The presence of a detached past in The Gran Boathouse of Rachel Whiteread

Abstract

This dissertation investigates Rachel Whiteread’s site-specific sculpture, The Gran Boathouse (2010), a cast concrete structure that sits tranquilly on the remote river shore of Røykenviken, Norway. Unlike artworks exhibited in a gallery or museum, the Whiteread’s sculpture is presented on the shoreline of an idyllic and rural area in Gran Municipality which also leads to the sculpture’s title. Whiteread cast the interior of a boathouse that was supposed to be demolished. As a vernacular and utilitarian building, boathouses in Norway played a historic role in Norwegian inland maritime culture. By examining the role of local memory embodied in vernacular architecture, this paper explores the possibility that The Gran Boathouse (2010) reveals the illusion of memory and visually highlights a discontinuity between the past and present. To this end, I consider the placement of The Gran Boathouse next to the M/S Brandbu, and how the juxtaposition of the boathouse by a ship activated the subtle tension between a reconstructed and represented past. While the M/S Brandbu serves to represent a national history and public memory, its juxtaposition with the defunctionalized boathouse forms a curious rhetorical space that creates a fiction of the past. In keeping with this I argue that the cast of The Gran Boathouse (2010) is an articulated form of anti-memory and Whitread’s cast of an interior space ironically expresses an inaccessible and detached past that makes it a memorial of Røykenvik.