This video charts the transformation of House from an ordinary home to one of the most ambitious and contentious artworks of recent years. Cast in concrete, House stood in an expansion of empty parkland in East London for three months before being destroyed on the orders of the local council. Its private conception and very public destruction were recorded by local filmmakers John Kelly and Helen Silverlock over several months. The video is interspersed with occasional observations from Whiteread’s own video diaries as the sculpture’s notoriety grew. Rachel Whiteread’s House records the short life of the sculpture at the quiet centre of one of the noisiest cultural storms of recent years. House was commissioned by Artangel and Beck’s, completed in October 1993, and demolished in January 1994. (Artangel Afterlives).
“A strange and fantastical object which also amounts to one of the most extraordinary and imaginative sculptures created by an English artist this century”
The Independent
