This is just a short post to point out an artwork I really like that’s related to my last post on the dismantling of Kitchener’s Cedar Hill water tower. The work is Rachel Whiteread’s Water Tower (1998), for those of you who are not familiar. Perched in the New York skyline, Whiteread’s life-size resin cast of a water tower simply reiterates the formal qualities of its functional cousins across the road but in a shimmering, translucent material that calls attention to the aesthetics of this everyday object. Rather than slipping into the collage of images and forms that make up the city, it makes the errant eye of a city wanderer pause and ponder the water tower as a cultural object – something technologically outmoded, and yet iconically part of the contemporary city (particularly New York). It’s ghostly figure seems like an appropriate memorial for the lost beast on the hill in Kitchener. Art critic and theorist Johanna Drucker had this to say about the work:

As an iconic form, the water tower recalls the industrial architecture exhaustively recorded over several decades of the late twentieth century by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, as well as the playful appropriation of mechanical forms that figured in the works of Francis Picabia, Fernand Leger, and Marcel Duchamp in the 1910s and 1920s. But Whiteread’s work is as far from the playful anthropomorphism of the early modernists as it is from the rigorous, decontextualized, and antihistorical sensibility of the Becher’s conceptualism. Her gesture is historical, self-consciously so. We are meant to see the water tower as an object that has its own lineage as well as being fully contextualized within the current moment – a thing functioning in the present but with the recollection of its past quite evident. […]

Francis Picabia, Violent Pain, 1915.

Bernd & Hilla Becher, from their series on water towers.

Whiteread seems enamored of material culture, keen to call our attention to the aesthetics of everyday life. The art object Water Tower is usefully other than that which it replaces. Its specificity makes it a work of historical reference but without an agenda. The sculpture comes into being first and foremost as an aesthetic object, manifesting a thoughtful commentary upon the real and lived but without any intention to prescribe social transformation through cultural means. Does it signal a change of sensibility? Even that might be too strong a suggestion for this work, which instead seems merely to be a manifestation of form for the sake of producing awareness, momentary surprise. (Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, 52-53).