Rachel Whiteread Water Tower 1998 translucent resin and painted steel 12' 2" x 9' in diameter [installation view]
I don't know how long it's been up there, but while at the Kippenberger press preview at MoMA last week I spotted a discreet label on the wall behind that artist's jaw-dropping Styrofoam-to-aluminum "Santa Claus Lamp"*, which is installed where Rodin's Balzac normally stands. I turned around and looked past the Sculpture Garden and up to the roofs where you see it here. Now owned by the museum, Rachel Whiteread's "Water Tower" was commissioned by the Public Art Fund. The last time I saw it was ten years ago when it was installed in its temporary home on top of a building in Soho.
*
It's shocking to find that there's no image of this piece on line, and perhaps even more shocking to find that MoMA has only one image of the entire Kippenberger show on its site (MOCA, where the exhibition originated last year, has only six). Especially for a museum operating in the twenty-first century, such neglect doesn't make it look like the "educational institution" which its founders wanted MoMA to be when it began in 1929.
To be fair, MoMA is relaunching its website later this week, and that may be the reason for the lack of images on moma.org.
Wow. An entire paragraph of this is posted in someone else's blog. I assume it is originally yours because of the date, and it makes more sense here, although you can alter the date of a blog post, so that is not final proof.
The other blog is:
http://blog.ivanpope.com/awol/2009/03/rachel-whitereads-water-tower-is-back.html
Mazin, of course it's my post (also my photograph), and the blogger, AWoL, links to my post below the image.