Advisor Lynne Cook
Frances Muldoon
Semester 3 Paper 3
November 22, 2014
The In-between Spaces
The Architectural
Uncanny
The concept of
home is at once extensive and specific. The house whether in practice or theoretically
is an internal space where its inhabitants feel safe and protected from outside
or “alien” forces. (Vidler 24) If this
barrier between the internal or heimlich (Freud)
and external is broken, outside influences may enter and disturb the feelings
of safety, well being and familiarity, the space may then become unheimlich or uncanny. (Vidler 23)
The home is only
one specific yet important example of architecture, which may be considered
uncanny. The home is not only at the heart of my current research and studio
practice but is applicable to two very influential artists. Each of whom distort
the spaces of architecture, bringing sculptural and installation art to new and
ever more impressive heights. Artists Katrin Sigurdardottir and Rachel
Whiteread have each worked extensively with the theme of architecture as well
as the idea of home throughout their careers. It is the inversion or divergence
from the traditional internal domestic space, the unheimlich or the uncanny
spaces that are applicable to my own studio practice. Katrin Sigurdadottir’s two-part
installation Boiserie created for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011 and Rachel Whiteread’s infamous and
controversial 1993 piece House each
provide specific examples of the architectural uncanny.
Installation view of Boiserie, 2010, mixed media,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Courtesy of the artist and Eleven
Rivington, New York City. (Heisler)
Installation
artist and Sculptor Katrin Sigurdardottir uses the language of architecture,
cartography, and landscape to explore and expand boundaries between perception
and illusion in spaces both real and invented. (Sigurdardottir press release) Through the interconnectivity of body and
space Sigurdardottir examines personal and collective memory while exploring
the physicality of architecture and whimsy of imagined places. (Heisler) These in-between spaces
create an enchanting yet unsettling feeling.
I was fortunate enough to witness
Sigurdardottir’s magic first hand in her two-part 2011 installation Boiserie
in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art based on two of the Museums 18th-century period rooms.
(Heisler) In the first part of the installation,
Sigurdardottir created a breathtaking and hauntingly beautiful room. The room
possessed no point of entrance or exit, unified and completely closed off,
impervious to the viewers longing to invade its quite and strange elegance. The
only point of entrance was visually, through one-way mirrors, which played the
part of windows. Placed around the outside of the room they allowed each viewer
to peer in but blocked out the image of any other viewers present near the
installation at that time. This singular viewing experience created a
hauntingly lonely and empty experience. (Heisler) The painstaking details taken and
simplified from the period room along with the ornate and over the top furniture
stood in stark contrast to the modern white washed pallor of the entire space.
Everything from curtains, to furniture, pillows to floor even to the exquisite chandelier
glowed in contemporary white. It was a modern day doppelganger of the Met’s period
room, which in turn is a modern day doppelganger of the original room, created
as part of the Met’s Wrightsman Galleries (Straus) a double of a double. The
viewer in this scenario is the outside and alien force while the internal safe
domestic space remains as such, but strangely protects and gives comfort to no
one, the relationship between inner and outer domestic spaces are disrupted.
Katrin Sigurdardottir. “Boiserie
(detail)”, 2010. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Bruce Schwarz, The
Photograph Studio, ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Straus)
In the second part of Boiserie the viewer was again greeted by exquisite details white
washed to perfection, but this time a series of highly angled panels composed
of windows doors and walls wound its way in an S shape. Each panel meeting that
which came before at a odd angle, hinged together in a consistent decrease in
size. The body sized panels at the beginning slowly wound and tapered down to a
size perfect for a dollhouse or perhaps for Lewis Carol’s Wonderland. Through
the significant distortion in the pieces scale the viewers idea of domestic
space is disrupted creating something strangely uninhabitable. Composed of
hinged doors, windows and walls whose ends never meet, the viewer is left not
with a room with the potential of inhabitation but rather with an object of
domesticity without a true inside or exterior an in-between space. The viewer
is neither safe in the internal space nor alien invader. In each installment of
Boiserie Sigurdardottir distorts the
standard version of the home bringing the room from what was once heimlich into the realm of the uncanny. (Freud)
House, 1993. Concrete, life-sized. (Cole)
Rachel Whiteread’s distortion
of internal and external domestic spaces may be even more to the clear. Sculptor, installation artist, caster,
draughtsman and printmaker Rachel Whiteread takes architecture in art quite
literally to new heights by creating full scale casts of a wide variety of
domestic in-between spaces. From the space under chairs and the interior of
closets to her 1993 piece House where
she endeavored to cast an entire Victorian house which was about to be
demolished. (Cooke) Using plaster, rubber and resin Whiteread creates
sculptures of the negative space of interior places, making the invisible space
of the room suddenly visible.
(Cole) In doing so highlighting the
architecture of domestic spaces and drawing the viewer’s thoughts and attention
to the empty space and absence of bodies and objects and thoughts of domestic
intimacy and personal memory. (Rachel
Whiteread - Luhring Augustine) The
personal memory associated with the cast domestic spaces become public in House, a temporary minimalist monument
to the everyday. (Vidler 77) Much like the first installment of
Siggurdardottir’s Boiserie, there is no point of entry to
house but in opposition to Boiserie there
are also no points from which to view the interior, the sculpture is solid and
unyielding, the only hints into the interior spaces are on the exterior, the
negatives of windows, fire places, doors and seams which delineated one room of
the house from the other. The heimlich interior
is not only exposed to outside alien forces, it becomes the outside. The idea
of the doppelganger once again surfaces, only in this piece in a physical form.
The new sculpture the doppelganger is not only created in likeness of the
original it is created physically from the original, and by creating the new (sculpture)
the old (house) must die, the building, after being cast was literally striped
away and discarded.
Whiteread’s imposing, stark
and monumental house is in direct
opposition to Siggurdardottir’s ethereal, light and whimsical Boiserie.
Yet each in in its own way strips away what is comfortable and
familiar, distorting what is typical of domestic spaces and creates in-between
spaces. The lines between internal and external, dream and reality, real and
imagined space all become twisted, entering at last the realm of the uncanny.
Bibliography
Cole, Ina. "Sculpture.org." Sculpture.org.
ISC International Sculpture
Center, n.d. Web. 15 Nov.
2014.
Cooke, Rachel. "Rachel Whiteread East London
2012." The Guardian. N.p., 7 July 2012.
Web. 10 Nov. 2014.
Freud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. The Uncanny.
New York:
Penguin, 2003. Kindle file.
Heisler, Eva. "Bomb." BOMB Magazine — Katrín
Sigurdardóttir by Eva Heisler.
BOMB — Artists in
Conversation, Spring 2013. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.
"Rachel Whiteread - Luhring Augustine." Rachel
Whiteread - Luhring Augustine.
Luhring Augustine, 2010. Web.
11 Nov. 2014.
Sigurdardottir, Katrin. "- Katrin Sigurdardottir
-." - Katrin Sigurdardottir -. N.p., n.d.
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<http://www.katrinsigurdardottir.info/>.
Straus, Michael. "KATRIN SIGURDARDOTTIR at the
Met." The Brooklyn Rail.
Artseen, Feb. 2011. Web. 7
Nov. 2014.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in
the Modern Unhomely.
Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992.
Print.
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