Strange witness: Rachel Whiteread’s art of the immemorial

Abstract

The paper offers a reading of the work of the artist Rachel Whiteread. The reception of Whiteread's work has focused on its site-specific, symbolic and memorial nature, the work understood as a series of mediations of and metonymies for hidden social and personal contexts and histories. The paper claims that such accounts overlook what may be a more radical and disquieting aspect of Whiteread’s work; that Whiteread’s sculptures may be understood as not primarily concerned with memory work, but rather with the limitations and failures thereof. Through this other reading, the paper reflects on the nature of the social relation, on the relation of one to the other, and the possibilities for thinking this relation as irreducible to any specific property, attribute, substance, or predicate. Following Whiteread, the paper sets out the ways in which we may understand and know this irreducibility, arguing that, in presenting us with the limits of memory work, Whiteread’s sculptures engage us another mode of signification. Specifically, a mode of de-signification. Hence, the paper proposes a ‘theory of de-signification’; de-signification describing a naming by not naming and the way in which the irreducibility of the social relation and the other make themselves known as other.