The Legacy of Minimalism

Rachel Whiteread
Tate Britain, London
12.09.17 – 24.01.18

Translated by Bridget Noetzel

A woman said quietly to her companion, ‘It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?’, as they examined a resin door flashing with emerald light, leaning against the wall. Not far from them, I was facing another resin window hung on the wall and inwardly replied, ‘Yes, it’s really beautiful.’

Like the other YBAs ( Young British Artists ), Rachel Whiteread made a name for herself at a young age, and controversy has followed her eventful artistic career. In 1993 she became the first woman to win the Turner Prize with House, but she was also named ‘Worst Artist of the Year’ by the K Foundation. In 2000 her Holocaust Monument ( also known as Nameless Library ) in Vienna drew praise from the art world, but touched off angry protests by local residents. Nevertheless, in contrast to the rock-star bravado of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, Whiteread does not like the spotlight. She prefers to stay in the studio, quietly and persistently moving between various materials. The works are left for the viewer to judge. Whiteread’s artworks are taken from everyday life, from hot-water bottles to boxes, from doors and windows to stairs, to an entire house. Using a range of industrial materials, she replicates objects that are often ignored yet are everywhere in our lives, cast in monumental sculptures. The intimacy of the forms of these everyday objects and the strangeness of their replication in new materials create connections and divergences, just as the artist’s reserve and the straightforwardness of her work do. This ambivalence is also reflected in her relationship to the ‘minimalist’ label.

The signs of minimalism are immediately visible in her work: repetition and extremely simple geometric forms. The ghosts of Donald Judd’s metal boxes and Carl Andre’s bricks hover in the exhibition space, wandering among Whiteread’s concrete and resin. This would have been a waking nightmare for Michael Fried: light softly filters down from Tate Britain’s high ceilings; the curator has lightly placed the artist’s pieces in resin, plaster and concrete, displaying them against gleaming marble flagstones, scattering them on clean wooden floors, or gently leaning them against clean white walls. A neat taped square surrounds every object, announcing its status as a valuable work of art. Visitors walk quietly through the exhibition as if a sacred ceremony were taking place in an elegant theatre. This theatre of ceremony undoubtedly persists in the exhibition halls of contemporary art museums. The noble ideals closely tied to modernism cited by Fried have since dissolved into the sheer variety and novelty of postmodern art and contemporary art. The rebellious and avant-garde ideas of performance art, conceptual art, audience intervention and relational aesthetics have engulfed every form in the art world since minimalism, pushing the theatricality that Fried so derided to its ultimate point. Compared to the novelty-chasing celebrities of the avant-garde, Whiteread’s exhibition surprisingly seems a bit nostalgic, and the Tate tactfully defined it as a retrospective, looking back to the classics to avoid cutting-edge works, like those shown in biennials.

After the utopian ideals of modernism and the showiness and cynicism of postmodern art, contemporary art has once again undertaken the political mission of practising a social critique, intervening in society through body, gender, race and region, and concerning itself with social issues in all corners of the globe. In contrast to this varied mode of contemporary art, Whiteread has not made any radical, passionate declarations or expressed political ambitions. She quietly and constantly explores, applying various materials and media to the remaking of everyday objects. In the process of casting the artworks, she carefully retains the traces of their use; these traces of everyday life are imprinted as properties of the objects. In this way, she strips art of the heavy burden of theme, while also retaining a shred of human warmth. Rendering them in unfamiliar materials removes the practicality from these doors, windows, mattresses and hot-water bottles. In a consumer society engulfed by the fetishisation of products, these objects receive a pardon, avoiding being seen as objects of consumption. After removing the symbolic imprints, as Jean Baudrillard conceived them, all that is left is the object itself, magnifying its materiality.

Whiteread has not returned to the arrogance of modernist elitism, and in contrast to the nearly religious quality of the works of her minimalist predecessors, the intimacy of the forms of everyday objects dissolves their sense of mystery, and the philosophical fog of the pure form is dispelled. When viewers confront these familiar objects, they no longer have to worry about whether they can play the intellectual game of identification. The Tate as a site of authority and the tickets in their hands ensure that the objects before them are genuine works of art. Therefore, viewers can temporarily set down their intellectual burdens, and situate themselves within this specific site to appreciate the dim light refracted through and from the translucent resin, the sturdy, full volumes of the rubber, and the solid, grainy surfaces of the concrete. The reproductions in the catalogue could never communicate the characteristics of the materials used in the works, even if they were in higher resolution than is actually the case; minimalist artworks, like the vast majority of contemporary art, need the viewer to be present in the space, experiencing the works. It is only in an exhibition space in a specific location that viewers can obtain this sense of ceremony and theatre.

Of course, the legacy of minimalism is theatricality, but it is also materiality itself. In contemporary society we are experiencing what David Harvey called ‘time-space compression’. Our sense of time and space is gradually disappearing with the increased acceleration of the movement of goods and the pace of life. Driven by instrumental rationality and hedonism, our sense of the material is gradually being lost. People focus on the functionality or fashionability of objects, and it is hard to find the energy to pay attention to their material properties. Man-made industrial materials, such as acrylic resin, rubber, plaster and concrete, are used extensively in our surroundings, but no one, apart from a builder, is likely to show a concern for their textures. However, Whiteread discovered them, and in the name of art, these familiar forms can once again showcase their materiality. Whiteread’s talent and effort allows their materiality to shine with beautiful radiance in a form that people find exceedingly intimate.

The pursuit of beauty has long been abandoned in modern and contemporary art. It has been renounced for so long that it is only remembered occasionally. As a result, we always hear calls for a return to beauty, but it’s hard to avoid being carelessly labelled as outmoded or lacking insight; even using the word ‘beautiful’ to evaluate a work of modern or contemporary art seems rather inappropriate. However, in a time enamoured of images and spectacles, a time in which consciousness and attention seem to have been dissolved or suspended, people should have the opportunity to avert their eyes from their screens, if only for a while, and take a break from trying to encrypt and decode the flickering imagery in front of their eyes. In the almost puritanically clean space that the curator has carefully created, viewers can once again appreciate materiality. At this moment, they put aside all accumulated knowledge and emotional baggage, pulled out of a complex world moving at full speed. Viewers find themselves in a visual vacuum in a cultural and social sense, once again facing the objects with new eyes. This materiality is, as Emmanuel Levinas said, ‘naked elements, simple and absolute, swellings or abscesses of being’. Viewers allow themselves to fall into a trap of materiality carefully laid out before their eyes by the artist, discovering the objects themselves while also discovering their own bodies and their own existences.

The temptation of materiality is always there, but this time an art exhibition gives it value. Pulling that fine thread means that the viewer can only repress the rising urge to touch the works, and quietly sigh, ‘It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?’