Don't try this at home: Artists' viewing inhabitation

This essay will discuss three art projects: House, by Rachel Whiteread [1993], Alteration to a Suburban House, by Dan Graham [1978] and Splitting, by Gordon Matta-Clark [1974]. All are concerned with mass housing typologies rather than bespoke housing. In all three, connection to any real lives is erased and frustrated in various ways, forcibly distancing our consideration from the particulars of previous inhabitants of these places, inviting us instead to project our own sense of home onto these anonymised places. The artists deploy complex dynamics of looking and not looking, seeing and not seeing, the visible, the invisible and the hidden, in order to draw attention to everyday material and spatial frameworks that persist in mass housing. I will dwell on how these projects combine examinations of the invisible relations of power exercised across domestic space with the familiar, visible image of home. © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2017. All rights reserved.