Who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain?

by anna at 07:36 PM on November 08, 2004

Yeah, but is Ghost art? Rachel Whiteread and her legion of fans sure think so. That I can agree with. I have no problem with her winning the ever controversial Turner Prize. I do take exception to Paul Richard's 15 paragraph article, waxing all rhapsodic about this damn thing. Does it really, "sympathetically acknowledge both the struggles of the common man and the high purities of abstraction?" Is it really, "British in its intimate shabbiness, its hip rejection of posh..?" Does it really evoke Bruce Nauman's A Cast of the Space Under My Chair? I'm thinking, no. Or yes.

Why no link? The only image I could find was in the Washington Post article and they have that damn registration feature. So I will describe it for you. It's a big white block of plaster that is all backwards. The fireplace bulges out towards you instead of inward. There are square lumps here and there. It is very...square. It looks like a tomb that might house a germphobe.

Whiteread's masterpiece is now on display at the National Gallery of Art. It's on loan, and it's very valuable in the parallel universe of contemporary art. We Washingtonians have billionaire art collector Mitchell Rales to thank for our viewing pleasure. Richard estimates it cost $1 million to bring it over here.

Maybe it's the low-def photo in the Post, but I can't see the soot still in the "negative fireplace." I can't discern the single door, or the "bruised windowsash" or the "pathetic gentility of the Victorian picture rail that runs around the walls." I don't understand the concept of an "anti-room" any more than I do antimatter. I do detect the snobbishness of rich snooty people looking down on us the great unwashed. Yes, that is coming through loud and clear, just as it did after the election results sunk in.

Meanwhile, over in war-ravaged Sudan, a 15 year old girl writhes in a makeshift tent as tribal elders pour water from a gourd onto her head. It's a primitive cleansing ritual. She's several months pregnant after being gang-raped by marrauding Arab madmen. Abortion isn't an option under tribal custom. It isn't likely anyone will marry her or agree to raise the biracial child as their own. It is a shameful stain not only upon her but her extended family. She'll live with that the remainder of her miserable life. She'd love to live somewhere that had those pathetic Victorian rails.

Is it just me or is something awfully amiss with both these stories appearing in the same paper on the same day? Sure, Mr. Rales could have parted with his $1 million any way he pleases. It is, after all, his money. Still, I have to think that sum would have gone a long way toward protecting the Sudanese lass from the horrors she experienced and the worst to come. I guess it's a question of your priorities. But if you ask me, these questions of basic human dignity need to be addressed before we can stand around peering at at some plaster sculpture of nothing and calling it art. And by addressing I don't mean world king Coffee Annan wringing his bony hands and lamenting this tragedy in his clipped, Eddie Murphy in Coming to America tones.

*Slumps down on soapbox and assumes the brooding position of Rodin's The Thinker* Now, that's a sculpture.