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Antibodies: Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower
Author(s) -
Malvern Sue
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2003.02603004.x
Subject(s) - tower , skyline , alien , art , art history , visual arts , ephemeral key , archaeology , history , law , politics , algorithm , citizenship , political science , computer science
First commissioned in 1994 and installed on a rooftop in SoHo, New York City, in 1998, Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower has been described with tropes identifying it as an alien presence on the New York skyline. In effect, Water Tower – and, by extension, the artist herself – has been classed as an immigrant or a foreign body, marked by difference. Water Tower is a tour de force of resin casting from one of New York's unique and ubiquitous wooden water towers, and has also been seen as a monument or a memorial. The piece was recently purchased and donated to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and a once‐discreet, sometimes invisible, ephemeral sight, that played on presence and absence, became a permanent monument in the canon of modern art.