APPLIANCE HOUSE

Appliance House, 1990, Ben Nicholson
Call the Appliance House a sub-urban home turned into a shelter from every kind of consumptive adversity the city is able to muster...each room encloses an accentuated state of normal, everyday, sub-urban living, but the rooms have all changed their ceramic nameplates. Where there used to be the cosy nook with an open fireplace, there is a furnace to suit the pyromaniac within us all. Where there was once a study, in which the Toby jug collection and family sports trophies were displayed, there now exists the Kleptoman Cell, a room given over to the face-to-face confrontation of what it means to have in one's possession any object gleaned by any means, fair or foul
 

UNTITLED (WHITEREAD)

 Untitled, 2005. From Whiteread's 'Postcard' series.

In this 'Postcard' series, Whiteread uses a hole punch to cut out negative spaces in the rooms, capturing the three-dimensional concerns of her sculptural form in a two-dimensional manner. The well-known touristic images are obscured by the cluster of circular abscesses, and they become ambiguous.  More of Rachel Whitereads' drawings at the Tate Britain courtesy of the Guardian here, with accompanying article here. 

Alongside the postcards are a collection of pseudo-technical drawings, including the revealing 'Study for "House"'. In this work, Whiteread uses an everyday and meaning-laden medium - correction fluid, or 'twink' - to simultaneously create and erase. The house is 'corrected' into a 'pure' whiteness, it becomes absent, yet at the same time, we are more aware of the space the object occupies after the 'intervention'. White is at once pure and ghostly, the house in the images becomes both nothing and, oddly, sky. 

Study for "House", 1992

Study for "House", 1992

WHAT IS A PIECE OF RESEARCH?


"What is a piece of ‘research’? To find out we would need to have some idea of what a ‘result’ is. What is it that one finds? What is it that one wants to find? What is missing? In what axiomatic field will the fact isolated, the meaning brought out, the statistical discovery placed?


No doubt it depends each time on the particular science approached, but from the moment a piece of research concerns the text (and the text extends very much further than the literary work) the research itself becomes text, production: to it, any ‘result’ is literally im-pertinent.
Research is then the name which prudently, under the constraint of certain social conditions, we give to the activity of writing: research here moves on the side of writing, is an adventure of the signifier."


- Barthes 1977, 197-198.




Yes - the question is both urgent and  valid - but from where, writes Walker, will the Barthesian mythologists who will examine this question come?
I come from architecture, but as this type of mythologist I must be vigilant with respect to my own motives and those of the institution that sustained my work.