Missed opportunity from a master of empty space

October 17, 2008|Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

How do you articulate absence? It's easy enough for photographers, since absence is built into the medium itself (every photograph is a physical trace of a moment now lost). Poets, too, can make use of the metaphors and similes of language; consider, for instance, W. S. Merwin's indelible short poem "Separation": "Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle./Everything I do is stitched with its color."

For sculptors, who work with solid materials, the task might appear harder. But the British artist Rachel Whiteread settled on a simple but effective means of articulating absence when (perhaps with the ghostly effects of photographic negatives in mind) she began casting negative spaces. She cast the interior of a room ("Ghost") in plaster, and the inside of a whole house ("House") and the empty spaces abutting books in a library (for a Holocaust memorial in Vienna) in concrete.

Transforming empty space into solid objects, all of these works made absence poignantly present.

Whiteread's idea was not exactly original: The American artist Bruce Nauman had cast the empty spaces under chairs back in the 1960s. (Whiteread once paid homage to Nauman with resin castings of the space beneath 100 chairs. The work was on display in the Royal Academy of Arts' "Sensation" exhibition in 1997). But Whiteread sensed a deep vein she could mine, and she has been mining it assiduously for almost two decades.

Empty space is by definition amorphous, and it's very often boundless (where precisely does the space beneath a chair end?). Whiteread's struggle to give form to something so inchoate has parallels with our emotional life, especially our attempts to cope with loss. The solid, implacable look of her work, which reads like minimalism but with textures and colors suggesting hidden warmth, makes the best of it seem at once haunted and stoic.

So she is a very interesting artist. It's sad, then, that the Rachel Whiteread show at the Museum of Fine Arts is such a disappointment.

The fault lies partly with the museum, as the show is neither one thing nor the other. It is neither a dedicated installation nor a serious survey. With one room given over to "Place (Village)," an installation that has already been seen in slightly different form in Naples and London, and another to an ad hoc gathering of barely connected work sourced mainly from Whiteread's dealers (including 16 desultory drawings), it is an awkward mix of the two, and well below the standard a museum like the MFA should be aiming for.

But the problem lies also with Whiteread, because the centerpiece of the exhibition, an installation of vintage dollhouses lit from within and displayed in a darkened room to suggest the effect of a village at night, just isn't that great.