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The Present Body, the Absent Body, and the Formless
Uros Cvoro
Published online: 07 May 2014.
To cite this article: Uros Cvoro (2002) The Present Body, the Absent Body, and the Formless, Art Journal, 61:4, 54-63
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2002.10792136
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The Present Body,
the Absent Body,
and the Formless
Uros Cvoro
Rachel Whiteread,
House, 1993-94.
Concrete. Front view.
Courtesy of the artist,
Artangel, and Luhring
Augustine. Photograph:
Stephen White.
I. Most notably Susan Best, "The Trace and the
Body." in Anthony Bond. ed., Trace, exh. cat.
(Liverpool: Livenpool Biennial of Contemporary
Art in association with Tate Gallery, 1999),
172-77.
2. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in
Theory 1900- I990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
(Oxford, Eng., and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell,
1993), s.v. "Georges Bataille," 474-75. Bataille
used the materialist position of the informe to
challenge the authority of the theories of Andre
Breton, who was seen by many as the most
prominent figure/theorist of the Surrealist movement
as well as its alleged leader.
3. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss,
Formless-A User's Guide (New York: Zone
Books, 1997).
4. This point is also raised by Charles Merewether
in "A Lasting Impression," in Trace. see n. I.
Rachel Whiteread's House was always a troublesome work. Its construction in
1993 in London's East End neighborhood of Bow opened a major public debate.
Many concerns were raised anew, including complaints against the state of housing
and against right-wing conservative racism, issues about the history of the
local community and a lost "way of life." Its destruction three months later only
further fueled the existing complaints as well as the ongoing "public sculpture
aesthetics" controversy that had surrounded its well-publicized life. Materialized
as a palpable imprint of absence, House also seemingly materialized burning
issues in British politiCS, imprinting itself onto the public conscio~sness.While
much of the public furor that accompanied House vanished with the work almost
a decade ago, it remains ever present in the arena of contemporary art theory,
albeit on a different note. The questions that House raised about the articulation of
memory as a displacement of past into present, the tracing
of absence, and the dialogue between the viewer's body and
the materiality of the object remain as pertinent as ever for
any serious study of sculpture and memory. It is in this context
that I propose to revisit House, with the hope of productively
reopening some of these questions.
This account of House as a disruption of material space
through solidification contests an assumption that some recent
analyses of the work make. I What I wish to take to task in this
investigation is the unquestioned assumption that House either
acted as a symbolic substitute for the body of the viewer-an inverted, disrupted
body-or represented the absence of the domestic body. In this analysis, the
reductive humanist perspective that is brought to bear on House always returns
into the symbolic economy of the body. The result of such an approach to the
work overlooks, in my view, the conceptual potential of House to dislocate the
oppositions of work/beholder, text/reader, and object/subject. It is in this context
that, by working through theoretical models of the trace and the formless,
I will link Whiteread's work to a material operation of sign deferral that contests
its very materiality as fixed location and show how it has the capacity to decompose
the very coherence of form on which the materiality of House has been
thought to depend. I intend to indicate how House assaults the category to which
the subject of body has been attached and in fact excludes the body altogether.
The strategy of putting the formless to work is not a new one. Georges Bataille
originally employed it to oppose Andre Breton's historical materialism with a
more basic materialism, a materialism that was devoid of form-the formless. 2
However, in more recent writings, the formless has been brought to prominence
byYve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss as a way ofretroactively disrupting the
structural binary in the history of modernism that has been used to interpret art
as a fundamental opposition between form and content.3 Bois and Krauss insert
the formless into the history ofmodernism in order to disrupt the unity and stability
of visual space in the modernist interpretative grid for art that assimilates
the "semantic registers" of objects constituted through the form/content opposition.
Bois and Krauss detach the trace of the formless from the visual form, thus
undermining the proximity of the trace to the form and the possibility of the trace
being absorbed by the form. Their point is that if the trace of the formless is independent
of the visual form, it will eschew the binary logic of form and content.4
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5. I am here specifically referring to Derrida's
argument in Of Grammatology, trans., Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
6. The discussion that follows will rely on the concept
of trace to suggest how House disrupts a
similar binary schema. I am aware of the difficulties
involved in transposing the speech/writing
opposition used by Derrida to the house/cast
opposition that I propose is at play in House.
Some of the difficulty may arise out of (one of
the simplest of) Derrida's definitions of trace
as "an originary synthesis not preceded by any
absolute simplicity" (62). Iam indebted to Sue
Best for her criticism i'n pointing out the difficulties
and the definition of trace.
7. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 47
8. Rosalind Krauss, "X Marks the Spot," in Rachel
Whiteread: Shedding Ufe, exh. cat. (London: Tate
Gallery, 1997),76.
9. Krauss uses Bataille's theory to locate the formless
in art history according to four categories
of operations: horizontality, base materialism,
pulse, and entropy. Each of these operations is a
response to an interpretative grid of art analysis.
See Bois and Krauss, Formless, 16.
The theoretical line of reasoning proposed by Bois and Krauss in some
respects echoes the postulate of Jacques Derrida's project of deconstruction.'
Derrida seeks to confound the system of privileging one meaning over another
that is founded on a binary schema of repression, division, and erasure. What is
of interest to us here specifically is the way in which Derrida introduces the
operation of the trace, which supersedes the dualism of absence and presence in
order to dislocate them. 6
Derrida's model of binary disruption is useful in that it
allows us to interpret Bois and Krauss's project in a similar way and, more importantly,
to consider Whiteread's House as a trace that disrupts a binary model!copy
schema. While a detailed discussion of the effect of trace on "structures"-as
articulated by Derrida-is beyond the scope of this essay, a few comments will
help to introduce its operation.
What is most significant about the effect of trace is the way in which it
destabilizes categories of meaning. Derrida's deconstructive trace is founded
within a moment of erasure whose operation supersedes the stable notions of
absence and presence. The force of the trace emerges not only from plaCing
presence under erasure, but also from destabilizing absence as a category of
meaning in the play between absence and presenceJ The lack of stable groundthe
site of the trace that forces the structures of absence and presence to be
always deferred-suggests an essential disequilibrium. Thus, the trace highlights
the lack of order and balance in structures, and in this respect can be likened to
the operation of the formless, which, also like the trace, is concerned with neither
meaning nor form, but only with the process of tracing. Furthermore, just
as the trace confuses the absence/presence binary, the formless confounds the
binary of form and content. In the following section, I intend to suggest that by
using the operations of the trace and the formless as models for our reading of
House, we will open the interpretative possibilities of the work to more democratic
ways of reading. More specifically, we will be able to eschew the confounding
absent/present binary of the body. In short, I will suggest that just as the trace
is without a past, and the formless is without a form, House is without a body.
Krauss identifies Whiteread's process of making casts as a way of evoking
one aspect of the formless-entropy. 8 Deriving its name from Bataille's "fascination
with rot and waste," entropy is a response to an interpretative grid of art
analysis that states that the value of a work is measured by its ability to unify
itself into a formal plentitude. This grid assumes that every artwork is complete
and necessarily absorbs any internal disorder by virtue of its completeness.9
Entropy marks a degradation of excess energy created by human beings in every
structure-including casts-and leading to a state of chaos. It is a process by
which the division within binaries is disturbed with no chance of their returning
to "order." 10 Entropy eradicates the distances between binary oppositions
such as form and content, thus contesting the production of meaning. This marks
the expulsion of what Krauss terms the "visual logic of the viewer's body."
Krauss suggests thatWhiteread's process of casting carries out the entropic
congealing of the possibilities of meaning. The way Whiteread creates objects
tests the spatiality of casts and produces antigestures that challenge our perception
of space, solidity, and objects. Before I explain how this takes place in House,
what its implications for the model!copy binary schema are, and its relation to
the viewer's body, let me clarify the significance of the casting process.
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following pages:
House, 1993-94.
Concrete. Side view.
Courtesy of the artist,
Artangel, and Luhring
Augustine. Photograph:
Stephen White.
10. As an example of entropy Krauss cites Robert
Smithson's example of a child running in a clockwise
circle in a sandbox filled with black and white
sand in two even halves. The initial mixing of sand
caused by the running will only be furthered if the
running is reversed.
I I. Krauss, "X Marks the Spot," 76.
12. Richard Shone, "A Cast in Time," in James
Lingwood, ed., House/Rachel Whiteread (London:
Phaidon Press in association with Artangel, 1995),
52.
13. Krauss, "X Marks the Spot," 217.
14. Bois and Krauss, Formless, 180.
Casts are what is left over after matter cools down and solidifies. As traces of
trapped space and destroyed spatiality, casts embody the compression and congealing
of "life," meaning, and the spatial intervals necessary to sustain them.
The force with which entropy sucks out all the intervals between points of space
originates in the casting processes's solidification and eradication of those distances
"that regulate the grid of oppositions or differences necessary to the production
of meaning." II
As Richard Shone observes, "A cast of an object traps it in time ... displaying
... its own past and the past of the object it replicates. I2 Shone goes on to
compare a cast to a death mask, in this regard with the cast standing as a palpable
reminder of a particular space or object and a finite period of history. A cast
is a connection to the past, a surviving reminder of memorial form governed by
the structural possibility of its iteration and repetition. The mechanical authenticity
that the cast assumes bears witness to the fracturing of its own condition.
Set between the sublime and unsavory ordinariness, between the "truth" of the
object and its insufficient aestheticism. a cast is a parody and euphemism of its
original. The unrelenting realism of its arrested image marks a space between
impression and imprint, between presence and absence. If, as Derrida indicates.
the supplement is the incomplete, intermediary component (the in-between).
then the process of casting is a repetition of this play between absence and presence.
A cast is a supplement to the"original," the coming of the mark of absence
after the original has been removed (erased). In Whiteread's case, the cast is literally
the mark left by empty space (absence). House used the inside of a Victorian
house for a mold. After the walls were removed. a concrete cast of the empty
space inside was left. Thus, House was supplementary to an original that came to
be a space, nothingness, or void. Insofar as there is no original given or referred
to elsewhere, the cast, while acting as a supplement, also displaces the stability
of the original object.
Whatever material Whiteread uses for casting, be it wax, resin. plaster, or
concrete, resonates with entropy, because it solidifies the space (and the structure
within that space) that made the cast possible. The space becomes an undifferentiated,
uniform material mass separated from life by its surface texture,Yet this
very surface. at least in part, remains attached to the original mold though the
markings and imprints left by the mold stuck to the cast. In direct contrast to
casting as a "paradigm of any process of reduplication, of spinning out masses
of copies from a single matrix or mold,"'3 Whiteread's casts nourish an indexical
relation to the matrix by silently pointing to something that existed in a specific
place. In other words, "these are plaster casts that are stuck in a posture of referring
to the spot where the real thing existed in all its particularity." 14 They are
traces that. paradoxically. contrast the extreme site-specificity of House by pointing
elsewhere, away from the site that grips and contextualizes it in a sign system.
Paraphrasing Krauss, we can suggest that the very inefficiency and incompleteness
as art objects announced in Whiteread's cast are what deflates the serial
nature of House.
When the formless is released in the slippery relationships between the cast
and its mold, the material integrity of the object itself is called into question. In
Whiteread's work the site functions as a text that is perpetually in the process
of being written and read, So the materiality of her work will become a point of
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"
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15. Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place
and Documentation (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), 3.
intersection between processes, and any attempt to establish itself as a stable
object or location will be subject to the process of slippage and deferral of meaning.
The materiality of House will be identified with slippages between the categories
of object and body, public and private space, absence and presence.
Shone suggests that Whiteread's method of production is constituted by a
set of revisions of the material object that offers a way to gain insight into the
overlooked, mundane aspects of that object. The way in which Whiteread manipulates
the materials and the materiality of her objects invokes the shaking and
disturbing of material reality constituted through baseline concepts such as
house and home, structure and foundation, and materials such as plaster and
concrete. This is a notion of materiality that cannot be bound to specific conditions
of space and place. The displacement of the static environment it entails
likens it to an event "in which the environment is problematised," as Nick Kaye
points out, and through which "the event comes between sign and object."
Whiteread's art practice identifies the logic of materials as catalysts for processes
of transformation and change, aligning the nature of materials with notions of
event and performance and"challenging the material integrity of the object and
stability of place and location." 15 At the same time, Whiteread's objects precipitate
a slippage between the processes and exchanges that constitute our experience
of the world. These include the material affinities between the body, the
object, and the environment it defines and by which it is defined. Her placement
of materials operates against the attempt to read the interior of the work or the
work through interiority.
House was a material reminder of domestic space as solidified absence that
invited the spectator to constantly decipher the ambivalent relationship of sign
to referent. House enacted a slippage between the experience of the inside and
outside, site and object, public and private, home, materiality (solid space and
actual home), and the body. Because it included the solidification of everyday
space, it implicated and provoked the viewers' presence and participation, only
to disrupt them. It worked to disturb the viewers' sense of their body's physical
integrity and spatial differentiation from the material object with which they
were confronted.
To paraphrase Shone, in House every spatial interval, every material mark can
be final, and yet each of these "moments" retains a memory of the trace of the
process of which it is a part in the material. Thus, its materiality simultaneously
suggests the processes of solidity of materials, historicity and memory, a phenomenological
experience of the world, and at the same time a negation of all
of these. Hence, the concrete materiality ofWhiteread's artwork defines itself not
as a stable category but as a point of intersection between historical and memorial
processes, a swinging motion that levitates between materials and events. It
has no fundamental or originary materiality, and, just as the trace is always under
erasure, the repressing of its materiality is necessary for the functioning of the
absence/presence binary. Materiality is the underside, the transgressive other,
the third, disrupting term in a binary. It represents an image/object by anterior
default of presence; its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of emptiness.
It is a slippage between categories that releases the formless.
In her article The Trace and the Body, Susan Best addresses the relationship
between the viewer's body and the materiality of House. Associating House with
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16. Best, "The Trace and the Body," 175.
17. Ibid.
18. Jon Bird, "Dolce Domum," in Lingwood, ed.,
House/Rache/ Whiteread, as in n. 12, 122.
19. Bois and Krauss, Formless, 171.
the viewer's body as the index of its absence and of the spatial structure in which
that body operates, Best suggests that House configures space in such a way as to
imply a relation to the body. House raises a sense of disturbance in the body, primarily
as the result of its carnal effect and affect, and possibly even without the
knowledge of the particular history or general typology of the work. As Best
puts it, the eliciting of"strong feelings of bodily discomfort" raised by House, the
sense of immediate disturbance and unease caused by having a domestic space
presented as solid object turned inside out, reflects the bodily endeavor to conform
to space. This demonstrates that our response to the work "is in.deed first
and foremost a corporeal one." 16
According to Best, then, we expect accommodation from House and we are
disturbed when it is denied. We are willing to take up its inside-out view as part
of our bodily constitution and feel that its spatial dislocation is a problem with
our body rather than with the work. Best suggests that this is how House summons
a carnal formula of its presence in the body so that the body responds
to it. We may elaborate and say that if the trace is, as Best suggests, a play
between subject and object, and if House demonstrates a play between the body
and its surroundings, it is a play in which corporeality "needs to be turned
inside out to realign itself again" with the displaced materiality of House. 17 If the
body feels that it needs to turn itself inside out, it is in order to respond to a
"metaphorical inversion of the body, a reversal of interiority and exteriority,
structure and void." 18
It appears, however, that there is more at stake in determining why House
is so disturbing. Best uses Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of the trace to
establish a link between the body and the world through the art object. At the
same time, she seems to be relying on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological
humanism, according to which the upside-down or the inside-out view is problematic
regardless of whether it involves the human body or not. Perhaps the
best indication of the inherent humanism in this argument is the generic and
universalized use of the terms "body" and "bodily response." While we may
accept that a viewing body would respond to House, it is important to clarify that
even on a phenomenological level, this type of response would be qualified by
habituation. It would involve a specific response to a particular house, one we
have lived in or one very similar to that. Therefore, instead of a generic body,
we should talk about the body of the viewer-or better still the bodies of viewers
and their respective homes.
Viewers felt sympathy for the other (the absent symbolic or proverbial
inhabitant of House) as if they experienced the inhabitant's disturbance. In this
context, it appears that House was disturbing because it represented an assault not
only on body orientation, but on the orientation of perception. Its materiality
disturbed the body not only because it was inverted, but because it was primarily
an assault on a system of perception for analyzing art that also determines
the category of body. House entailed a loss of the humanist subject and a "leaking
away into the nondifferentiated." 19 Through a material reordering, it took the
place of the body and became a witness to a palpable corporeal absence, leaving
the audience as the intruder into private space. House became a nonhuman of the
corporeal. It was also an attack on the body without an affirmation, where the
humanist body was denied, excluded, and turned into the formless.
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20. Anthony Vidler, "A Dark Space," in lingwood,
ed., House/Rachel Whiteread, as in n. 12, 68.
21. Bird, "Dolce Domum," 122.
22. Ibid., 124
23. Vidler, "A Dark Space," 71
At the same time, House did not belong to the viewer's body. It had to be
the other to the space it replaced in order to replace it. The very negation of the
original produced a supplement, just as the very act of repetition articulated
the freestanding condition of the signifier. House thus constituted a black hole in
the viewer's perception, stripping the world to a characterless isotropic desert. To
paraphrase Bois, in this context it revealed the precariousness of the confidence
in bodily and material solidity. In part, this assault was only possible because
House was a reminder/ remainder of a domestic and familiar space. The basis of
this relation depended on what domestic space represented for its audience.
According to many accounts, it was precisely the "domestic" character of
Whiteread's intervention that touched the public nerve. House seemingly struck
a blow at the archetypal space of homeliness. It was, in AnthonyVidler's words,
a "silencing of the past life of the house," where the traces of that former life
were "rendered dead but preserved."20
Home is the "mythical point of origin" that represents a crucial component
in the constitution of identity.21 Home represents not only the focus of our
desires and longings, a point of origin and return, but a way of acquiring a place
in the world of social relations. It is also the point of reference for a spatial politics
that gUides our differentiation between interiority and exteriority, immediate
environment and wider culture. Whiteread solidified this space of interiority and
comfort. In part, this meant exposing it to the scrutiny and questioning of the
public other. House materialized the fragile symbolic barrier between absence
and presence and private and public, between things that should be hidden and
things that should be shown. Possibly it disturbed its viewers by removing the
things that were intended for display, leaving only the bare familiarity of things
that ought to have been hidden but have come to light: the uncanny. What disturbed
the meaning inWhiteread's work is "the psychopathology that lies
beneath the everyday; the repressed fears, desires, prohibitions that lurk within
social routines as the uncanny stalks the familiar, and the inanimate threatens
to come alive."n
Viewers felt distressed because they experienced the invasion of the exposed
nakedness of House and realized that this could have been their house and their
private space.Yet it has been noted in many accounts that the most disturbing
aspect of House was its blank, blocked windows. Some of the responses to House
were reactions to "the literal impossibility of entering into the house itself" and
the possibility "that its closed form held unaccounted secrets and horrors."23
Contrary to a "traditional" Site-specific work, House refused the right of entry to
its audience. As Jon Bird noted, Whiteread thus denied all chances of the nostalgic
return to the womb by refusing access to domestic familiarity, even banishing
the uncanny itself If nostalgia marks a primal desire to return to the womb,
then House was decidedly and extremely antinostalgic; it was a past to which one
could not return.
House was an impOSSible, "lost" object of memory, a trace of a trace. It was
erased with no real relics or souvenirs other than the traces that remain: public
and private memories, second-hand accounts, and photographs. Souvenirs are
the traces that replace the event with narrative, and the desire for them arises
from the impression of unrepeatability of the event, or longing for the vanished
original. House was not an original, it was a mark of a past that never was, a
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24. Merewether. "A Lasting Impression," 167.
2S.lbid.
present that never quite added up and a future that never carne. Its physical erasure
was only a part of its affectivity.
House was imprinted by the trace structure, by the repressed term that
deconstructs that structure. This trace is not a sign, "empirical or evanescent,"
it does not point to anything outside of itself.24 It does not rely on memory to
reproduce the past, it does not depend upon notions of revelation that refer
to an originary site or mark a return to such a site: the economy of presence.
The trace is founded within a moment of erasure. This is an erasure because
Whiteread's object is a cast, an impression made by a void whose appearance
is constituted by the erasure of such marks.25 The very structure of the sign is
determined by the trace of what is forever absent. The presence of materiality of
House took on meaning from its being an addition that replaced absence. It represented
an irreversible past event, one that is always obliterated, a memory of
what has never been present.
Uros Cvoro completed his undergraduate studies in 200 I. He is currently working on his Ph.D. thesis
at the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts. Sydney. His area of interest is museums,
memory, and national identity.
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