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Born in London in 1963, Rachel Whiteread still lives in her native city. In the 1990s Whiteread began making plaster casts of the insides of objects such as sinks, mattresses, and bathtubs. From making casts of objects she became interested in making casts of entire spaces and rooms.  Whiteread’s cast pieces have now been displayed in public spaces in America and in Europe. Her translucent resin water tower, in MoMA’s collection, has been displayed on the Museum’s roof. Whiteread also created the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna.

In the Making
Reflecting on her interest in taking casts of a space, whether it is the inside of a hot water bottle or a living room, Whiteread said, "I wanted to use things that already existed. I wanted to get inside them or beneath them and try to reveal something previously unknown." ¹

Because Whiteread makes a direct cast from the interior space she is interested in, the original object is destroyed during the process. Take a moment to think about what it's like to look at a bookshelf; the spines of the books and their titles face outward toward you, while the pages face inward toward the back of the shelf. In order to make Untitled (Paperbacks), Whiteread began by casting an entire bookshelf, including the books, in plaster. At the end of the process, she ripped the books from the plaster, leaving behind the mold of the shelf space and the ghostly print of book pages. As is the case with her other casts, Whiteread left the white plaster of this work unpainted.

• Does knowing more about how this work was made change your ideas? Why or why not?

• What do you think about the fact that Whiteread destroyed books in the process of making this piece?

• Can you imagine being in a space surrounded by casts of bookshelves and the ghosts of books no longer there? What might that be like?

• Think of objects you live with every day. Can you imagine what their interior spaces might look like as a cast sculpture?

Sending a Message
Untitled (Paperbacks) is one of a series of works Whiteread did that relates to books and libraries. Having cast a number of private spaces found in homes (such as the interior of a bathtub or underneath a bed), Whiteread turned to perhaps spaces that we might think of as more public.

In 1996 Whiteread proposed a monument for a Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, Austria, and was awarded the commission. Due to a complex controversy about the location and nature of the memorial, Whiteread was unable to complete and install the work until 2000. Now, over fifty years after World War II (in which more than 65,000 Austrian Jews were killed by the Nazis), Whiteread’s simple, white, rectangular memorial resides in one of the oldest, most beautiful squares of the city.

The memorial (12 feet high, 24 feet wide, and 33 feet long, about half the size of a college basketball court) is a cast of an entire room, or library, full of books, but again we see no titles or authors. Unlike Untitled (Paperbacks) which allows us to enter and see into a space, the Memorial allows no one in, the untold stories are lost to us, much like the lives of Holocaust victims.

• Based on your experiences, what is it like to be in a library?

• Can you think of any public monuments you know that you would consider to be successful? In your opinion, what makes them successful?

1. Rachel Whiteread, Options 46: Rachel Whiteread, interview by Beryl Wright (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993).