“I love books. I love the smell and feel of books. I don’t believe books are going to disappear and I don’t like the idea of gleaning all your information from the superhighways, sitting in a café and reading your newspaper on a screen.”
Imbued with a captivating sense of memory, absence and loss, Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled from 2000 exemplifies the artist’s pioneering dedication to sculpture. Unveiling the hidden and overlooked facets of the everyday, the present work displays copies of unreadable books, their spines flayed and turned inwards, forming a tapestry of literary content suspended in time and space. Embodying the absent presence of a library, and spanning an impressive two metres in width, Untitled is rendered in plaster, an industrial material typically associated with construction, building and reinforcement. Through the meticulous process of pouring liquid plaster into prefabricated moulds and allowing it to solidify, Whiteread orchestrates a bold act of preservation, illuminating the often unnoticed negative spaces of our surroundings. A process of petrifying, casting the bookshelves involves destroying the original source, physically ripping the books from the hardened plaster, in which exquisite fragments of fossilised pink, yellow and white paper become lodged permanently into the surface, the plaster absorbing the colour of the ghostly spines. Whiteread’s horizontal bands of inaccessible knowledge find resonance with other eminent works in her distinguished oeuvre. Larger bookshelf installations are housed in some of the most prestigious public art museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Untitled belongs to a group of biblio-centric sculptures first began in 1995 and which continued to preoccupy Whiteread through the early 2000s. This period coincides with the artist's pivotal involvement in the design and realisation of the Vienna Holocaust Memorial, a project that sparked intense controversy and culminated in its unveiling in the year 2000. Inspired by the historical significance of Vienna's Judenplatz, the former Jewish quarter, Whiteread conceived the memorial as a poignant tribute to the lives and legacies lost during the atrocities of the Holocaust. The centrepiece of her creation was a square concrete cast representing a sealed library, its volumes hermetically sealed, unreachable and beyond grasp. A site-specific response to its surroundings, encapsulating the solemnity and gravity of its location within the heart of Vienna's historic district, the artist invited viewers to contemplate themes of loss, remembrance and knowledge in a tangible and deeply resonant manner. Whiteread’s monument acknowledged that, for The People of the Book, “the book epitomises heritage and endurance in the face of displacement and Diaspora; it is seen as a symbol of sanctuary for Jewish learning and for the continuance of tradition,” and alluded to historical instances of book burning by repressive and despotic forces (Andrea Schlieker, “Pause for Thought: The Public Sculptures of Rachel Whiteread” in: Exh. Cat., London, Serpentine Gallery (and travelling), Rachel Whiteread, 2001, pp. 60-61).
According to philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, a library is a place of memory and a space for mnemonic ritual. In 1931 Benjamin penned his infamous short essay “Unpacking My Library: A Speech on Collecting.” “Not thoughts,” Benjamin writes, “but images, memories are conjured in this process." He continues: “Memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris; memories of Rosenthal’s sumptuous rooms in Munich…of Sussengut’s musty book cellar in North Berlin; memories of the rooms where these books had been housed” (Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collection,” 1931, p. 67).
While Carl Andre’s industrial metal units are arranged in simple arithmetic combinations and Donald Judd’s mechanically fabricated cubes explore repetition and mass production, Whiteread’s sculptures depart from the minimalist tradition in that their indexical nature haunts the communities and spaces they inhabit. Indeed, viewers cannot escape the phenomenological encounter experienced when in front of Untitled: the hidden voids prompting the viewer to insert their own perception and narrative, an active process of introspective questioning, in which experience is instilled into the very fabric of her work. Her approach to sculpture evokes parallels to Bruce Nauman who also explored the idea of negative space, namely in his A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1965-66). Nauman’s 1986 exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London was a catalyst for Whiteread, an art student challenging the boundaries between exterior and interior spaces.
Whiteread was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993 following her project Untitled (House), a life-sized cast, painstakingly rendered in concrete which served to immortalise a condemned Victorian terrace house in London’s East End. The final sculpture encapsulated every facet of the three-story structure, from its basement to its lofty summit. The casting process spanned an impressive three months, resulting in a monumentally weighty final composition. On the continuity between the bookshelves and her earlier works, Whiteread has explained: “as one develops as an artist, the language becomes the language of the pieces you have made previously, building up a thesaurus, really. A lot of my work is influenced by earlier work, as well as the decrepit libraries of Hackney or the junk shops” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces, 2001-02, pp. 140-41). Fusing the intimate and domestic nature of Whiteread’s early work with the monumental and communal subjects that emerged in the 1990s, Untitled offers a powerful summation of Whiteread’s artistic idiom and unique reinterpretation of the readymade.