"I wanted to make the piece in such a way that all the leaves of the books were facing outward and the spines were facing inward, so that you would have no idea what the actual books were."
Intimately domestic yet ghostly and reminiscent, Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Black Books) reimagines the ordinary objects with which we coexist. Exemplifying a sculptural reversal, Whiteread solidifies space through the embrace of absence. “In the casting process the original, the recognisable object which the work seems to be ‘about,’ is lost” describes curator Fiona Bradley. “What is left is a residue or reminder, a space of oscillation between presence and absence” (Fiona Bradley, “Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life,” Exh. Cat., Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1996, p. 8).
In negating the very utility of a bookshelf, the artist exposes her fascination with dismantling the familiarity of such human-used objects. Reminiscent of fossilized city skylines, the blackened, anonymous books haunt the space they inhabit. Rachel Whiteread forces the viewer to utilize one’s own imagination and mentally replace something which is not really there. As such, the small library of absent books invites internal contemplation and accounts of individual experience, redirecting our gaze to seemingly banal objects.
