intercontinental art attack...

Thanks to little birdie in new york and jimmy page in london (his take is at the bottom) for the greatest art attack yet.

The Tate exhibit "Embankment" seems to be Whiteread varying her way of making sculptures. Personal memory and personal spaces remain a sources of inspriation, but here's a review of her work until now.

Whiteread typically makes sculptural casts of ordinary places and objects by spraying them with liquid concrete or resin, which turn out to be solid objects of the negative space that surrounds us. Her projects include casts of the spaces around beds, desks, and window sills that have haunting effects on the unfamiliarity of very familiar spaces. Critics have read much into these, but I'll leave it at her art operates on many levels. Here is "Untitled (Stairs)" from 2001:



I first saw Rachel Whiteread at the 1997 Sensation exhibit in London, which brought together the YBAs (Young British Artists) in the collection of Charles Saatchi. Whiteread along with Hirst, Ofili, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin and others are the YBAs and the favored artists of the London contemporary art scene of the 1990s and today. The YBAs are influenced by Marcel Duchamps' found objects as well as conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth. Whiteread also seems influenced by earlier architectural artists like Gordon Matta-Clarke and her spare shapes must be endowed to Minimalist sculpture. Like the other YBAs there is a satiric humor in her work but Whiteread is much less of a rock-star than Hirst, much less of an exhibitionist than Emin. Her work is deeply serious and introspective.

Here is her cast of an abandoned East London house titled "House" of 1993, done the same year she won the Turner Prize:



While her most popular art focuses on personal spaces and as she said the "muffifying the sense of silence in the room" other work is more politically oriented towards the silence of human suffering, like the Vienna Holocaust Memorial (a commission) and "100 spaces":





Whiteread is a sculptor and a printmaker. Her prints serve as studies for her sculptures and are also unrelated. This is a link to the extremely effective Public Art Project she did here in NYC in 1998 titled "Water Tower", which shows everything from the studies to the installation:



And if you want to own a Whiteread, you should fly to London and bid at the Christie's Contemporary sale next week for this.

THIS IS FROM JIMMY PAGE IN LONDON:

I've seen it with my own eyes. I'm at some shady Internet Cafe not too far from the Tate. The exhibit is massive. From a distance, the white boxes resemble Styrofoam beer coolers. From close up, however, they are casts of differently shaped old boxes. They are thousands of them and you can actually walk through the maze, or watch the wanderers from above.

Siging off...