I’d been drawn to it, when it had appeared one day in the middle 90s, bursting upon a patch of wasteland on the way to Roman Road, where my favourite morning market had offered cut-price clothes. My mother and I had gone to the market every now and then, and we’d punctuated our chilly trawl down the long, stall-congested street, where tightly packed rows of garments had spilled from the grimy white vans, with buttered toast in one of the caffs. Roman Road was the East End in all its indefatigability: here was its cheeky chappiness in full display, here was its apples and pears, its best foot forward, its sunny outlook only lightly stained by a shadow of black despair. The community took umbrage then – naturally. The Block was a shock. It was not what the East End stood for. It spoke to what people did not like to acknowledge.
An emptiness made extant in poured concrete. I’ve just looked the Block up, and it appeared almost twenty-five years ago, when I would have been about ten years old – that awkward age at which one finds oneself caught between childhood and consciousness. Ten. I imagine my swiftly multiplying cells, my stretching bones, my accreting womb and, as my body slowly augmented itself, adorning my genderless torso with growths, I see not an enhancement taking place, but an entombment. With every split cell, with every fleshy enlargement, how much more rigorous my sense of interment became, how much more efficient and complete the fleshy casing that was to protect me, to shield me, to screen me off against –
but of course, back then, I knew not what.
The Block posed an uncanny figure on the bleak little park into which it landed, looking like some crude UFO; it was all awkwardness, all elbows and knees and juttings and corners. You call that Art? people would cry, indignantly. After all, it was irrefutably ugly and, somehow, off-puttingly self-conscious. The Block wore its loneliness on its sleeve. The park in which it stood, with its yellowed, overgrown grasses and the black iron railings which bound it ineptly from the busy intersection, owed its existence to the fall of wartime bombs; in this way the Block’s home intrinsically denoted an absence: the Block indicated the absence of the houses which once stood there.
What Whiteread had made was an empty space, if an emptiness can indeed be realised; the Block, or rather, House, was the cast of the insides of an ex-dwelling; it was the negative made positive. It seemed at once to accentuate the absence of the walls and floors and ceilings and so forth which we tend to believe make up a property, and also to bring into tangible view the truth: that what actually makes a house a house, a home a home, is the empty space within it. As a bowl is made useful by its cavity. As a womb –
I remember seeing the stairs that went nowhere. Remember noting the depressions of skirting boards and of doors and of window frames, observing where protuberances had been rendered into their opposites. Looking at House, one could perceive the way in which the trappings of life had impinged upon the space “within” it – within the misshapen concrete block which stood alone and so naked, so utterly turned inside-out. Blood and guts were hanging out there for all to examine, held out for all to poke fun at; the blood and guts of the house had already poked at, prodded, deformed. What House presented was the space of a life and the life of a space, as opposed to that of the inert object by which both life and space had been marked, circumscribed. I was transfixed, even at ten; I could not get it out of my mind. And now, some quarter-century later, and returning home from abroad, I could not get it out of my mind again.
The house was in my way.
Whiteread said of her work that she was, in some way, “mummifying the air in the room.”
Yes, the house was standing in my way.
I’d been abroad for a decade and now here I was, returning. Returning to Hackney, returning to the East End; returning to the past which had never let me go. Soon I would be at the house, I was in the car, in my father’s car, and then there would be the house, his house, and it was a house which looked just like Whiteread’s. It was a Victorian terrace with concrete stairs up to the door: a narrow soldier stood eternally sentinel, hemmed in between its unforgivingly upright friends. It had a bay window, with two eye-like sashes above, each crossed into four panes, glassing in the master room; there was a basement; there were many sets of stairs. I was sitting in the car, sitting and grinning besides my father, Happy to be back!, I said, of course I said, I offer a running commentary on the streets we drive through as proof: of how engaged I am, how curious, how stimulated. I profess interest in my father’s work, in his garden, his holiday. To myself I wonder: if I could insert a needle into the house, into the house I remember so well, into the air which –
what would it say. What would the air say; what, the density.
There was a lot I had never said, a lot I had barely permitted myself to think of.
My father’s house, this concrete Block, Whiteread’s twin, was what I carried with me, what took up all the space in my chest, “only by losing that past would [I] lose the condition of exile” (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost) and when I saw the house, the old terrace, it all became suddenly clear: I felt like an exile not because I’d lived abroad, not because I was mixed race, not because my upbringing was somewhat unconventional, but because of the Block, yes the Block: the Block was saying something I refused to hear, and because I refused to hear it, it was forcing me to live elsewhere. I could not live with the past I’d had: we could not coexist, it was either it or me, and I was damn well sure that it would not be me, not this time, because it had always been me, me who has made way or who has cleared out; no, this time it would be the past which would be extirpated, and along with it, its pain; the pain was not mine, for years I had thought it was but whenever I’d gone away, all I’d done was load the Block into my baggage. And I’d wondered why I was struggling.
Sometimes we need art to make us see.
Dark amputations. The house, then, as ever it was. Held rigid, an armless torso packed tetra-pak along with its fellows into the stifling street. My father, with my bag in his hand, leading the way.
Certainly what has been abandoned can be beautiful, but its beauty will depend upon time’s having been able to move, upon its having been permitted to inflict its dismantle at will, to engulf all it meets, wreaking its decay within or upon whatever it lands on. As I entered the house I found it thick, thick with something I could not immediately understand but which it became gradually plain was my own absence, and this absence had, I understood, grown into some dark force. My absence was inside this house and my absence had taken on a heft of its own. In the curious manner of Whiteread’s work, what was negative had become positive, and this great presence, this presence of absence, expressed an emptiness whose magnitude was huge, unfathomable. It was me. It was not me. It was the house. It was not the house. It was the Block. It was my father. This was what I had returned to.
The house was a mausoleum. Dead air hit me. What was wrong with the air? I thought. It was the same as it had always been – that’s what was wrong with it. A sombre stillness stood waiting, tense with anticipation; now I was back, back within the tightly-packed bricks which surrounded us, back with my father, it was my father and me, always my father and me, I was cemented in.
Time had moved on but not in the house, not in his. And so when I returned to the site of my youth it was not to Hackney I returned but to Whiteread’s House. It was House which made me understand, House which lent to my understanding of my childhood truer contours; the genius of House was that it made the hollows visible, and the terror of it was that it made the violence real. When we return to a place after a long period away that place is supposed to have changed. And yet it is always the same, for when a place has been impossible, a place is not space, it is blockage.
Emilia Ong is a British writer, born in Hackney in 1983. A now ex-English teacher with a degree in philosophy, she has recently relocated to Margate, where she writes for local paper, the Margate Mercury, and is working on her first novel. In her work she is interested in side-stepping formal boundaries in order to present urgent content in a freshly compelling, intimate way. More of her work will soon be collected on her website, emiliaong.com.