Holocaust Memorial, Vienna
Book pages face outward - viewer cannot read title of books.
65,000 Austrian Jews, 1938 - 1945.
Alphabetical order, name of camps around base.
Doors have no doorknobs or hinges.
Resembles a bunker.
The sculpture is a cast of negative space.
Space between us and the books.
Concrete chosen for familiar/common material.
"Given this thematic edge in all her work, it is not surprising that Whiteread was one of nine artists and architects invited to submit proposals for the Vienna Holocaust memorial. Other invitees included the Russian installation artist Ilya Kabakov, Israeli architect Zvi Hecker, and American architect Peter Eisenman. As proposed, Whiteread’s cast of a library turned inside-out measures ten by seven meters, is almost four meters high, and resembles a solid white cube. Its outer surface would consist entirely of the roughly textured negative space next to the edges of book leaves. On the front wall facing onto the square would be a double-wing door, also cast inside out and inaccessible. In its formalization of absence, on the one hand, and of books, on the other, it found an enthusiastic reception among a jury looking for a design that “would combine dignity with reserve and spark an aesthetic dialogue with the past in a place that is replete with history.”16 Despite the jury’s unanimous decision to award Whiteread’s design first place and to begin its realization immediately, the aesthetic dialogue it very successfully sparked in this place so “replete with history” eventually paralyzed the entire memorial process.
Text source harvarddesignmagazine.org
Prisoners files in small fort office, Theresienstadt. Photo, Dirk Reinartz
Four minute video that shows Whiteread planning and working on the memorial.
https://vimeo.com/47024557
I found this personal video made by a visitor to the memorial.
Whitehead talks about her work, 2011.
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