Today I occupied my lunch hour with a walk to the Tate Modern so I could see the new installation in the turbine hall – Embankment by Rachel Whiteread.

I have to say that I was a bit disappointed by it. Maybe it was spoiled for me by having seen so many photographs of it in the newspapers that it was too familiar, but I doubt it. I just did not have any sort of visceral response to it.

I was not overwhelmed as I was with Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas or left awestruck as I was by Ólafur Elíasson’s The Weather Project. I had actually seen pictures of The Weather Project before visiting, but found that no photo can accurately portray the feeling of being there.

By contrast, I found that seeing Embankment in the flesh did not really feel any different than seeing photographs. But is it art? I suppose it must be. Art is a very subjective thing and I am sure some people were as affected by Embankment as I was by The Weather Project. If a measure of art’s success is its ability to stimulate debate and conversation then Rachel Whiteread must score very highly, this piece just does not move me.

I should have stopped to ask one of the 300 children on school visits what they thought, but they were all too busy doing the traditional school trip activity of drawing something. Besides, trying to strike up unsolicited conversations with schoolchildren is viewed with some suspicion these days.

I do not automatically discount a piece of art just because “I could have done that”. There are plenty of works in the Tate Modern which I am sure I could have done, but I would not have thought to do them, and quite like them. I think I might have enjoyed Whiteread’s House if I had seen it.

One part of the exhibit was quite interesting though. It was where the blocks (plastic casts of cardboard boxes) were piled up in geometric precision all except for the very top, which was in some disorder. Whatever could have given the artist the inspiration for that? Its a mystery to me…

…unless she saw Pink Floyd’s stage show for The Wall. Or Roger Waters’ version in Berlin which I grabbed that picture from. Click on any of the pictures to see a larger version, or look at half a dozen full-sized originals at Flickr)