The Rachel Whiteread retrospective at Tate Britain - and why to visit again and again ! (work in progress)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

7 October

This is a first reaction (work in progress) to the retrospective show for Rachel Whiteread that has just opened at Tate Britain, Millbank, London

#RachelWhiteread uses industrial materials to cast everyday objects. See her monumental works at Tate Britain: https://t.co/n6qK8AJn2j pic.twitter.com/I6yY1XUNeK

— Tate (@Tate) October 9, 2017

Citing a 2012 film-title (on planning cities and public space within them), Whiteread always uses The Human Scale :https://t.co/FE81xt0APk

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 9, 2017

Now, and from previous occasions of looking at work by Rachel Whiteread, one is aware that she presents a vivid and ever-continuing appreciation of the inner materiality of the substances with which she makes it : they cry out, in the exhibition at Tate Britain (@Tate), to be perceived - as the case may be - as being porous, reflective, semi-opaque, etc.

If we perceive form in her practice, but not how substance has influenced her in arriving at it, then we overlook what is intrinsic to it. For, porosity or the appearance of opacity are resolutely not merely optical qualities here, but ones that allude to the tactile nature of each piece, embodied in its capacity to look taut, pliant, rubbery, giving, and so on.


Penultimate weekend - closing chapters, three months on*... :

Back at @Tate Britain, leading up to the final weekend of #RachelWhiteread (and, no, the hordes here are for summat else - as bored well-at-heel Londoners and their kids do), finally connecting with film positives and negatives - and @itspetergabriel... :https://t.co/B6en5CnAg5

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 13, 2018

** The vitrine, at any rate, curates them as items in conjunction - co-curated with RW, one imagines, as with how IN, OUT + various Roman numerals, to address each other and so us ? What are we looking at - what are the substance-specific artefacts of the very fact of making... ?

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 13, 2018

[...]


End-notes :

* Which is a surprise to realize - gigs or shows that live in one's head exist outside the mundanity of time ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)