Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Stairs) 2001. Tate. © Rachel Whiteread.
4 rooms in Art Around the Building
We are invited to look at, listen to, smell and read the artworks in this display. Five different artists encourage us to become participants in the artwork
These Tate collection works use diverse materials to reveal and memorialise the temporary or intangible: journeys, lives lived, and the links between people and parts of the world.
Vong Phaophanit’s Neon Rice Field contains white rice and neon lights. When combined they create the optical illusion of an undulating paddy field. For the artist, this ‘third material’ symbolises the idea of cultural identity as unfixed and imaginary.
For Untitled (Staircase), Rachel Whiteread cast in plaster the inside of a building that had been a church, a synagogue and a factory.
The artwork makes solid the memories that were associated with this space.
In Lydia Ourahmane’s The Third Choir, twenty echoing oil barrels stand in place of Algerian migrants, having taken the same route across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
Monument by Susan Hiller replicates Victorian memorial plaques from Postman’s Park, near St Paul’s Cathedral, London. The plaques commemorate people who died while saving the lives of others. The work’s accompanying sound piece reflects on the representation of life after death.
At the north end of the gallery, Anya Gallaccio’s preserve ‘beauty’ sees 2,000 gerbera flowers in bloom, wilt, die and decay – the cycle of life, contained between two panes of glass.
Susan Hiller, Monument 1980–1
Monument explores memory, death, history, heroism, representation and time. Its subject is taken from a series of Victorian ceramic tiles photographed by Hiller in a London park. These commemorate acts of courage by ordinary men, women and children. Hiller's greatly enlarged photographs draw attention to changes wrought by time and have a powerful formal presence. The sound track, which the viewer should listen to after looking at the photographs, is crucial to an understanding of work; it makes the viewer/listener an active participant and an integral part of the installation when seen by other spectators. Hiller pioneered installation in the early 1980s. The combination here of sound and image was innovatory.
Gallery label, August 2004
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artworks in Material as Message
Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Stairs) 2001
Untitled (Stairs) is a very large free-standing sculpture made up of ten cast elements bolted together to form a unit. As its title indicates, it is the cast of a staircase, including three square-shaped landings as the stairs zigzag down the stairwell. The artist cast the surface of the stairs and the space above them. She made a 1:10 scale model before the casting in order to envisage the form of the solidified space and to work out how the final sculpture should be positioned. It has been rotated by 90 degrees so that it stands on an edge which would have been a wall in the original space. Whiteread cast the sections making up Untitled (Stairs) using a durable polymer reinforced plaster, known as Jesmonite, combined with layers of fibreglass matting, painted directly onto the surfaces of the stairs, the walls and the enclosing panels which had been fitted against the stair railings to make moulds. The casts are approximately 80mm thick. Although the assembled sculpture has the appearance of a solid block, it is in fact a shell.
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artworks in Material as Message
Anya Gallaccio, preserve ‘beauty’ 1991–2003
Gallaccio works with organic, perishable materials such as ice, flowers, fruits and sugar. This installation challenges romantic ideas associated with flowers and our relationship to nature. Gallaccio has described cut flowers as a mass-produced ‘disposable commodity’. The word ‘beauty’ in the title refers to a variety of cultivated gerbera. It is also a play on words, as the flowers are left to wither and rot. Gallaccio calls her work a ‘performance between myself and the material’. She says it is a collaboration with the viewers experiencing this temporary artwork.
Gallery label, January 2020
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artworks in Material as Message
Vong Phaophanit, Neon Rice Field 1993
Neon Rice Field 1993 is a large floor-based installation consisting of seven tons of dry, white long-grain rice underlaid at intervals with six parallel tubes of red neon light. The overall effect is of an undulating translucent field where the light glows amidst the rice. As with many of Phaophanit’s works, light plays an important role in this installation, binding together the different materials to achieve a particular visual effect. In addition to the work’s visual impact, the rice also generates its own particular smell, which pervades the space beyond the physical limits of the piece.
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artworks in Material as Message
Art in this room
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