Rachel Whiteread. LondonReview by: Tony GodfreyThe Burlington Magazine, Vol. 141, No. 1150 (Jan., 1999), p. 50Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/888231 .

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS

colour and were sometimes precious, but took elegance in design to an extraordinary standard. The resonances of their arts were very different, but such a link shows that Beardsley is a major figure in British art.

A.D. FRASERJENKINS Tate Gallery, London

'Aubrey Beardsley. By Stephen Calloway. 224 pp. incl. 50 col. pls. + 145 b. & w. ills. (V. & A. Publications, Lon- don, 1998), ?25. ISBN 1-85177-219-7. 'Reviewed in this Magazine, CXXXV [1993], p.576. Aubrey Beardsley: A biography. By Matthew Sturgis. 404 pp. with b. & w. ills. (Harper Collins, London, 1998), ?19.99. ISBN 0-00-255789-4.

London Rachel Whiteread

It has been Rachel Whiteread's fortune, or misfortune, that her work has been so easily and readily explained in terms of memory and the phenomenology of the house. Ever since she began showing her plaster casts of the' negative spaces of wardrobes and tables in 1988, her work has been seen, positively, as an evocation of the past and, negatively, as a mere addendum to Bruce Nauman's piece, Cast of the space under my chair (1965-68). To the latter gibe she responded most forcefully, and sumptu- ously, with her Untitled (One hundred spaces) in coloured resins of 1995. The current exhibi- tion at Anthony D'Offay, London (to 16th January) likewise shows how she wrings great variety of effect from a seemingly limited way of working.

It has also been the nature of Whiteread's career to develop quite slowly and method- ically, exploring different 'moulds' - sinks, baths, beds, chairs, rooms, houses - and materials - plaster, fibreglass, resin, foam, aluminium. The nature of the objects from which she casts has inevitably over- dominated analyses of her work, allowing writers to discuss personal and collective memory in a rather literary way. (Sympto- matically, there is no critical essay in the cat- alogue of this show, but instead a short story by the American writer A.M. Homes.) * This exhibition of seven sculptures gives us an opportunity to reflect on the peculiar visual qualities of the work as art.

In her attention to materials - this exhibi-

tion includes plaster, concrete, aluminium, plastic and urethane foam - Whiteread is surprisingly like Carl Andre. The materials as much as the moulds (here bookcases, desks, switch boxes and plinths) are the grammar of her acuvre, something made clear by the differing look of each work's surface. Robert Smithson said of Donald Judd's works, much to Judd's displeasure, that they were uncanny. It is on this poten- tial uncanniness of the minimal object, the very oddness of exhibiting an object, that Whiteread's work builds. This is particu- larly evident in Untitled (Elongated plinths) (Fig.66) where one is struck first by the pearly opalescence of the surface. It is far from evident what the sculptures are and, indeed, even when we have read the label and found what they are derived from, there is no 'surge of memories': plinths, especially elongated ones, were not a significant part of one's childhood. It seems more of a chal- lenge to try and imagine how the work con- nects to an object in the 'real' world. This challenge is reiterated by the work in the adjoining room where a cast has been made of a complete wall and then pulled away from it, but only just far enough away that one can walk half way into the gap: it is a play not on the semiotics of the object so much as the semiotics of casting.

The three identical shapes of Untitled (Elongated plinths) seem unreal, familiar only in a baffling, conceptual rather than visual way. They do not belong. If they are remi- niscent of anything it is of a science-fiction scene such as the closing sequences of 2001, where the protagonist enters silent rooms bathed in an artificial light and the objects seemingly have the form but not the sub- stance of real things. This oddity is true of much of Whiteread's work: when first ex- posed to the public eye, her 1993 sculpture House looked not so much like the memory of a house, as a strange, alien thing arrived on wasteland like a giant, newly laid egg. In their whiteness the plinths may seem to suggest the marble blocks of the 'traditional' sculptor, but the surface is actually more reminiscent of an iced bun (a connexion that underlines how strange the scale often seems in Whiteread's work). Most importantly the overriding sense given by this piece is its prescience, its sense of being an object arrived in the world but not yet given a name. It is also very beautiful. In its aes-

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66. Untitled (Elongated plinths), by Rachel Whiteread. 1998. Plastic and urothane foam, 67.3 by 376.6 by 221 cm. (Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London).

theticism and avowed subject it bears a curious relationship to the Belgian sculptor Didier Vermeiron, whose career is centred on the casting of plinths.

Similar things can be said of the largest work here, Untitled (Book corridors) (Fig.65). Walking through it may remind one of pass- ing through the stacks in the London Lib- rary, but as one starts to puzzle out how these blocks are made - the shelves and books are left in negative, but the back of the bookshelves is left positive as though the books were floating in space - such memo- ries are lost. The presence of the work is actually more foreboding, more reminiscent in its surface of old bunkers or fortifications. The scale and proportion of the work is peculiar - large and yet cut short. Its formal, brooding presence eventually affects one more than its derivation.

Other sculptures in the second gallery also inhabit the limbo between the 'real' and the abstract: a casting of a box with twenty-four light switches, though it seems so generic as to suggest an invented switch box; a set of nine identical curved desks in grey concrete, a wall relief of bookshelves entitled Untitled (Fiction) delicately coloured with the yellows, pinks and blues that used to tinge the edges of pages of old paperback novels.

In the third gallery are hung a set of Whiteread's photographs: images of waste- bins, interiors, shells of houses. They are probably unnecessary and lack the presence of her sculptures. The video diary of House produced earlier this year by Artangel, with its emphasis on both movement and pro- cess, is a more appropriate addendum.

TONY GODFREY

*Rachel Whiteread. With a story by A.M. Homes. 52 pp. incl. 8 col. pls. + 8 b. & w. ills. (Anthony D'Offay, Lon- don, 1998). ISBN 0-947564-76-4.

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65. Untitled (Book corridors), by Rachel Whiteread. 1997-98. Plaster, polystyrene, steel and wood, 222 by 427 by 523 cm. (Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London).

Birmingham and Paris Burne-Jones

Edward Burne-Jones was one of the most singular British artists of the nine- teenth century, in his lifetime admired both at home and abroad. Despite a modern audience's likely belief in its familiarity with his works, he is in fact somewhat difficult to categorise. Dubbed variously a High Pre- Raphaelite, Aesthete, Classicist or Symbolist,

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