Described in the dictionary: a house is a building for people to live in, usually for one family. A house is often referred to as a home. Although the concept of home is broader than just a physical dwelling. A place of social interactions where our needs and desires are being fulfilled. Home is often a place of refuge, privacy, safety and comfort. A place where the things and people we love become the main focus.
It is a place where we grow up, therefore where our history remains and our memories are coming from. A representation of a house as a microcosm of a world at large, creates a possibility to translate personal experiences in to universal issues. As a result, the idea of a house and home has been of a deep interest for artists and subject matter in their work. Like Louise Bourgeois “trapped by a house” and Rachel Whiteread who literally “trapped a house”.
Louise Bourgeois’ work is largely resulting from her personal history and experience as a woman. Betrayed as a child by her father “for not being what he supposed to be”, her understanding of home and family transformed. House doesn’t provide protective shelter anymore. It becomes a painfully uncertain world of pretending adults. In the “Femme Maison” series she uses the forms of body and house to find a balance between enclosure and escape, security and alienation. The image of a female carrying a house on her shoulders or wearing it like a stiff corset may represent: the universe, woman created to protect herself and her family, that has betrayed her and has taken her as a unconscious prisoner of her own invention. According to Bourgeois the woman on the drawings is not conscious: “She does not know that she is half naked and she does not know that she is trying to hide. She shows herself at the very moment that she thinks she’s hiding.” Ambiguity is actively present in Bourgeois’ existential dilemmas, seek for identity and questions of gender.
Rachel Whiteread’s work like Louise Bourgeois is strongly related to her own history, her memories and literally to her body. She recognizes a clear connection and sensitive relation between body and architecture. While still a student at the art academy, she cast parts of her own body. Not treating them just like knee or a foot but as a construction, set of joints, objects. Her next step was to cast daily objects, or rather space trapped by them. Space not as container but as contained. The cast is a body and an object is a cast of the body. “House” is a cast of an existing Victorian terrace house in London that had been scheduled for demolition. For Whiteread architecture is a body suspended between life and death. Working on the House she felt like exploring inside the body, removing it’s internal organs, preserving the shapes and details. “It was like we were embalming the body”. But not just the physical body. Casting a space is not just conversation. It’s not simply asking to tell a story. “Casting is violently pulling evidence out of it, torturing it, forcing a confession. To reveal its secrets, to show the unseen.”
The symbol of house is an essential representation of everyday affairs. Fundamental relationships suspended between life and death. Bourgeois and Whiteread are aware of it’s importance. They both touch sensitive issues of our personal memories. Where home appears more like a time than a place. Shared histories become part of us and stay with us forever. For Louise Bourgeois house and home are contradictory constructions, where solitude may become not freedom but isolation. Where woman recognizes absurdity of her own choices and decisions. Almost fifty years later Rachel Whiteread tries to save the past. By mummifying the silence of the abandoned place she wants to protect personal stories. Bourgeois wants to escape, Whiteread wishes to preserve. However both of them stress the significance of ones home, the place where the heart is. I want to go home…