On a razed area that was once a housing block, the titled structure ‘House’ (1993) of 193 Grove Road, District of Bow, East End of London, was the last Victorian house of that line and stood alone. Rachel Whiteread has transformed what was once a functioning, lived-in house, into an uninviting void; it heightened feelings of loss, death and memory almost immediately, concepts of which are only amplified given the sculpture’s short lifespan. Whiteread’s casting process allowed for the possibility of preserving memory while also suggesting a likeness to a death mask. Whiteread has presented the viewer with something uncanny, which touched on the physical and psychological relationship the sculpture had with the space and its viewers; the object of which was recognizable, was not immediately familiar as she casted the inside of the house and projected it onto the outside of the structure. Through this infrastructural switch, the artist discomforts audiences as she has altered the relationship between private and public space. Where, what was once a private space of the home has been presented publicly. This in turn has been interpreted by the public in a multitude of ways that has been applied to the artist’s original intention of creating a work that spoke about memory and loss. In this respect, Whiteread’s House created ripples within the community on a political and socio-economic scale that strongly implicates notions of site specificity, as examined by Miwon Kwon and Richard Serra in their books One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity and Writings/Interviews; Kwon articulates that to be site-specific in the sense of the ‘phenomenological paradigm’, an art object must be experienced through the bodily presence. The concept stresses that the sculpture is grounded to the site as an actual location, whereupon the sculpture’s identity is informed by, and informs the site.

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House was associated with the history of the site and existing ideologies about the overarching space. That in mind, the piece is arguably site-specific with a contrasting (counter) language to the space as it initiates an interrogation of the space and its accompanied ideology. This is especially important when understanding the language involved within the location that Serra has noted as always present. While investigating the language of the space, this essay will take note regarding the production of, and materials used for House as well as the chosen location and its history, as each element plays a role in the reading of the artwork. Finally, it is important to note the public’s reception of the piece, and how viewers read the language of the sculpture within its specified site; where among its brief lifespan, the piece has been vandalized with notations surrounding the topic of poverty and racism. These actions will be applied to Serra’s concept of site-specificity and Kwon’s paradigms as the artwork grew into a projection of social issues associated with London; viewers have reacted physically to the work of art, arguably adding to the language of the space. The sculpture was effectively emptied from the inside out with no discernable features; it in fact resembled a void. The nothingness that exuded from House broke one’s concept of ‘the Real’. Where, for Zizek in his book titled “Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture”, it is Fantasy – that he interprets from Lacanian principle - that fills this void of the Real. I argue, that Whiteread’s House created a disruptive presence that not only influenced the reading of it as loss, but of a void, destined to be filled by fantasy concepts. The trauma, fantasy and the real - as Zizek pulls from a Lacanian perspective -, that the piece created and identified within the space, further emphasizes the interplay of language and counter-language of the site. Given that Whiteread had chosen to use a housing development as her site, it is the elements of this landscape that emphasized the sculpture’s symbolic representation to which one’s fantasy was applied. However it is important to note that while the ‘real’ cannot be represented, and is resistant to all symbolization, it can be analyzed through the “distortions and displacements of the symbolic structure.”[1] All of these elements when considered will bring to light how House created a disruptive presence within its site-specific atmosphere during its short life.

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            In order to read Whiteread’s House as a site-specific work, it is important to review Miwon Kwon’s recitation of the history of site-specificity and its relationship to terms such as “public art” and “plop art” and how the definition of “site-specific” is not the same as “public art”. From this information, the reader will conclude that House did not function as public art nor would it be considered plop art. Kwon reviews the growing commodification of art from the 1960s - onward and how site-specific art converges with land art, performance art, public art and many other categories. She recognizes that the term “site-specific” has been applied in a multitude of ways as a diverse and rather broad definition. As since the practice of “site-specificity” emerged in the mid-late 1960s, it wasn’t until 1974 that site-specific approaches to public art were incited.[2] Kwon engages the explanation of site-specificity with her three paradigms which do not function chronologically, but overlap each other in many ways; the phenomenological, social/institutional and discursive.[3] Initially, public art between the 1960s-70s were governed by the “art-in-public-places paradigm”, where abstract sculptures were often enlarged copies of works found in museums and galleries.[4] These pieces had no unique qualities to legitimize them as “public art” other than their size, scale and the fact that they were “outdoor”. Working within the art-in-public-places mode meant ignoring the conditions of the site in terms of the piece’s conception (how it would relate to the area); the site as a physical or architectural entity only mattered in terms of compositional challenge/arrangement for the piece – which was often considered a decoration by architects.[5] Moreover, these public art pieces were criticized for negating public involvement (with the exception of acting as public furniture) and felt like an extension of the museum. The artwork’s indifference to the site and audience in turn, caused for public disinterest.[6] Public art under this category was often classified as “plop art” or an “object out of the pedestal” as the work was more an ornament of the space, put there with no thought about its surrounding, rather than creating a dialogue or awareness about the territory – let alone initiating an interrogation about the ideological authority of the atmosphere. Kwon posits that the solution for public art’s public relational problems was to adopt site-specific principles.[7] And so began the desire to apply site-specific “approaches to public art, favoring the creation of unique and unrepeatable aesthetic responses tailored to specific locations”.[8]

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Emerging from minimalist understanding, site-specific work was based in a phenomenological awareness of the particular location and its physical attributes.[9] The phenomenological site-specific model posits the experience of the here and now through the bodily experience of each viewing subject[10]. This site-specific model also focuses on the artwork’s inseparable nature from its environment, while the institutional model challenges the neutrality of the site[11]. It is in the institutional paradigm that site-specific works are meant to decode or recode institutional conventions to expose their hidden meanings with interest in the cultural framework; such as “revealing institutional autonomy by making apparent their relationship to the broader socioeconomic and political processes,”[12] to criticise said underlying structures specifically targeting the art system itself (which include the museum, studio, galleries etc.). The discursive paradigm, however, sees the site as a discourse surrounded in a set of ideas or beliefs – more so having to do with the realm of socio-political issues.[13] This paradigm sees the work’s relationship to both the physical features of the location and its institutional and social contexts. Where, the locational anchor moves from geography to discursive formats. Kwon connects the discursive paradigm of site-specificity with site-oriented art of the 1990s. This art often sought to create more political and stronger relations with the world and life outside of art institutions.[14] For Kwon, in the earliest manifestation of site-specific work, it was defined as a focus of establishing an inseparable relationship between the work and its site – this concept was largely of the phenomenological paradigm[15]. Kwon relates to Richard Serra in further asserting her point about the immovability of the work from site; where Serra states that works designed for a particular site are deemed site-specific pieces and must not be relocated. If they are to be removed, they are effectively destroyed[16]. Serra emphasizes that site-specificity includes the environmental components of a place, taking into consideration the scale, size and topography of the site (albeit urban, landscape or architectural plot) as well as the language propagated within the area. These works thus become part of the site and restructure said location conceptually and perceptually – while arguably, also being informed by the space.

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Furthermore, Kwon explains that a piece can be site-specific, so long as it is “adamant about immobility”[17] and presence, even if it is materially ephemeral, or faces the threat of disappearance or destruction. Finally, Serra’s conception of site-specificity also includes the sculpture’s relationship to the language of the site. For Serra, there is always a language within the art and its space; the work is relational to the space, and it becomes part of the sculpture[18]. Moreover, the language of the space not only references certain ideologies, but also affects how individuals relate to the site in their day-to-day practices and their understanding of the ideologies attached to the area. If the language of the site is the coating of the space, the sculpture’s interjection – its counter-language -, acts as a kind of element, which was not initially part of the existing language.[19] From this conception, one will understand, as Serra has asserted, “there is no neutral site. Every context has its frame and its ideological overtones. It’s a matter of degree.”[20] As Serra explains in his 1980 interview with Douglas Crimp, the viewer reads the site via the sculpture,[21] and the sculpture in turn, recognizes and uses the surrounding signifiers.

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            For Serra however, in order for his sculptures to effectively create a dialogue with the site – and to avoid it being deemed “plop art” -, he conceives his work to specifically cater to the desired site. In an interview with Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Serra explains that most of his work (drawings and sculptures) is site-related;

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The site determines how I think about what I am going to do, whether it be an urban or landscape site, a room, or other architectural enclosure. All the site-defining information that’s available is gathered: topographical maps, elevation maps, architectural isometrics. Then I measure and steak out the site.”[22]

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Much like Serra, Whiteread also staked out her desired location and spent a great deal of time planning the execution of House. House was Whiteread’s first public sculpture, which led her to win the Turner Prize and included the casting of a concrete skin of a white Victorian house.[23] The artist familiarized herself with the idiosyncrasies of the structure’s interior by photographing it while also having videographers do the same. She would envision her casting process by blocking out features of the photographs. Each room was unique, possessing its own combination of floor and wall coverings. It is, as Stephanie Bradshaw in her text The Sculpture of Rachel Whiteread and Social Space, explained, “Whiteread’s knowledge of the house’s interior contributes to House’s power to communicate the story of its residents since the Victorian era."[24] It must be clearly understood however, that by ‘residents’, it is meant to regard those who lived in the general vicinity of East End London and not just the inhabitants of the household of 193 Grove Road. Whiteread specifically wanted the sculpture to be more than just about those who had lived at 193 Grove Road before their eviction – or its first death. By spring 1993, two years of preparation had been put into the House project; work began in the summer on the last house to remain on the demolished property lot on Grove Road.[25] Liquid concrete was used to spray the interior of the house in order to create a cast; the external walls were then carefully removed.[26] Coating the house took little over a month, and another ten days were needed for the concrete to set and cure. Once the structure was solid, scaffolding was set up in order for Whiteread and her assistants to remove the exterior brick structure.[27] The terrace was tall but narrow; its side revealed that the structure had many tiny rooms on each floor, each with their own small fireplace. Looking from the front, its size and shape implied that the house was a residence. Given that the piece projected something similar to a front door and a resemblance to windows, the idea was further reinforced until it was looked at more closely. The spectator came to find that this was not a sculpture of a house’s exterior but of what should be concave was turned convex as the interior of the house was projected outward. Details of the exterior were also missing where the smooth walls of the inside replaced the brick texture, the archway and cornices were missing and because the attic wasn’t cast, the chimneys were also gone.[28] House was officially finished on October 25, 1993, only six days before the sculpture was expected to be torn down; showcasing a full-sized, “inverse representation of the three-storey home, complete with outlines of fireplaces, windows, architraves and staircases.[29]

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Whiteread’s House only existed on the condition of the destruction of the structure from which it was cast.[30] If not for its initial structure, the piece would not have an uncanny presence. House is argued here as a site-specific sculpture as the completed concrete-cast house exemplifies studies of spatial absence and had a strong connection to the lived moments of a space, which was clearly asserted in the dialogue the sculpture had with its encompassing surroundings.[31] Whiteread was interested in making the work reflect the lived bodily experience of the space it resided in. Where although her intentions were not deliberately political, House became political as members from the public sphere interacted with the piece on a physical and intellectual level and expressed their own ideas about loss and identity in London.[32] Whiteread of course knew that the piece would have a political element to it, noting, “you can’t make a cast of a house in a poor area of London and not be political”.[33] Yet, the sculpture became much more political than she had predicted. The council had also seemed to underestimate its resonance. The artwork was quick to become front-page news and its status was brought to the House of Commons for debate. The council regarded it as a politically embarrassing monument to a history of poverty that stood in the way of constructing a green field – one of which is arguably of forced amnesia.[34] Civilians reacted so strongly to the piece that it transcended the individual and “became an archetype.”[35] It emblematized the area’s mode of living and raised questions about the degrading housing situation and what should be done about it – the creeping gentrification of a history of the working-class community and skepticism towards the authority who was instigating the change of the space ‘for the greater good.’[36]

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House confronted the question of for who was this change for? – it confronted these queries by means of its own material existence. In this respect, House follows Kwon’s phenomenological and discursive paradigm where the public interacted with the piece physically and gave it a meaning larger than where it stood geographically. In keeping with Serra, this harkens to his reference pertaining to ideologies and how the civilian understands and applies certain ideologies based on their experiences of a place. This injection of a piece that wanted to remember disrupts a green field that’s purpose was to forget the past. Ergo, House disturbed the space and investigated its rhetoric and dogmas. What is interesting about the piece is that it offered no comfort to the viewer either visually of physically. It was uninviting in the sense that it did not create public seating or much in the way of any sort of interaction other than walking around, or attempting to climb the structure. Yet, individuals would leave bottles of milk outside of the sculpture, and advertise the work as a piece of real estate.[37] The exterior walls of the house were smoothed over with Locrete and were hence an invitation for the community to comment upon. Phrases such as “WOT FOR?, WHY NOT” and covered over subtext “HOMES FOR ALL BLACK + WHITE” were sprayed onto the surface.[38] With this effect, House became a symbolic realization of the community’s underbelly wrought with poor housing and racism. These interactions and reactions have created a dialogue of interpretation of the space and the sculpture. This in turn, adds to the language that House proposed and interrogated within the given space. House evoked issues surrounding urban living; ownership; space and place; “and the politics that affect and give effect to those issues and sites.”[39]

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The piece was a temporary, site-specific sculpture that was located in an area of redevelopment in Bow, Hackney East London;[40] before the house was bathed in cement, it belonged to one Sydney Gale. Mr. Gale, a retired war hero, was resisting eviction from the city council for years. He was eventually re-homed nearby and Whiteread found her sculpture; she had been looking for a sculpture in London for over two years to realize her venture.[41] The East End of London in which House resided was littered with rows of dilapidated tenements in the 90s. Mr. Gale’s home was the last row of the lot that was to be demolished as part of Tower Hamlet’s council’s plan for a Green Corridor – one that was hoped to unify the broken line between the Isle of Dogs and the ‘lung’ of Victoria Park; It was a means to cleanse the area of the legacy of prefabs that had homed the dislocated population post-war and a redemptive space for those in high-rise accommodation which had replaced the traditional terraces.[42] Councilor Eric Flounders strongly asserted that parkland is what tower residents desired and seemed dead against Whiteread’s sculpture. The dilapidated area was in effect a graveyard without the headstones of the homes that once occupied the area - to put in a field is voluntary fugue.[43] During World War Two, Grove Road was one of the first locations in London hit by a bomb.[44] The bomb damaged the already decaying architecture of the area. After the war, the desire to improve the location resulted in the demolishing of the dilapidated tenements.[45]

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Since the war, the atmosphere drastically deteriorated; where the area of London the house resided in was one of low socioeconomic status, having poor housing conditions and high levels of violence and crime.[46] When House was standing, it was a hotbed of attraction. On Grove Road where it resided, had a busy local politico, filled with anarchist squatters, rock stars and psycheographers, House showcased the human shambles of the Green Way.[47] House was a few hundred yards from passing traffic, in an almost-completed park that was never secured to keep the public out. The piece was a huge media opportunity – especially for Flounders to defend himself in light of the eviction of 100 Bangladeshi families. Council Flounders cited the work as “crap”, while there were an almost even number of council members voting for and against the piece.[48] Councilor Glover argued that House provided spectators and the Bow residence the opportunity to comment on the post-war social development and wasted opportunities pertaining to the space.[49] Opposed to this notion was Councilor Baunton who believed that the neighbourhood should not be looking to the past as the site’s war history could bring up negative reflections for the public. Instead, Baunton suggested that the public should be looking forward, toward the future.[50]

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For many who have read into the piece, House did not only represent the broad concept of memory, but that of the past and present of “working London families.”[51] Given that Whiteread had chosen to cast a domestic space within London, rather than outside of it, demonstrates importance of personal knowledge of the space. This personal knowledge of a place resonates with individual stories and connections associated with the site for many who view it. Whiteread chose not to cast the space of the attic, calling to the idiom ‘having no roof over one’s head,’[52] which in effect acknowledged the housing inequality of the East End of London – one with a high homeless rate. That being said, it is understandable that some residents harbored resentment towards House as they saw it as adding insult to injury regarding the demolition of the homes in the area; believing it as crass in displaying a private, working-class home for the “arty leisure classes.”[53] For those who saw House as a comment on the urban living situation, House was often argued as emblemizing loss in relation to profit; either through gentrification, redevelopment of a revitalizing that destroys neighborhoods in order to create new high-profit developments.[54] With this knowledge in mind, House’s specified site exposed the loss of domestic spaces that have been destroyed for capital benefit. This immediate resolution is felt intensely when one especially considers the sculpture’s accompanying space, as the piece stood completely alone in “what had once been a vital block of homes.”[55] House sat stoically as a solitary representation of what had been Grove Road; it mocked the patterned deconstruction that so much of East London had already endured. In this respect, House symbolized the homes, residents and neighborhoods lost through gentrification – and the desire to remember them. To understand this reading of House fully, one must consider the history of the site, as it is personal knowledge that enables the viewer to read House as a comment on loss of neighborhoods. East London, where Whiteread resides, is known for its history of industry and working class individuals; the discourse House portrayed was specific to the East London sector; the East end provided industry and labor “largely responsible for the United Kingdom’s economic success in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”[56] Yet, in spite of high profits and a booming economy, the high wage inequity generated by labor meant that many workers lived in poverty.[57]

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As evidenced, the sculpture stood boldly against a green field; an initial interpretation of such a contrast speaks to the dialogue of the space. The sculpture was the only semblance of a row of housing tenements that once resided in the space now demolished. Immediately, the contrast suggested a discourse about ‘new’ and ‘old’, or of ‘past’ and ‘future’, which in effect, speaks to loss and memory as the field attempted to destroy the memory of poor housing in the area, the crime, inequality and violence associated with it. The bold presence House had, reminds the spectator of the poor living accommodations, creating a conversation and in some respects, outcry about the continuance of such inequality. The reactions of the public where they treat the sculpture as if it were a functioning house gives further meaning to the desire for memory and better housing quality, rather than forgetting how poorly the area and its residents had been treated. Through Whiteread’s interjection of House and its death-like allure, as well as her choice of materials, viewers with knowledge of the area can read into the sculpture as remembering the past of London’s East End. Furthermore, in keeping with addressing the language of House and its site, it is important to pay close attention to Whiteread’s choice of materials and desired location: Whiteread chose concrete, which was read as significant as it referenced British proprietor’s practice of blocking “toilets in abandoned houses as a way of discouraging homeless squatters”[58]. In that regard, viewers with this knowledge may have read the piece as an act of solidarity with the homeless or poor and a reference to poor handling of the living condition in the East End.

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To complete a project this large, Whiteread worked with the Artangel Trust – a privately funded foundation in Britain that commissions contemporary art projects worldwide.[59] The artist and Artangel approached the London Borough council about using Mr. Gale’s property, and they consented. Yet, by the time the bricks of the structure were removed, revealing the sculpture, Councilor Flounders condemned the piece as “excrescent.”[60] Given its uncanny allure and reference to an embarrassing past that the London administration has been so desperate to be covered up, it is understandable that the Councilor may have such feelings about the piece. This negative cast of an everyday object triggered a sense of recognition in viewers, as it was a cast of something familiar; it was a place of invitation and one to create memories within. However with this piece, one was unable to enter and the geneses of memories have been embalmed forever. In this respect, House was a material reminder of domestic space, where its absence had been solidified; the spectator had to decipher the conflicting relationship of sign to reference;

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House enacted a slippage between the experience of the inside and outside, site and object, public and private, home, materiality (solid space and actual home), and the body. Because it included the solidification of everyday space, it implicated and provoked the viewers’ presence and participation, only to disrupt them. It worked to disturb the viewers’ sense of their body’s physical integrity and spatial differentiation from the material object with which they were confronted.[61]

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The viewer was not only confronted with their own understanding and associations of the home, but what ‘home’ meant. Nostalgia encouraged the individual to think about the entire community and the location of the sculpture; “by inspiring viewers to think about the community of the East End and Grove Road, House is permanently attached to it.”[62]

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Due to the casting process and Whiteread’s desire to preserve memory, the sculpture had affinities with the death mask; initially, death masks were created after the subject died in an attempt to preserve its memory. Yet, in Whiteread’s process, there is a reversal of the order in which the memory is preserved. The artist chose to cast the object, thereby destroying it, choosing to end the structure’s existence “as if she is burying the memories alive.”[63] Where the death mask replicates unique qualities of the subject, Whiteread’s House produced vague outlines and features of a common piece of architecture. The structure looked like an abstract work with geometric shapes and possessing an arguably weak resemblance to the physical world. Yet it was also real as it was a cast of an actual house. What is interesting to note is that, Whiteread chose this structure because of its iconography, so it would be fair to venture that it was chosen so that the house would be easily recognizable. Yet, by casting and downplaying the architecture’s features, she problematizes the ability to immediately see the building for a home, or better yet, a functional house. It becomes assimilated, and faceless. No longer unique, but a bland reference to so many structures before it – at odds with the initial function of what a death mask is supposed to provide; a unique replica of something that was once ‘alive’. Through this method, Whiteread presented the spectator with a disturbing negative of the object rather than a full cast of all its outer design. The experience is thus uncanny;

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The house that once stood at 193 Grove Road can no longer allow for individual humans to live inside, no more personal memories from Sid the War Hero and his family can be made. Instead the negative physical characteristics of the house are presented to the viewer. Theoretically these physical characteristics should be similar, if not identical, to the previous Victorian terraced houses that lined Grove Road. By casting the space of a house, Whiteread is able to take the private space and turn it into a public space, creating the possibility for collective memory through this cast, in contrast to the individual memory that typically is associated with a death mask.[64]

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            The sculpture House seemed to not only die once, but twice. Firstly, when it was cast, it was destroyed, but secondly, when it was demolished. When relating to the sculpture’s first death, one must look to Zizek, where the casting is a symbolic murder; House was suspended in its reality; for the real, although it appears in the form of the traumatic return (which can derail the balance of everyday life), it consequently also serves as a support for said balance.[65] House created a space of interruption – like an abyss that leaves a scar -, where coherent meaning is replaced by a traumatic break in reality – our perceptions and what we think we know based on social and institutional discourses. This abyss becomes a space of pure interruption within the existing language of the space. Where, as mentioned previously, the structure can be read as the counter-language that became a scar within the space.[66] 193 Grove Road at that point was a space of interruption. This interruption was where the real acts as a disruption of social fantasy. Reality, in this sense – as we experience it -, relies on a repression of the real of our desire. The social reality becomes not much more than a fragile symbolic mesh that can be torn by an intrusion of the real.[67] It is fantasy that fills the void left by the real. This fantasy realizes our desire, not fulfills it. In this respect, the void created by House caused a break within the real that inspired the need for an application of fantasy by many within the public onto the structure. This of course, came in the form of arguments about the interpretation of the piece as politically charged revolving around issues of racism and housing inequalities; where, as previously stated, the public would react to the piece through written text on its surface and milk bottles. Moreover, this desire is not something given in advance, but has to be constructed – and it is the role of fantasy to give coordinates of subject’s desire, to locate and specify its object and position that the object assumes.[68] Zizek pairs his understanding of the Lacanian term ‘desire’ with the linguistic system of the Symbolic Order; our desire is never our own but is created via fantasies that are wrought with cultural ideologies rather than material sexuality. Our desire relies on lack, since fantasy does not correspond to anything in the real.[69]

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As noted, the fantasy that the public has filled the void of House with reflected the history of the East End of London that the council preferred to repress. Housing has been central to the politics of community for a long time in London’s East End – these politics of which are equally important to the racist myth of the East End’s past as a pure white presence (before immigration or ‘outsiders’).[70] The district of Bow was an especially white enclave; it was also an area where the housing policy prioritized ‘locals’ – in other words, prioritizing whites –, which was developed by the area’s council. House itself was adjusted to the status of an outsider and was treated by its opposers as “a species of unwanted, [an] illegal immigrant.”[71] The second death, and final destruction of House symbolized the termination of unwanted alien elements from the ‘pure’ territory of a white community.[72] For others, House simply represented the destruction of undeveloped, poor neighbourhoods in the pursuit of profit yielding growth. Efforts were made to stop the destruction of the sculpture – from writing to the neighbourhood council to adolescents chaining themselves to the fence in front of the sculpture. One Twenty-three year old, Karl McCarthy defended his actions by claiming “We’re doing this because House represents the destruction of not only homes but whole communities in East London. 350 homes are being pulled down to make way for [new projects]. There was a row of houses here but now there’s only one piece of art, and we don’t want them to demolish this one.”[73] McCathy’s statement proves that citizens of London were not concerned with the house on lot 193 specifically, but of entire neighbourhoods in London that were being destroyed and neglected. This not only supports the notion that House worked as a memorial for collective memory, but also heightens the realization of the social and economic divide in London. It is recognized that the East End is one of the poorest and ignored areas and the sculpture is a physical embodiment of these tribulations, where for its brief life, the reality of East London’s poor state was unavoidable to see tangibly. In effect, by taking the private elements of the house and showcasing as public, Whiteread had made something invisible, visible. This was not only felt or seen physically, but also experienced psychologically as the viewer reflected on the rhetoric of London’s East End.

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By mummifying the air within House, the sculpture moved between being “a haunting reclusive presence and an impenetrable absence.” [74] The work divulged Lacanian models of ‘l’extimité or extimacy: the concept of the exterior and intimacy being interlaced, the experience of inside and outside – or ontological incompleteness of reality.[75] By materializing the void of 193 Grove Road, Whiteread created a mirror of the real; the sculpture was saturated with the nature of its past and intricate relationship to the present. That being said, the work was as much about pliancy as it was about ephemerality as the more one engages with House’s exteriors, “the more the act of looking becomes a profoundly introspective experience.”[76] This massive object not only gave body to itself by means of casting empty space, but also inverted the standard relationship between the void and its shell: instead of the vessel embodying the void, the void itself was materialized. The effect is one, which demonstrates ontological incompleteness of reality, where they ‘stick out’ and are thusly not on the same level of reality as average objects would be.[77] Here, Zizek interprets the concept of the return of the living dead. The return of the living dead is a reversal of the proper funeral right. Where the funeral right implies reconciliation or acceptance of loss, the return of the living dead signifies that the lost have not found a proper place. Where Zizek makes an example about the ghosts of holocaust victims pursuing the living in an attempt to reconcile their death into ‘our historical memory,’[78] I equate Whiteread’s House to the same notation. Positioning the piece as a ghostly representation of the last house on Grove Road to die for the sake of gentrification, it posited the viewer through its forceful and uncanny disposition to remember the unpleasant history of the London’s East End. Moreover, given that the lot was originally full of houses signifying private property, it was then transitioned into a green space of supposed public property. Yet this ‘public space’ came at the heavy cost of eviction. That in mind, the sculpture and its irrefutable death explored the notion of why the green space is really there – for what purpose does it actually pose, is actually in the interest of the community if its creation is born from dispossession, or is it there to enforce a stupor in memory?

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The site today is a houseless park; the legacy of House seems to be written off and largely absent with the exception of a small brick protrusion - the equivalent to a scar from a paper cut – that resides within the park’s grounds. Its memory now faded, only lives through photographs. For locals, there may be a glimmer of recognition – a secret message, as described by Derrida. House stood at 193 Grove as an abstracted version of a no longer functional house. It was obscure in its own right through Whiteread’s choice in rendering the structure, creating an uncanny effect. What House symbolized was never immediately clear; it was those who gazed upon it and incited their own fantasies based on their social understandings defined a broad example of memory – for memory of what was dependent on the spectator. In this way, House held a secret message for the secret addressee, if there was a message in its disruptive nature, the concept of the secret message presupposes that the people will understand and read into it as.[79] Whiteread’s inversion of positive and negative space; of public and private, interrupted one’s relationship between seeing and knowing where through her tangible object, invisible inequalities were made visible by those who read the secret message of the house/fed the fantasy of the void. As discussed in this essay, in its wake, House created a media uproar that inspired political debates about race, gentrification and working class London – raising issues about private and public life as well as individual and collective memory. Whiteread knew that House would be destroyed – but she also knew that the promised demise of the sculpture gave the piece a lot of power. It was already deceased long before it was casted. As Whiteread stated “it took three and a half years to develop, four months to make, and thirty minutes to demolish,”[80] yet during its short life, the artwork’s disruptive presence gave substance to the invisible nature of inequality in London’s East End; interrogating a space that attempted to ignore it’s sordid past, coupled with its haunting presence, created a counter-language that the public read – and added – to. The ephemeral nature of House made a point that struck the hearts and minds of those who took the time to engage with the piece. Its brief period of time lends further to the experience of eviction and gentrification within East London.