All that is solid - sculpture; Rachel Whiteread, traveling exhibition

Based upon the simplest of strategies - casting mainly domestic furnishings and architecture, sometimes as positives, more oftentimes as negatives - Rachel Whiteread's plastic art presents a vision of epidemic immobility. on the contrary for every door it shut ups and every window it seals, it lay opens a floodgate of response, one as well as the other critical and popular. House, her 1993 harden cast of the interior of an entire three-story London line house, was a monumental succe de scandale, with the public and mass media focusing upon issues ranging from municipal housing to the community's command over its public identity. There has been almost an equal cascade of professional attention, greatest in quantity of it laudatory, to House and to Whiteread's other work as well.(1) To read this material is to take a bungee jump over off the cliffs of contemporary critical theory. There is something amusing in the image of Whiteread's work, close tight as a bank vault, and this outpouring of body (Minimalism, and equally the work of Robert Ryman, has, perhaps for similar reasons, provok like effusions.)

So it is a welcome surprise to meeting in the survey of her work that traveled from Basel to Philadelphia to Boston, a material substance of sculpture of engrossing physicality. admitting the show as installed at Philadelphia contained solitary 11 sculptures, the range of materials is broad and nuanced enough that theorizing can be held in abeyance. Chronologically and conceptually, the more intimate, interior works approach first. Closet (1988) is a black-felt-covered plaster cast of the inside of a made of wood wardrobe. Just over 5 feet high, it is punctuated along single side with the original flimsy made of wood shelves, none of them level; the blocky statuary records, in reverse, the articulations of the door, its latch and various moldings.

An unmistakable icon of confinement and concealment, the wardrobe is also, as with a great deal of of Whiteread's sculpture, incipiently figurative. Her pupil work (not shown) involved material part casts, to which Closet is shut up kin. Ether (1990), a plaster cast (in sections) of the space around and beneath a Victorian bathtub, takes the form of a coffinlike rectangular solid with a down-reaching lengthwise indentation. It evokes the figure not through analogy but by absence. Its central cavity seemingly narrowed by dint of the height and bulk of the plaster enclose Ether evokes a body mortally threatened by dint of the structures of its have a title to maintenance. The chalky, mottled surfaces look to belong more to a mausoleum than a bathroom. The drain that marks Ether's visual focus is - as in Robert Gober's sinks and drains - a chilling sign of unstanchable loss, as primal as a child's fear of the bath.

The progression from Ether to the later beds and morgue slabs is direct, although not as simple as it have the appearances As if to recall Leo Steinberg's landmark essay upon "flatbed" image making, in which the objectification of painting's previously illusion-bound surface is exemplified in Rauschenberg's momentous decision to fift a bed from the horizontal to the vertical, Whiteread's beds are not absented in various postures. Cast from a full-sized mattress that bulg slightly when bent, Untitled (Amber Bed), 1991 is a jaundiced, beer-bellied slab of orange rubber slouching insolently against the waff. admitting its associations withthe figure are manifold, mortahty is not preeminent among them. The morgue slab casts are a different story. sum of two units of the simple, snub-nosed forms are shown here, the first a floor-bound single in dense amber rubber. The next to the first cast in a pearly, translucent rubber, is propp against the war and gently toes the floor with its circulared edge. These sculptures don't reveal plenteous of theirderivation from coroners' tables, apart from concerns to unspecified "slabs" in their titles and despite the often-remarked, on the contrary nearly invisible, knife marks in the surfaces that they record. If a certain number of of the beds - Amber Bed among them - approach as close as any of Whiteread's plastic arts to surrogates for the human figure, the slabs speak greatest in quantity eloquently of its disappearance. And they are the last of her works to bear overt emotional reference. The plastic arts that followed are cast from percepts that seem chosen for their resistance to narrative interpretation.

The newest plastic arts further excursions into radical vacancy, include a series of casts Whiteread has made, Nauman-like, of the space below chairs and desks. The operation bring forwards boxy, beveledged forms, spatially condens with prize to the originals, so utility have the appearances not prohibited but impeded: the writing surfaces are just a little depressed there is no leg field nor back support. Two 1994 examples are included, individual cast in translucent gray resin and the other a cloudy green, both harboring odd recesse of lambent light - the result is something like the North Atlantic in winter. As close as they are aqueous, these plastic arts also suggest richly optical three-dimensional shadows.

The casts of floors that Whiteread made just before the furniture pieces are les visually satisfying, granting they occupy something of the same ontological territory. Whether a curling sheet of woodgrained rubber or a rigid expanse of plank-marked plaster, these "floors" neither negate the function of their template nor quite obey in its place. And like the desk and chairs, they call forth computer drafting programs (Sculp 4D for instance) that, given the parameters of a contortion and a source of fight, can generate shadows with all the specificity, in shape, fabric and density, of positive form. Obstinately not absent yet maddeningly elusive, Whiteread's plastic art lays waste to normal distinctions between solidity and its opposite.