THE PRESENT BODY

Untitled (Cast Iron) 2001

Three thoughtful readings on Whiteread:  
1. Uros Cvoro's 'The Present body, the Absent body, and the Formless' provides a terribly lucid and necessary translation of Whiteread's work in Derridian terms. While Whiteread is typically referenced to Derrida, I have found most links shallow and the critique lacking. (We are typically given a logic somewhat along the lines of Derrida = trace = presence + absence = Whiteread).
2. Damon Hyldreth's 'The Uncanny' discusses Whiteread in Freudian terms based on the double.
3. Doreen Massey's 'Space-time and the Politics of Location' discusses how 'House' functions in social terms.

OVERLAYS OF HOMES

Home is the place from which the world can be founded. And so it is that the rearranged familiar is the most unfamiliar of all.


When you sit in the chair you forget the great distances your hands once flung; when you lie in the bed you forget who you are now but you are equally unsure of who you were. You see yourself flying above time. There is a trans-versing of self-self-self-self-self.


This is the overlaying of experience. The marking out of territory. The room existing solely as your room. All the physical modifications mapped over time.

TRACES OF HOME

New/old  Sky/lights
Study, March 2010

A few weeks ago, I  realised how much my skylight painting studies recall Rachel Whiteread's House.

In my painting studies, the trace provides both a framework for memory to be constructed and an element to reference memory. We can use tracers to decode space, and use the language of the trace to set up new activity in space. A trace, in essence, is the projection of the subject/object relationship over time. 

The language of the trace is not overlay, it is not stain, it is not tracing, it is not aging, it is not lingering, nor forgotten. It is a generation of an in-between, a projection of time, a fabrication of time...

Most importantly the trace takes into account its own process. It is not  an A to B, but an A via AB to B. The trace iterates. The trace asks us to locate meaning.