Rachel Whiteread's Nameless Library

24 25 in perpetuity. It achieves this by cannily responding to its historical site and surrounding context, turning the architecture of the square in upon itself to foreground Vienna’s disavowal of anti- Semitic persecution since the Middle Ages: looking to the local and its role as silent witness in Silent Witness: Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library order to draw attention to past atrocities committed on the site. Rachel Carley : Unitec, New Zealand In 1994, the late Simon Wiesenthal approached the Mayor of Vienna to discuss the possibility of erecting a Holocaust memorial to commemorate the 65,000 Austrian Jews who died in Vienna or in concentration camps under the National Socialist regime. The proposal emerged from dissatisfaction with an existing sculpture, Monument to the Victims of Fascism by Alfred Hrdlicka, ABSTRACT installed in the Albertinaplatz in 1988.1 Silent Witness examines the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library, (1996-2000), a holocaust The organising committee for the competition decided that a figurative design was not appropriate memorial in Judenplatz Square, Vienna. For her project, the sculptor designed an inverted library in concrete, the and this was the motivating force behind the selection of participants, which was limited to an proportions being derived from those found in a room surrounding the square. While the majority of critics refer to invited group of five Austrians and five foreigners. The Austrian entrants were Valie Export, Karl this memorial as an ‘inside out’ library, this paper argues that Whiteread’s design is not so easily understood. It will Prantl and architect Peter Waldbauer, Zbynek Sekal, and Heimo Zobernig in collaboration with identify the ways in which her design complicates relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and Michael Hofstatter and Wolfgang Pauzenberger. The foreign entrants were the collaborative artists contained, private and public, interior and façade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The work is placed within a Michael Clegg and Martin Guttman, Ilya Kabakov, Rachel Whiteread, Zvi Hecker, and Peter Eisenman. ‘counter monumental’ tradition of memorialisation, as articulated by James E. Young, which demonstrates a radical Judenplatz or ‘Jews Square’ was decided upon as the location for the memorial. It was the site of re-making of memorial sculpture after the Holocaust. It is argued that this site-specific memorial, partially cloned from the urban context in which it is placed, commemorates a loss that is beyond words. Nameless Library utilises the first Jewish ghetto and is located in Vienna’s First District (Figure 1). architectural operations and details to evoke a disquieting atmosphere in urban space, borrowing from the local to inculcate neighbouring structures as silent witnesses to past atrocities. The memorial is compared to the casemate The small, intimate square is accessed by five narrow streets, and is populated by buildings fortifications on the Atlantic wall; the defensible spaces of bunkers, described by Paul Virilio in his book Bunker predominantly from the Baroque period. Judenplatz’s picturesque aspect is belied however, by Archaeology as ‘survival machines’. It is argued that Whiteread’s careful detailing of Nameless Library is designed closer inspection into the history of the site. to keep memory alive. Under Whiteread’s direction, the typological form of the bunker is transformed into a structure of both physical and psychic defense. The memorial has been specifically designed to resist attack by vandals and also functions as a defence against entropy, taking into itself and holding onto lost loved ones, preserving their memory. Rachel Whiteread’s sculptural oeuvre evidences an continuing interest in the evolution and transformation of physical interiors. Her public sculpture Nameless Library is one project that can be understood as an evolutionary interior. Using her sculptural vocabulary Whiteread strategically unfolds and involutes condensed layers of historical, cultural and architectural activity specific to the project’s particular site and surrounding context. In 2000, Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial Nameless Library was dedicated in Judenplatz Square in Vienna. Whiteread’s memorial design elaborately convolutes relationships between sculpture and architecture, container and contained, private and public, interior and façade, as well as domestic and civic scales. The project’s strength inheres in its detailing. The memorial’s strategic assemblage of positive and negative cast elements has been carefully detailed to depict a work of mourning Above Figure. 1 Anti-Semitic Plaque on Haus zum Grossen, Judenplatz 2, Vienna (detail). Photo taken by author IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies IDEA JOURNAL 2010 Interior Ecologies 26 27 The Judenplatz site has had a tumultuous history and many of On the eastern side of the square is a bronze sculpture of the In counter-monumental practices, it is the monument’s very The drawings for Whiteread’s competition entry were made the competition entrants made direct or oblique reference to Enlightenment poet, playwright, and advocate for tolerance, negation, its disappearance that has been foregrounded by in collaboration with the architectural firm, Atelier One. All this history and the recent excavations in the square.2 In 1995, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The sculpture was designed by many artists charged with designing German Holocaust the technical drawings submitted were at a scale of 1:100 and the City of Vienna Department of Archaeology discovered Siegfried Charoux and unveiled in 1935 (Figure 2). In 1939, memorials. Strategies of inversion, self-effacement, and included a ground plan of Judenplatz Square and the memorial beneath the proposed memorial location the remains of the city’s the Nazis removed the sculpture and melted it down for disappearance, are evident in projects such as Horst Hoheisel’s site, sections and elevations, foundation details and wall oldest Synagogue, dating from the Middle Ages The unearthing ammunition. In 1968, Charoux rebuilt the piece and installed it negative form monument Aschrott-Brunnen Monument, Kassel, details of book fixings, and ground and roof plans. The model of flagstones from the synagogue revealed scorch marks that in Morinplatz. The work was relocated to its original Judenplatz 1987, Jochen and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Harburg Monument for the project was made at a scale of 1:20 from wood, glass, testified to the torching of the temple in 1421. In this pogrom, location in 1981. For the Holocaust memorial competition, some Against War and Fascism and for Peace, Harburg, 1986-1993, model paste, and paint in collaboration with model maker several hundred Jews burned themselves alive in the synagogue entrants construed the figure of Lessing with ambivalence, for and Micha Ullman’s Bibliotek: Memorial to the Nazi Book Simon Phipps (Figure 3). rather than submit to being forcibly baptised.The sculptural the Enlightenment thinker championed reason and it was a Burnings, Bebelplatz, Berlin, 1996. reliefs and the inscriptions that adorn the surrounding buildings ‘rationality gone mad’ that reached its terrifying conclusion in the Some critics were wary of appraising the finished project based on the square bear witness to prior Christian occupations of the 4 As with these contemporary memorials, Whiteread’s proposal on these competition documents. Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote 3 catastrophic event of the Holocaust. Judenplatz and to historic anti-Semitic activity. is also characterised by a form of negation. It fails, however, to about the room devoted to this project in the exhibition Shedding stage a disappearing act. Rather than being subsumed within the The competition regulations laid particular emphasis on the Life, cautioning ‘It is represented by a model….on which it should subterranean realm, Nameless Library imposes itself unequivocally monument as a work of art that carefully attended to its certainly not be judged.’10 Rebecca Comay also acknowledged within the public domain. surroundings and the architectural essence of the Judenplatz. that ‘The crucial differences in detail…between the model and the monument, may nonetheless reveal an essential ambiguity.’11 The memorial was also to be considered in relation to Whilst living in Berlin for 18 months between 1992-3, Whiteread Misrachi House at Judenplatz 8, a building that has existed on travelled throughout Germany and Eastern Europe and became Mark Cousins, Brian Hatton, and William Feaver also had the site since the fifteenth century and had become a locus of fascinated with the history of Berlin under the Third Reich. She reservations about Whiteread’s proposal at this early stage. Jewish Education. Two compulsory texts, rendered in German, visited concentration camps in Germany and read extensively on Cousins’ was suspicious that the project had been hijacked by Hebrew, and English were also required on the memorial: the first the subject, in particular survivors’ testimonies of the Holocaust. commemorating the loss of 65,000 Austrian Jewish lives during Given this experience, the artist felt equipped to address the the symbolism of Jews as the people of the Book, and the Nazi the Holocaust, and the second listing all of the concentration subject of Holocaust memorialisation.8 camps in which these Austrian Jews were killed. THE MEMORIAL COUNTER-MONUMENTS In Jewish tradition the first memorials came in book form, and Brian Hatton observed that the competition was set between Whiteread’s memorial makes reference to Jewish people being negative terms as ‘not monument, not anti-monument, not the people of the book.9 Her proposal resembles a domestic museum, not an installation, not an urban intervention.’5 This library seemingly turned inside out so that thousands of cast negation of the very idea of the monument is emblematised by replicas of books, cast as positive concrete forms, face out the emergence of the ‘counter-monument,’ a new sub-genre of toward the viewer, their spines inward set. The roof bears a cast Holocaust monuments investigated in detail by the art historian in the negative of a ceiling rose, a detail characteristic of those James E.

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