House was a temporary public sculpture by British artist Rachel Whiteread, on Grove Road, Mile End, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It was completed on 25 October 1993 and demolished eleven weeks later on 11 January 1994. The work won Whiteread the Turner Prize for best young British artist and the K Foundation art award for the worst British artist in November 1993. [1]
Whiteread had previously exhibited her sculpture Ghost, a plaster cast of the four living room walls inside an abandoned Victorian townhouse, at the Chisenhale Gallery in 1990. [2] House was conceived as a similar work on a larger scale, encompassing not just a single room but an entire house. The work was commissioned by Artangel, and sponsored by Beck's Beer and Tarmac Structural Repairs. [3] It was intended that the selected house would have been already scheduled for demolition and that the work would be temporary, but the structure had to be free-standing so it would be visible from all sides.
After some initial discussions in 1991 and 1992 when other locations in London were considered, a Victorian terraced house in East London was selected for the work, and a temporary lease was granted by the local council of 193 Grove Road, in Mile End, E3, near the old Roman road from London to Colchester. [4] The house was part of a terrace on a road where some of the buildings had been destroyed by bombing in the Second World War and later replaced by prefabricated dwellings. [5]
By the 1990s, the area had a diverse social mix, with churches from three different denominations nearby. The local buildings comprised a mixture of Victorian terraces and villas, with high-rise blocks of flats from the 1960s and later, and the development at Canary Wharf was visible in the distance. [6] The area was in the middle of an extensive redevelopment, and the local authorities decided to demolish the terrace to create a new park beside Roman Road and Grove Road. Sydney Gale, the last residential occupier of 193 Grove Road, opposed its demolition, and continued to live in the house while the remainder of the terrace was demolished, leaving his house and the ones to either side, but he was eventually persuaded to move out. [7]
The work was a concrete cast of the inside of the entire three-story house, basement, ground floor and first floor, including stairs and bay windows, but not the roof space. After Whiteread took possession of the building in August 1993, new foundations were created to support the new concrete. Internal structures such as sinks and cupboards were removed, holes in the walls filled and the windows covered, to prepare a continuous internal surface that could be sprayed with a debonding agent, then a 5 centimetres (2.0 in) layer of locrete coloured light grey, and then a final 25 centimetres (9.8 in) layer of concrete reinforced with steel mesh. The builders left through a hole in the roof which was then sealed, and the external brick-built structure was removed.
The casting took place from August to October 1993, and the work was opened to the public on 25 October 1993. [8] Being so heavy, the work was exhibited at the original site of the house, on the edge of a new public park, Wennington Green, and beside Grove Road. The other houses in the terrace had already been demolished by Tower Hamlets London Borough Council.
House became a popular visitor attraction, with thousands of visitors per day. [8] Graffiti was later added on one side reading "Wot for?" with the enigmatic reply "Why not!" [9] It received rave reviews from critics. Andrew Graham-Dixon of The Independent describing it as "one of the most extraordinary and imaginative public sculptures created by an English artist this century". [10] However, it was described as a monstrosity by Eric Flounders, the chair of the local council. [lower-alpha 1] A petition demanding it remain permanently received 3,300 signatures. A motion for its retention was moved in the House of Commons by the local Bow and Poplar member of parliament Mildred Gordon in November 1993. [12] [8]
The work won Whiteread the Turner Prize in November 1993, but the council confirmed the decision to demolish it the same day, passed by the casting vote of the chairman of the planning committee. [8] The controversy was compared to that over the public sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, with the fate of the work recalling Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in New York. [13] At the same time as winning the Turner Prize, Whiteread won the K Foundation art award for the worst example of British art, twice the amount of the Turner Prize. [14] Whiteread was hesitant to accept their award at first, but the money would have been burnt had she not. She donated half of the money to the housing charity Shelter, and the remainder in grants to young artists. [8]
The thin structure of House was demolished within two hours on 11 January 1994. Joe Cullen, the operator of the earthmover which destroyed the work, told the assembled press that "It's not art, it's a lump of concrete." [15] Whiteread, who was present at the destruction, stated that it was upsetting, but was determined not to show her emotion publicly. [11] [lower-alpha 2] Nothing remains of the artwork. [11]
In 2008, Whiteread proposed a variant of her House artwork for the Ebbsfleet Landmark project. The project would have been based on her own family home, and would be what she described as "a monument to everybody's homes".
Her submission reached a shortlist along with Mark Wallinger, Richard Deacon, Christopher le Brun, and Daniel Buren, and Wallinger's White Horse at Ebbsfleet was ultimately chosen.
The Turner Prize, named after the English painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist. Between 1991 and 2016, only artists under the age of 50 were eligible. The prize is awarded at Tate Britain every other year, with various venues outside of London being used in alternate years. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the UK's most publicised art award. The award represents all media.
Dame Rachel Whiteread is an English artist who primarily produces sculptures, which typically take the form of casts. She was the first woman to win the annual Turner Prize in 1993.
The Young British Artists, or YBAs—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, whereas some from the group had trained at Royal College of Art.
Mark Wallinger is a British artist. Having previously been nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, he won in 2007 for his installation State Britain. His work Ecce Homo (1999–2000) was the first piece to occupy the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Labyrinth (2013), a permanent commission for Art on the Underground, was created to celebrate 150 years of the London Underground. In 2018, the permanent work Writ in Water was realized for the National Trust to celebrate Magna Carta at Runnymede.
The 1994 K Foundation award was an award given by the K Foundation to the "worst artist of the year". The shortlist for the £40,000 K Foundation award was identical to the shortlist for the well-established but controversial £20,000 Turner Prize for the best British contemporary artist. On the evening of 23 November 1993, Rachel Whiteread was presented with the 1993 Turner Prize inside London's Tate Gallery, and the 1994 K Foundation award on the street outside.
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Mile End Park is a park located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is a linear park of some 32 hectares, and was created on industrial land devastated by World War II bombing. Some of the park is within Limehouse and Globe Town/Bethnal Green, with the park lying on land to the east of the Regent's Canal. In the north, it is separated from the southern edge of Victoria Park by the Hertford Union Canal. It is open 24 hours a day.
The A1205 is a road in east London which runs north to south parallel to the Regent's Canal and connects South Hackney and Victoria Park with the A13 at Limehouse. It is approximately 2 miles (3 km) in length, and runs in a roughly SSW direction.
Events from the year 1993 in art.
The Arts Council Collection is a national loan collection of modern and contemporary British art. It was founded in 1946. The collection continues to acquire works each year. The Arts Council Collection reaches its audience through loans to public institutions, touring exhibitions, digital and outreach projects. The collection supports artists based in the UK through the purchase and display of their work, safeguarding it.
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Iwona Maria Blazwick OBE is a British art critic and lecturer. She is currently the Chair of the Royal Commission for Al-'Ula’s Public Art Expert Panel. She was the Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from 2001 to 2022. She discovered Damien Hirst and staged his first solo show at a public London art gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1992. She supports the careers of young artists.
Susan Hiller was a US-born, British conceptual artist who lived in London, United Kingdom. Her practice spanned a broad range of media including installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, artist's books and writing. A key figure in British art across four decades, she was best known for her innovative large-scale multimedia installations, and for works that took as their subject matter aspects of culture that were overlooked, marginalised, or disregarded, including paranormal beliefs – an approach which she referred to as 'paraconceptualism'.
The White Horse at Ebbsfleet, formerly the Ebbsfleet Landmark, colloquially the Angel of the South, was a planned white horse statue to be built in the Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent, England. Designed by Mark Wallinger to faithfully resemble a thoroughbred horse, but at 33 times life size, the colossal sculpture was to be 50 metres (160 ft) high.
Roger Hiorns is a British artist based in London. His primary media is sculpture and installation, using a wide variety of materials, including metals, wood and plastics. He also works in the media of video and photography.
Artangel is a London-based arts organisation founded in 1985 by Roger Took. Directed since 1991 by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, it has commissioned and produced a string of notable site-specific works, plus several projects for TV, film, radio and the web. Notable past works include the Turner Prize-winning House by Rachel Whiteread (1993), Break Down by Michael Landy (2001) and Seizure by Roger Hiorns (2008–2010), also nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009.
Chisenhale Gallery is a non-profit contemporary art gallery based in London's East End.
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