out: Conceal and Reveal," saw Whitehead stack 1400 white polyurethane casts of storage boxes within the 500ft long and 115ft high space. Bemusingly entitled The Embankment, it has immediately attracted a lot of confused reactions. However, a little more consideration readily reveals Whitehead’s exhibit as a very original and talented sculpture.
Large boxes, built up like sugar cube towers, dwell in this huge expanse; piled up in gargantuan stacks some "buildings" are shaped like perfect cubes; others without any specific shape at all, just masses working their way up to the sky–it effortlessly takes on the vibe of a cityscape, exposing streets and passageways between the buildings where viewers can walk and appreciate the artwork. Said to have been inspired by old cardboard boxes that Whitehead stumbled upon while clearing her mother’s house, soon after she had passed on–the containers automatically symbolized those memories, thoughts, feelings and unvoiceables which we neatly box up and forget about over time…until Life leads us back to them.
The Embankment seems like a representation of the hidden world our past can subconsciously create for us, until it takes on a space all of its own: a space that, perhaps, deserves a conscious visit every now and again. Would Whitehead’s piece therefore work if no one walked around it? Does the power of the whole sculpture rest in the visitors themselves: people who symbolically make a positive move to familiarize themselves with the past and what it contains? The revisiting of the things we have boxed up could perhaps be where the movement, life blood, pulse of the sculpture lies; without people all that would exist in Whitehead’s boxes is the dead matter of moments that have no meaning, nor place–until someone can claim them as part of their life story.
Being able to walk around Whitehead’s Embankment is, unexpectedly, a very personal experience. Initially, the view delivers only one punch: its size, seemingly uniform and lacking in attention-grabbing detail. Its impact is foreign both from above and when walking towards it from a distance–almost like approaching a polar landscape, flecked with ice caps. Up close, the intimacy automatically shuns the overbearing might of the vision, and the details of the scene become much more interesting, powerful and familiar. All the boxes are hollow and opaque and several little nooks and crannies reveal themselves in the spaces between the buildings, which go unnoticed with a less curious effort: spaces to slide into, hide behind, whisper over, shout across, sit down in or lie down on. If the boxes represent unopened emotional clutter, or our subconscious, then where the boxes are not would represent what lies in our conscious, where our most accessible emotions and experiences are. Where there are no boxes is just as symbolic as where they are boxes: the skyline of containers could be the focus of the artwork as much as providing the background for it. This begs the question: Is Whitehead the true artist here, or are we–the gallery-goers? Do we actually create an individual story, as each one of us weaves our way through the massive exhibit, with our own, unique memories for each box? In this way, Whitehead’s Embankment becomes a very versatile, original and talent-wrought piece.
The second British artist to fill the Hall, Whitehead is known for creating casts from the space in, underneath or between domestic objects and interiors. House was created in 1993 from the concrete cast of the interior of a condemned house in London’s East End; her winning design for the Holocaust memorial in Vienna saw her put the cast of a library, including the imprint of books, in the center of the Judenplatz Square in 2000, and Embankment has exposed unseen interiors in the same way. It seems clear that Whitehead has achieved exactly what she intended with this year’s Unilever Commission, as she succinctly reveals: "I hope to challenge the space by developing a degree of intimacy, which somehow relates to our lives."
