Art and designReviewClosed books and stilled lives
Finally, five-and-a-half years after Rachel Whiteread's design for a Holocaust memorial in Vienna was approved, the sculpture was unveiled.
As much as it is a sculpture Whiteread's memorial is a closed, windowless single storey building. It sits on a low plinth at one end of Judenplatz. The walls are covered from top to bottom in row upon row of books. But it is as though they have been turned to face the wall.
One sees the edges of the book covers, the closed pages. They are like the books one holds in one's hand, about to be opened. Like the rest of the building the books are made of concrete, which in the autumn sunshine looked as pale as the stones which paved the newly pedestrianised square.
A pair of doors at one end of the building are sealed shut. The metaphor, surely, is one of finality.
The concrete looks fresh, although small imperfections in the surface make some of the books look used, the edges of the pages discoloured or speckled with age.
Whiteread had to use a slightly less porous concrete than planned. She wanted the rain to get in and frost to age the sculpture, giving it what she called a somewhat sorry appearance.
At a distance you can barely see the books, and the building appears to be made of a series of slabs. The top edge of the structure is cut off at an angle. Although it echoes the roofs of the baroque buildings which line the square, it looks like a bunker.
Whiteread's memorial asserts itself against its surroundings. It is an interruption in the square. It stops you short.
How can any public sculpture address the enormity of the Holocaust? Expressionist figurative sculpture risks the humiliation of its tormented mannerisms. Whiteread's nameless library is austere to the point of brutality, yet seen up close its details have a familiarity and approachability which invites a step towards it.
At this point one looks down and reads the names of the death camps, and the dedication to the Jewish Austrian dead.
This monument resists the affectations of style. Echoing the military bunkers of the second world war it achieves a kind of stylelessness, and timelessness.
How can one read a closed book? What does a perpetually closed building signify? Whiteread will not be drawn into discussions about the memorial's symbolism although books inevitably speak of the histories and stories of their time. Conceived almost six years ago the Holocaust Memorial cannot be considered a new work by the artist and she is not, she has said, in the memorial business. Yet the Vienna memorial will undoubtedly enhance her international reputation as an artist of great seriousness, rigour and sensitivity.
Across the Judenplatz the statue of Gottfraim Lessing gesticulates. Whiteread's building does not invite a dialogue with the statue nor with the buildings on the square nor with the remains of the 15th century synagogue, beautifully displayed in it's own subterranean vault beneath the square.
The memorial's uncomfortable unapologetic presence has a certain grandeur. It is a reminder enough of its meanings. The building's emphatic muteness and silence is the appropriate response to the enormity of its subject.
It will not disappear into forgetfulness or the every day. It is a place where memories happen.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJulocG2vsRoaWloYGS8pMCOa21omaKpwKexwK2sq52jaw%3D%3D