2011 March 04 – Fading Ad Blog

September 1998 with Rachel Whiteread Watertower © Frank H. Jump

On view June 1998 – November 2000

New York, NY — On Wednesday, June 10th, the Public Art Fund opened its most ambitious project to date: Water Tower, British artist Rachel Whiteread’s first public sculpture in the United States.

Water Tower is a translucent resin cast of the interior of a once functioning, 12′ 2″ (high) x 9′ (diameter) wooden water tank, the largest such cast ever created with this material. The wooden tank served as a mold for the resin and once removed, a frozen monolithic form was revealed. At the beginning of June, the hollow cast will be raised seven stories to rest upon the dunnage (steel tower frame) of a Soho rooftop and remain visible from street level at the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street for one year.

Situated among two functioning water tanks, Water Tower is described by the artist as a “jewel in the Manhattan skyline”. On a cloudy day, the weathered surface of the original tank’s interior, will be visible from street level, providing a ghostly form of its previous structure. In bright sunlight the translucent resin will become a beacon of refracted light, and at night the unlit sculpture will disappear against the darkened sky. Poetic, yet incongruous, Whiteread’s Water Tower powerfully represents a deep felt need for public sculpture to be physically present yet, paradoxically, ephemeral.

Whiteread was approached by the Public Art Fund four years ago, shortly after the explosive public interest in House, her concrete casting of an East London row house for which the artist received the prestigious Turner Prize. Whiteread’s House was a natural extension of her inverted castings of domestic objects such as mattresses, chairs, tables and water bottles that grew in scale to include the cast of a single room, Ghost, which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1994. – Public Art Fund dot org