Antibodies

First commissioned in 1994 and installed on a rooftop in SoHo, New York City, in 1998, Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower has been described with tropes identifying it as an alien presence on the New York skyline. In effect, Water Tower – and, by extension, the artist herself – has been classed as an immigrant or a foreign body, marked by difference. Water Tower is a tour de force of resin casting from one of New York's unique and ubiquitous wooden water towers, and has also been seen as a monument or a memorial. The piece was recently purchased and donated to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and a once‐discreet, sometimes invisible, ephemeral sight, that played on presence and absence, became a permanent monument in the canon of modern art

Alien · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Ephemeral key · Politics · Skyline · Tower · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · History · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Photography and Visual Culture