Rachel Whiteread: Embankment
Until April 2; Tate Modern, London

It’s often said that children have as much fun with the cardboard box as they do with the toy that came in it. The same is true of at least one artist.

When Rachel Whiteread was asked to fill the cavernous space of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, she could have inserted a streetful of houses like the single house she cast in 1993. She could have filled it with an inside-out library ten times the size of her Holocaust Memorial of 2000. Or she could have reproduced the hall’s industrial-scale machinery in ghostly reverse.

But she didn’t do any of these. Instead, Whiteread took the space inside a humble cardboard box, and reproduced it 14,000 times. Made from a semi-translucent material that looks like wax, the boxes’ ghosts are pristine, pure and inviting. So inviting, in fact, that the Tate’s “Do Not Touch” sign is surrounded by people running their fingers languorously across the smooth, glowing surfaces.

But that sign is secondary to another, far more urgent one, saying “Do Not Climb”. The boxes are stacked as high, it seems, as mountains and skyscrapers, tempting you in through streets and paths and nooks and crannies, to explore a landscape which rises up around you on all sides.

Whiteread was inspired originally by a cardboard box which survived her entire childhood, holding toys and Christmas decorations despite its increasing decrepitude. Boxes can, in this way, hold very personal associations for us all. I am reminded of my recent visit to Skateraw in East Lothian, where Richard Demarco was surrounded by his treasured archive boxes, home to his life’s work.

Demarco had arranged his boxes in a cheeky homage to Donald Judd’s spartan brand of Minimalism. Some of Whiteread’s more orderly stacks evoke the same response, and others deliberately knock it off balance. Her messier clusters, like vast glaciers ready to topple, point strongly to the romantic idea of the sublime. Dwarfed by the huge, polyethylene landscape around you, it’s impossible not to feel a sense of awe.

Distracted by the scale of the installation, it’s easy to forget that what you’re looking at is the inside of closed cardboard boxes rather than the boxes themselves. The visible difference is subtle, but this essential detail makes the work intensely private. In one stroke, Whiteread has turned her grandiose allusions to macho periods of art history inside out.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 30.10.05