If Walls Could Talk: An Interview with Rachel Whiteread Craig Houser
CH: You recently purchased a building that will become your new home and studio, and you've been making your most recent body of work there before you move into the space. What first attracted you to this building?
RW: My partner, Marcus Taylor, and I were looking for a new studio and apartment, and he was the one who actually found the building, one that I'd driven past and walked past for fifteen years, but had never, ever noticed. There was originally a Baptist church on the site, and then it became a synagogue in the early 1900s. During World War II, the site was bombed and the present structure was built in the mid-1950s. Less than thirty years later, the synagogue closed and a textile company used the building as a warehouse for about the next thirteen years or so. Then it was empty. So by the time we arrived, there were already varied layers of history present in the building.
CH: You've worked with many different buildings in creating your sculptures. How did this particular one intrigue you from the point of view of an artist?
RW: Really, the anonymity of it. The building is made of a stock brick—an anonymous sort of brick. Architecturally, it reflects a mishmash of styles—both semi-industrial and semidomestic. There are two Stars of David and three stained-glass windows on the face of the building, but other than that, you wouldn't think it was originally a synagogue.
I began by thinking about the minutiae of the building, in terms of how one might change it and translate it into something more modern. I was really considering it in terms of living there, possibly for the rest of my life. I had never really thought about the details of a space in this manner before, except in terms of sculpture. So while I was busy being totally absorbed with the building and thinking about working with architects, I became drawn to the idea of creating a series of works related to the apartments, the staircases, and the floors.
CH: Tell me about the basement staircase and the upstairs apartment where you made the casts for your commissioned project for the Guggenheim.
RW: My decision to cast these two parts of the building had a lot to do with the odd proportions of the architectural design. The building has three staircases, which are made of concrete and feel industrial. The one I chose to cast for the Guggenheim leads to an enormous basement, which you would not expect to find as you walk around the place. In some ways the building is much larger than one might think.
There are two apartments; I believe one was built for the rabbi and the other for the caretaker of the synagogue. They're just spaces that have been blocked into small rooms. They look like archetypal council flats, really—each is made up of small rooms leading off a main corridor, and usually the rooms are based on the proportions of an arm span. A lot of rooms are based on that width. You can just get a bed in. We're not going to keep any of that when we live there.
CH: Do you see your project, then, as a way to archive the building?
RW: In a way. It's almost like taking photographs or making prints of the space. If those parts of the building don't exist later, I'll still have, as you say, this archive of the place.
CH: I came across a recent book titled The Lost Synagogues of London and spoke to the author, Peter Renton. He has a reproduction of your building in his book and gives a little history of the congregations, but he said that apart from that there really isn't much information about the building itself. During my research, I kept thinking about how your building has readily changed hands and functions in a relatively short period of time, and how it seems like an abandoned object in some ways.
RW: When Marcus and I first visited with the estate agent, there was a definite sadness to the building. I remember that it was full of all this weird, glittery fabric and other strange material that the textile company had left behind. Marcus and I spent about a month combing through all the stuff, just thinking about it. Not that we wanted any of it. It was our way of getting to know the place.
CH: Were you specifically interested in the building in terms of its history as a synagogue or any of the larger Judaic themes that might relate to it?
RW: No, it just happens that we purchased this building. I didn't go and look for a synagogue, either to live in or make work in. I'm interested in the layering in buildings, and the traces that are left behind by the change of use of places. My work is really about the strange kind of architecture that cropped up during the postwar years.
CH: I'm curious what you mean by that. Are you interested in the impersonal nature of such architecture?
RW: In London, there were enormous areas of devastation from bombing during the war, especially along the Thames and in the semi-industrial areas. A lot of houses and accommodations were flattened, and there was a rush to rebuild. I am being somewhat simplistic here, but with the massive rebuilding, we ended up in the 1960s with these residential building complexes that I suppose symbolized hope, and were full of optimism and good intentions, but had a very different outcome in reality. I made a series of prints a long time ago called Demolished [1996], which documented these types of tower blocks being blown up in the 1990s. Now they make these awful buildings that are mock-Victorian, mock-Georgian houses, which have similar facades to the houses that are around this area, but the rooms are still based on the arm span.
CH: Your new building is located in East London, where you've created other projects in the past. I'm wondering what intrigues you about this area, specifically the neighborhood of Tower Hamlets.
RW: I've actually lived around this area ever since I moved back to London after studying in Brighton, about sixteen years ago. The neighborhoods around here—Hackney and Tower Hamlets—may feel a bit derelict and alien to some, but for me, they are my sketchbook. What makes the area wonderful is that it reflects a great cross section of London—a big bowl of world soup. There's a large Asian community, a Jewish community, an Afro-Caribbean community, and something of a Turkish and Serbian community. I find it a very rich and vital place that's really full of history. The area, like my building, has experienced significant changes recently. It was originally part of the slums of the old East End, and it's now becoming more gentrified.
CH: Your Guggenheim pieces were commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin specifically, and your show will travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since much of your work is about architecture, did these sites enter your thoughts in any way while you were working on the commission?
RW: Well, I'm afraid I'm old-fashioned and still think the "Guggenheim" is the Guggenheim in New York. I realize the museum has expanded, but when I was first approached by the Guggenheim, I thought of the fantastic building by Frank Lloyd Wright, who is a great hero of mine. The rotunda is the most extraordinary sculptural object. Sometimes I wish it was just left empty. So I was thinking about that building, and wondered how I might compete with the rotunda. I think a lot of people have had trouble doing that. I also thought about the other Guggenheim buildings in general. The Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin is a long, narrow gallery. It's beautiful, but it's not unique, like the Guggenheim in New York or in Bilbao.
Initially, I thought about how I could relate the different Guggenheims to one another. Then I thought, "Why don't I bring my own architecture to the museums, rather than the other way around?" And that is why I've used my own building.
CH: From what you're saying, it seems that Untitled (Apartment) will relate to the Deutsche Guggenheim space most directly. Apartment and the gallery space are both long and narrow, geometric and austere. Apartment is also quite large and will just fit within the gallery space.
RW: It's nice that the show will be there first, because Apartment and the gallery space definitely relate. Although I don't like to plan exhibitions on paper, I do think Apartment will feel a bit like a maze in the gallery. You'll be able to walk around part of the piece, but then you'll have to back out, and go around the other way. So you'll never really see the piece as a whole.
CH: As an artist, many concerns must be on your mind as you create your works. Was there any one thing in particular that you focused on while making this piece?
RW: For me, Apartment has a lot to do with figuring out how to cast a many-roomed apartment and show the space where the walls were between the rooms. When I made House [1993], we had to leave the actual walls and floors in place. We could not knock them out. But with Apartment, everything was cast around the architectural elements and the casts were removed in sections. So when you look at the piece, there is a space between the rooms where the wall once was. We did an awful lot of casting for six months in order to make this space. The engineering and crazy gymnastic backward thinking that was needed to be able to make the piece was remarkable. That's really how I think about it.
CH: So is this the first time that you've let wall spaces exist between rooms?
RW: Yes. Apartment will consequently have these very weird gaps, especially since the architecture itself wasn't really thought out. You will be able to peer down these narrow negative spaces and just glimpse where the light fittings and light switches once were. There are a lot of electrical elements that you can't see, but trust me, they're there, as they would be within any normal building. It is incredibly important to me that these details have to be right. I have to be honest in what I am doing.
CH: You mentioned to me once that Apartment is unusual because it has a ceiling. Can you elaborate on that?
RW: When I was thinking about making Apartment, I was very clear that I wanted it to be a series of cubes that fit together and that there had to be ceilings on them. All of the light fixtures are part of the piece. So when you see the piece from above, there's a kind of belly button to the piece, and along the corridor a series of indentations from lights.
CH: Is your other work for the Guggenheim, Untitled (Basement), the first staircase piece you've ever made?
RW: Yes. It's something that I've been trying to do for about eight years. What intrigued me about the staircase is that I felt it could be turned on its side.
CH: In the past, you've always been true to form with your architectural pieces. What is your intention in putting the staircase on its side?
RW: When I was first thinking about making Basement, I didn't necessarily want to illustrate it as a staircase. If I had, I would have had to either peg the bottom to the floor or lean the top part against the wall. I wanted to try to do something a bit less literal. I made models of the staircase, which helped me realize that I could actually turn things around. You can't do that when you've got a sculpture over three meters high.
CH: I see the staircase and I wonder if there's a link with any of the Guggenheim buildings. The reason I ask is that the Guggenheim in Bilbao is an unusual building in which forms appear turned around. Even Frank Lloyd Wright's structure in New York does this in its own way.
RW: I think that's a very good observation. I was thinking for this piece that I wanted to try and flip the architecture a little bit. I wanted to change the way one might think about how you walk around or through something, which is what the New York and Bilbao Guggenheim buildings do. When we first put the staircase work up in the studio, I remember I was struck by the sense of physical disorientation it gave me.
CH: I would like to ask you more about your work made prior to Apartment and Basement. Your early pieces are noted for their ability to conjure up memories and stories. How do you see your work doing that?
RW: Some of my very early works do so partly due to their titling. Works with titles, such as Yellow Leaf [1989], Closet [1988], Shallow Breath [1988], and Ether [1990], make you look at the pieces in a certain way. Also, the history of the objects used in some of the earlier works is much more evident in the surfaces of the final sculptures.
CH: What did you do to create that type of surface?
RW: Well, with Yellow Leaf, for example, I cast a piece of furniture that was very similar to my grandmother's kitchen table. All the coloring on the surface of the work is the actual coloring from the underside of the table. In order to make the color more intense, I used cooking oil as a release agent to separate the cast from the object. So there's this slight yellowing on the surface of the sculpture. But there are also all sorts of bits of horrible stuff that you find underneath tables.
CH: Chewing gum and the like?
RW: All that kind of stuff is there on the surface of the work. I managed to pull things from the object being cast, reflecting the layers of its history.
CH: Another early work, Shallow Breath, relates to your personal history. The work was made from a bed you were presumably born in.
RW: No. People always think that. I'm sure you read it somewhere.
CH: I read it several times.
RW: People think that I was born on that bed, and people also think that my father died on that bed. I actually bought the bed in a secondhand shop. In fact, I've never used an actual object that's been directly related to my family history.
CH: You've said that furniture functions as a "metaphor for human beings," and all of your furniture pieces—your bed pieces in particular—tend to evoke absence and loss. This is especially true of your casts that exist as negative impressions, which reveal the forms of their original objects in detail, but not their physical presence.
While you were making your furniture sculptures, you also began to create architectonic pieces. In 1990 you made your first one, Ghost, which is a cast of a parlor room in a Victorian house.
RW: Yes. That was the first time I really thought about trying to be ambitious in my work. I remember I said that I wanted to mummify the air in a room, which is what I was writing in my proposals to try to raise the money to make the piece.
CH: The very title of the work conjures up death and remembrance, and in fact the work has been interpreted as a mausoleum. Like your furniture pieces, Ghost documents the shape of something, yet notes its very absence. The structural logic of architecture has been inverted: inside has become outside; space has become solid form.
How did you go about creating this first large-scale work?
RW: Ghost was hand cast, and I made a lot of it entirely on my own. It was the first piece in which I realized that I could absolutely disorient the viewer. While I was making it, I was just seeing one side at a time. I then took all the panels to my studio and fixed them to a framework. When we finally put the piece up, I realized what I had created. There was the door in front of me, and a light switch, back to front, and I just thought to myself: "I'm the wall. That's what I've done. I've become the wall."
Ghost was naively made and put together, and it's extraordinary that it still survives in such a good state today. It's still there, holding on, with lots of fiberglass around the back of it now to support it. I've since learned how to make things in a completely different way.
CH: Your process has changed considerably over time. What are the differences between Ghost and Apartment as a result?
RW: With Ghost, there are slight gaps between some of the panels, and there is no ceiling, so chinks of light come through. With Apartment, everything is fitted very tightly together, and the top is sealed off so it's dark inside and no light comes through.
Also, on the surface of Ghost you can see lots of soot from the fireplace, whereas with Apartment and Basement I used a blank release agent, so that although you see the edges of the wallpapering and the paint marks on the wall, there are no nicotine stains or ventilation stains where windows have been opened and pollution has come in. I quite deliberately made the surfaces of the pieces blank.
CH: The simple geometry of Apartment and Basement is therefore emphasized and their sense of "individuality" is less apparent. In 1993, you unveiled House, your first public sculpture in London, which was commissioned by James Lingwood of Artangel. How does this piece compare with Apartment?
RW: For House, we used a Victorian house as the mold, and then destroyed it. We just took the house down around the piece, which stayed where it was. For Apartment, we didn't destroy the mold; we kept it. Everything was cast in sections, so we could get the piece out of the rooms of the apartment.
CH: With House, you also took numerous photographs of the house before you began casting. Were you interested in the personal stories related to the house?
RW: No. When I made House, I met the previous occupants, Mr. [Sydney] Gale and his daughter, and we kept in touch for a while. But actually, it made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. It was like I'd cast their history. I didn't want to intrude in that way.
CH: House stimulated strong reactions from the public—both positive and negative—and eventually was destroyed. Was it intended to be temporary from the start?
RW: House was always supposed to be temporary. It was there for just three months, and for a while I was hoping for a sort of reprieve, so that the piece could have a good six months in its situation and become part of the city, rather than the moment of madness that it was.
CH: The same year you unveiled House, you also created Untitled (Room).
RW: In 1992–93, I had a DAAD fellowship and lived in Berlin for eighteen months. I created Room while I was there. I see Apartment and Basement as extensions of this piece.
CH: I read that about the time you made Room, you decided to create work that was less concerned with nostalgia and recollection. You seem to have moved away from the fancy trimmings of nineteenth-century architecture to favor simplified geometric form, which Apartment, Basement, and Room all have in common. These works feel more impersonal, neutral, and even standardized in comparison to many of your early pieces.
RW: Room was actually made from a fictional space. I made a plywood mold for the room, as if it were a prop. It had one window, one door, and looked just completely blank. It didn't even have a light switch or any electrical bits in it. The work represents a generic space.
CH: Room, like Apartment, recalls the low-income housing of the postwar period and the formulaic approach to its making. You've made some changes in the type of space you cast and in the way you go about the process, but is there anything your room pieces share?
RW: All of my room pieces—or any architectural pieces I've made—really have to do with observing. There's a sense of puzzlement in just looking at them and thinking: "We live in that kind of place. How do we function physically within a place like that?" This is definitely what I do when I look at my works. I think about how they affect me physically.
CH: I would like to discuss the influences on your work. I think of American Minimalism right away, as well as other movements of the 1960s and 1970s including Process art and Conceptual art. In the past, you've talked about Carl Andre and Richard Serra, and you've also mentioned Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. I'm wondering more specifically what ideas and practices from this period intrigue you.
RW: I would say there's an American influence in my work, specifically American art from the 1940s onwards. I think it has a lot to do with the scale and ambition that American artists had at that time, particularly in sculpture, that had never really been seen before. They had this incredible kind of freshness.
CH: Who else then?
RW: Gordon Matta-Clark, Tony Smith, and Louise Bourgeois. All sorts of people have crept in.
CH: How do you see your work differing from, or reversing, the tropes of Minimalism?
RW: Well, somebody once said—and I hate this as a quote—that what I do is "Minimalism with a heart." I suppose there is a certain kind of feminine touch that I use with materials and color. I try to make things look easy when, in fact, they're incredibly difficult. Someone like Serra does this as well. He uses these extraordinary masses, yet the best pieces look completely effortless. My response to sculpture is often physical, the physical way in which you look at something. Serra is a perfect example of an artist who does that. He changes your perception of how you put one foot in front of the other when you're walking around or through something. What happens is that you think about your physical place in the world.
CH: Do you see your work relating to his in terms of scale?
RW: Well, House was a large piece physically. It was bigger than a Serra, or rather, some Serras. But it was also very simple and very humble. It was about where we live, where we come from, where we sleep, where we have families. I think it therefore shrank and became much smaller than its physical space. If you stood beneath House, it was monumental, but when you walked a little bit down the street, it just looked kind of pathetic. So my work is different: you could never describe a Serra as looking pathetic. Or an Andre. There's a pathos about what I do. People respond to the sense of humanity that's in some of my works, which isn't in a lot of other artists' works.
CH: Some of your pieces make direct reference to works by a few of the artists we named before. You refer to Nauman's A Cast of the Space under My Chair [1965–68], for example, in Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) [1995], which is made up of casts from one hundred different chairs. What is your strategy in creating a piece like that?
RW: One Hundred Spaces was one of a series of chair pieces. I'd actually forgotten that I'd seen the piece by Nauman at a show that Nick Serota curated for the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London many years before. I just hadn't really noticed Nauman's piece at the time. I think I used the space under chairs for all sorts of other reasons. For me, it was a step to making an absent place for one person—or in the case of One Hundred Spaces, an audience of people.
CH: To me, the experience of Nauman's piece is quite different from that of One Hundred Spaces. I think you paid more attention to the formal details of the objects you worked with than Nauman did. You also used a variety of colors and different kinds of chairs, and the translucent resin material you used gives the work a somewhat ghostly, religious feel.
RW: The more I showed or gave lectures in the United States, people would say: "You're just making Naumans!" And they would get really cross. I felt like I had to backtrack and even defend myself. I recognize that Nauman is the source where this series initially came from, but I think it's doing something different. It's up to you whether or not you think it's doing something else. I suppose the situation is similar with Carl Andre. . . .
CH: You've been making floor pieces since the early 1990s. You told me that you want to place Untitled (Cast Iron Floor) [2001], which you cast from the floor in your new building, in the entryway to your exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery opening in London in June [2001].
RW: We cast four floor pieces in the synagogue, first in plaster, and then we translated them into metal. The casting inverts the surface texture of the floor, such that the areas where the grout originally went inward become the raised parts of the finished piece. We then applied a mixture of black patina and wax by hand across the surface. The idea is that as visitors continue to walk over the piece, their feet will buff the raised areas. Eventually, the patina will be removed and the raised areas will shine, revealing the grid pattern of the original floor. In the end, I hope to achieve an effect like an Agnes Martin painting.
CH: You originally trained as a painter at Brighton Polytechnic and then focused on sculpture at the Slade School of Art. Is there any way you see yourself still as a painter?
RW: No. I definitely see myself as a sculptor. But I do enjoy the painterly aspects of these recent works, and some of my book pieces have a lot of color. I also like to make a lot of drawings, which I think is where my former painting studies mainly come out today.
CH: Whenever I look at your work, I'm always struck by your choice of materials.
RW: I'm very interested in the materials that are around us all the time, how they happen to be there, what they do, and how things are made. Initially, I was especially curious about rubbers and plastics. But I use different materials for all sorts of reasons. For projects like Apartment and Basement, I knew I didn't want to make it in rubber or plastic. The piece had to be light and white. I wanted to get the same kind of surface as plaster, but I wanted to use a material that was far more robust. So after a lot of research, we found a type of plasticized plaster. It's an elemental material that comes from the earth. You can add stone dust to the material and a liquid agent. It's much like fiberglass, but it's safer to use and, I think, looks better.
CH: Do you choose materials based on the object you're casting?
RW: No. For example, with the bed pieces I made two or three in plaster, two or three in rubber, a couple in polystyrene.
CH: Does the plasticized plaster you used for Apartment and Basement do anything different from other materials you have used, in terms of the look or the associations attached to the pieces?
RW: No, not really. Earlier in my career, I never wanted my pieces to have that hollow sound if they were ever hit. They had to sound solid. But Apartment and Basement have a hollow sound to them, which I don't mind because I have moved on.
CH: In October 2000, after five years in the making, your Holocaust Memorial was finally unveiled in Vienna's Judenplatz, which is largely a residential square. For the project, you created a single room lined with rows and rows of books, all of it rendered in concrete. There is a set of closed double doors in front, and the names of the concentration camps where Austrian Jews died are listed on the platform surrounding the memorial. The piece is near the Holocaust Museum in Misrachi Haus, and sits to one side of the Judenplatz, directly above the archeological site of a medieval synagogue.
How did you get involved in the project, and what was on your mind as you created the piece?
RW: When I came back from Berlin, I was asked to make a proposal for the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. I had never been to Austria, and I looked at this project, and thought, very innocently, that Vienna would be an equivalent to Berlin, and it would be an interesting place to try to make a memorial to such atrocities.
In Berlin, I did a lot of reading. I also went outside the city and visited some concentration camps and thought long and hard about what had happened and how people have dealt with the Holocaust. I was very interested in the psychology of that experience, and the repercussions of it within the city.
When I went to Vienna, I didn't realize that the politics would be so different from the politics in Berlin. And I didn't think for a moment that my proposal would actually be chosen.
CH: Why was that?
RW: There were twelve to fifteen international artists and architects who had been asked to submit proposals, and I was a baby compared to most of them. In the end, I was selected, which was a mixed blessing. It entailed five years of very, very difficult problems—with the city, the bureaucracy, and the politics. Luckily, I worked with some really great architects there; if it wasn't for them, I probably would have been crushed by the whole experience and might have just given up. I can't say I enjoyed making the piece at all, though I'm very proud that it's there.
CH: In making the casts of books for the memorial, you did it differently than you have for most of your other book pieces. Instead of doing negative casts—showing the space around the books—you created positive casts. The leaves of the books protrude toward the viewer, and we end up seeing what appears to be a library from the outside. What is the significance of these positive casts?
RW: When I was making this piece, I was thinking about how it might be vandalized, how it could be used without being destroyed, and how it should be able to live with some dignity in the city. One of the things that concerned me about vandalism was Serra's Intersection [1992], which is outside of the Basel Stadttheater. The last time I saw it, it was completely covered with graffiti as high as arm's reach. Inside were condoms, needles, and urine. It was a pretty grim reaction to a piece of public artwork. I knew my piece was going to be a memorial, and I wasn't quite sure if it would be respected. So I made replaceable book pieces that are bolted from the inside, and a series of extra pieces to serve as replacements if necessary, in case there is some terrible graffiti.
CH: So the reason for creating positive casts was a means to overcome the threat of vandalism.
RW: They are also much easier to read as a series of books, and I didn't want to make something completely obscure. I mean, some people already think it's an abstract block that they can't really understand; others think it's an anonymous library. It also looks quite like a concrete bunker.
CH: The bunker is a means of protecting oneself. I see the piece as a metaphor for protection on many levels.
RW: 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.
CH: Why did you want to hide the names and titles of the books?
RW: I don't think that looking at memorials should be easy. You know, it's about looking; it's about challenging; it's about thinking. Unless it does that, it doesn't work.
CH: The library you've created seems institutional. The books are all the same size, placed in neat, even rows, and they fill the walls side to side. They look systematized.
RW: The original books for the cast were made from wood, so they are completely systematized.
CH: So nothing was ever really "documented."
RW: No. There's nothing real about that piece at all, in a way. The doors were constructed; I constructed the ceiling rose. It's all about the idea of a place. Rather than an actual room, it's based on the idea of a room in one of the surrounding buildings. It was about standing in a domestic square amidst very grand buildings, and thinking about what the scale of a room might be in one of those buildings. I didn't ever want to try to cast an existing building.
CH: Other art and architectural projects related to the Holocaust were created at the same time as yours. Does your piece relate to Micha Ullman's Bibliothek [1996], a memorial against Nazi book burnings in Berlin? Or Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum [1997] in Berlin?
RW: No. If anything, my piece is a reaction against Alfred Hrdlicka's Monument against War and Fascism [1988], by the Opera in Vienna. It's a statue made out of granite and marble, consisting of screaming figures wearing gas masks. On the ground nearby, there's a bronze Expressionistic lump, which is a Jewish man on his knees scrubbing the streets. People used to come by and use this particular piece of sculpture as a seat, or as a picnic stand. It was just unbelievable. Eventually, bronzed barbed wire was wrapped over the top of it.
In terms of other works, I actually think the memorial has far more in common with Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. When I was thinking about making the Holocaust memorial, I spent a week there, and visited Lin's memorial twice. I wasn't interested in the politics related to the monument, but the way people who are alive today respond to it, reacting to something that may be within their history or within their own family's history. Lin's piece showed incredible sensitivity and maturity.
When I visited concentration camps, I was more interested in how people responded to the camps than to the actual places. I spent a lot of time just watching people. I watched kids picnicking on the ovens, and other people stricken with grief. I saw grandparents with their grandchildren, having the most appalling experiences, trying to somehow tell this younger generation about the past.
CH: So now that the memorial is completed, how has it been received?
RW: I'm very surprised. It's actually very moving how people have reacted to it. I had expected graffiti, but people have been leaving candles, stones, and flowers on the memorial. I think it's already become a "place of pilgrimage." People come into the city and go to Judenplatz specifically to see the memorial, the museum in Misrachi Haus, and the excavations of the medieval synagogue underneath the square. If I've in any way touched people, or affected a certain political force in Austria, I'm very proud to have done that.
CH: During the time you were working on the memorial, you also created Water Tower [1998], a public project in New York commissioned by the Public Art Fund.
RW: Yes. I was asked to come to New York City and think about making a piece there. The sites I was initially offered were all very public, which didn't appeal to me. I really didn't want to get involved with that kind of scrutiny again so soon after House. I was much more interested in trying to do something that was sort of interactive with the city.
CH: From its site on top of a building in SoHo, the piece definitely interacted with the skyline. And it interacted with the city in another way too: I felt like you were commemorating a symbol of New York that we New Yorkers don't always notice, and this was accentuated by your choice of translucent polyester resin for the work. During the course of the day, the piece would appear and disappear depending on the effects of light in the sky.
In June of this year, you will unveil a new public project in London.
RW: After House, I thought I would never make another public piece in England again. The person who asked me to create Monument was the same one who commissioned House, James Lingwood from Artangel. At first I said, "You've got to be joking." But then I spent a day in Trafalgar Square as a tourist and just watched the people and the pigeons there, and thought to myself: "This is actually quite an extraordinary place. It's a massive roundabout with noise and a continuous tension between people and traffic. But then in the middle of it all is Nelson's Column, which makes you look up and see the sky, and the sky is peaceful." I wanted to help make a pause within Trafalgar Square—a place where your eyes could rest.
CH: Monument is translucent, like Water Tower. Are they made from the same material?
RW: Actually, they're not the same material, but they are similar. Monument will be the largest plastic casting ever made. It's been an ongoing investigation for three years. All the research from making Water Tower in New York went into creating Monument, but the engineering and the technology involved with Monument are substantially greater.
CH: How has your work transformed over time, from, say, Ghost and the furniture pieces to Apartment and Basement?
RW: Maybe the work has become a little tougher since Ghost . . . in terms of not giving so much away. I once said that I was removing Granny's fingerprints, making the work less sentimental. Over time I think I've removed them a little bit more. But I think a lot of the works that I've been making over the years have been part of a cyclical process. I could probably plot a family tree of these works. Things have happened, things branch off, things crop up that I haven't thought about. I often feel a cycle is incomplete and need to tread the same path again. That's just how I work. I've been teaching myself a language for the past fifteen years, and the utilization of that language can take on many forms.
This interview took place in Rachel Whiteread's London studio on April 18, 2001.