A TENSION BETWEEN FORM AND NARRATIVE: RACHEL WHITEREAD’S ‘BEDS’ BT Series - Rachel Whiteread. Lynn Barber meets Rachel Whiteread | From the Observer | The Observer. It is not by any means clear, as we go to press, that Rachel Whiteread's Untitled Monument - her cast of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square - will be unveiled on 4 June, as intended. It has run into difficulties, of which more later. She always knew it was a tricky project, given that it will be the largest resin object ever made - she jokes that she's aiming for the Guinness Book of Records . And it has already been postponed once, from last autumn, which means that Bill Woodrow's feeble bronze, Regardless of History , has been hogging the plinth for more than a year.
I wish they could at least have brought back Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo , which is now languishing in storage, but anyway we must hope that Rachel Whiteread delivers on time - she is working frantically as I write. When I first talked to her about the plinth, at the end of April, everything was fine and running on schedule, though she said that she wouldn't know for sure until they did the 'pour' on 8 May. Vienna Guide. Rachel Whiteread at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills.
Often, when information is not immediately ascertainable, stories are invented to fill the gap. The Egyptians gave us Nut, the goddess who gave birth to the sun every morning and swallowed it every night. Long before the invention of fMRIs, Freud appropriated stories from Greek myth to give meaning to our cranial matter. In his essay on the Uncanny, Freud fairly warns us of our mind’s ability to ascribe meaning where there is none. In one example, a seemingly random number—62—appears on a room door and a ticket for a coat check.
“…if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains — invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. Rachel Whiteread's Ghost, 1990 “…a reversal of an enclosing, comforting, dwelling, a place of repose and comfort, a symbol of domestic hopes and dreams. Rachel Whiteread and Untitled (Hive), 2007-08.