The art of empty houses

Susan Gustavson’s recent post about modern & contemporary art reminded me all over again what it is that I love best about art: how it compels you to see the everyday in a completely new light. All art does this to some extent, but contemporary art – because it lacks much of the pre-conceived intellectual baggage of “historical” art - can be particularly good at surprising you into it. The wonderful thing is that the experience then becomes a ball rolling down hill, and everything starts to look startling and new.

When I first started studying art history, I spent a lot of time looking at art & at art images, and that way of seeing – the looking at art way - soon began to bleed into my regular life. I’d be walking around town not thinking about much of anything, and all of a sudden the Platonic ideas behind the everyday forms would come screaming out at me. The essential truth of a row of rooftops would suddenly be revealed; they were an endless series of intersecting triangles. A random assortment of buildings would be reduced to nothing more than great big blocks of color. A branch bending over a sidewalk would bisect a familiar scene, turning regular houses and driveways into components of an elaborate diagonal composition, and the clouds overhead were perpetually morphing into fantastically complex shapes, like the designs on Persian tiles. It got to the point where the vision switch became so intrusive that I actually wondered if I was going crazy, but eventually I just stopped worrying about it. And after awhile my perceptions adjusted and I settled down. But I miss it, miss the intensity and freshness of that kind of seeing.

So I’m a fan of anything that can temporarily restore it to me, which is why I found myself driving to the MFA up in Boston last month to see the Rachel Whiteread show. For those who are unfamiliar with her, Rachel Whiteread is a British sculptor who uses what is usually regarded as negative space – often in an architectural context - as her subject matter. Sounds complicated, but it isn’t. Simply put, she makes plaster casts of empty space. An early piece of hers, “House, consisted of her filling a derelict London building with cement and then stripping away the shell of the building, leaving a solid concrete cast of the empty space inside. Empty space became densely full, dense matter disappeared, reality was seen backwards, as if in a mirror. Much of what she does involves the space found within boxes, containers, architectural space. How often do we see the empty space we spend our lives inhabiting? For those of us who are realtors, how often do we seriously reflect upon the nature of the empty spaces we sell, or think about the voids that constitute our primary product?

Her installation that I went to at the MFA differed from her usual work in that the empty spaces stayed empty. What she did was to take hundreds of old dollhouses and fill them with light. The interior of every house was completely empty, save for the light, which became in effect a kind of sculptural soft cast of the interior voids. House after house, all glowing, all empty, piled on empty wooden packing crates, hillsides, towns, cities of them. Solid empty space made visible. I’ll never look at a street of empty houses in the same way again. And that, I think, is a good thing.