In 1993, an artwork by Rachel Whiteread was the subject of the biggest scandal in British art since the notorious Tate bricks affair of 1976, when the gallery was publicly pilloried for having squandered public funds on a sculpture by Carl Andre consisting of 120 firebricks. Ms Whiteread’s work was House, the concrete cast of a condemned terraced dwelling in the East End of London, which she had made under the aegis of the arts commissioner Artangel. House stood for only 80 days, but it was a remarkable lightning rod for debate, attacked and defended with equal fervour. The Liberal Democrat leader of Tower Hamlets council at the time denounced it with particular enthusiasm, calling it “utter rubbish” and “a little entertainment for the gallery-going classes of Hampstead”.
Others, though, greeted it as a masterpiece and called for it to have a permanent life (which was not the artist’s intention), comparing its destruction to the iconoclasm of the English Reformation. One critic wrote lyrically of the cast’s uncanny ability to draw the viewer into “the world of the photographic negative, with its phantom-like reversal of known fact; the world that Alice enters through her looking glass; the world that lurks behind the molten silver mirror in Cocteau’s Orphée”. Meanwhile, it was sucked into arguments about housing and the fabric of London, about the British and their relationship to art, about political extremism and multiculturalism.
Continue reading...