Michal Sapir: 'HOUSED MEMORY by Uriel Orlow, at The Wiener Library and RIBA Architecture Gallery, London 2-15 November 2000'

Published in Hadoar (New York) Vol. LXXX No. 4 (3230) Jan 5 2001, p.23

The Wiener Library didn’t know what hit it when Uriel Orlow, a young Zurich-born artist living in London, showed up with a video camera and asked if he could make an art work there. The library, founded in Amsterdam in 1933 and based in London since 1939, is the world’s oldest memorial institution dedicated to the study and documentation of the Holocaust. Its extensive collection includes books, periodicals, newspapers, original documents, testimonies and memoirs, photographs, videos and artefacts. Bemused at best, and hostile at worst, the staff eventually allowed Orlow access to their institution for two months as a kind of State Comptroller, to explore the status and significance of such an archive in the context of our current efforts “to remember and never forget” the history of Europe in the past century.

The result of Orlow’s residency was a video installation in two parts entitled Housed Memory, exhibited ‘Inside’ in the entrance hall of the library itself, and ‘Outside’ at the RIBA Architecture Gallery around the corner. ‘Inside’ consisted of five video monitors and a soundtrack played through headphones. Four of these monitors screened sections of a 15 hour long video in which Orlow track-shot, item after item and shelf after shelf, the entire archive. On the soundtrack, the staff talked about their work – photo conservation, cataloguing of documents, the creation of a thesaurus and so on – and about their personal encounters with the collection. A fifth monitor, positioned next to the reception desk, showed mute, still photographs depicting the vacant interior of the building. ‘Outside’ screened a 90-minute video shot by a stationary camera positioned across the street and directed at the library’s façade. Over this ‘still movie’ scrolled, like the final credits in a film, the computerised thesaurus which forms the conceptual skeleton of the collection.

What interested Orlow was less the contents of the collection, and more its surface area, the interface between the inside and the outside, and how it is experienced by those who come in contact with it – both employees and visitors. The work reveals the accessibility of the archive as a paradoxical issue. On the one hand, the collection is meant to bring the past closer to us, to make it more attainable and comprehensible, to create transparency between us and the dense mass of history. But on the other hand, the archive as an institution actually preserves and perpetuates this very impenetrability, putting between us and the materials, various hindering layers such as storage mechanisms, catalogue codes and limiting rules of usage. The points of encounter between the general public and the archive – the pages or computer screens of the catalogue, the forms for ordering books, the librarians’ counter – are closed doors whose effect is almost Kafkaesque: this richness is intended for us, but we can only access it through partial, accidental and ever-mediated glimpses. Furthermore, the very idea of archiving memory is problematic, since the more the archive is complete, the more it resembles the bewildering and ungraspable reality which it aspired to organise and clarify in the first place.

“Housed Memory” poignantly conveys the frustration and even inevitable failure involved in the act of commemoration, while exposing the fleeting subjectivity that undermines the ostensibly stable objective world of collecting, cataloguing and exhibiting. The constant but slow movement of the camera along the severe-looking books and stark boxes which stand with proud melancholy on the bureaucratic metal shelves, the cool Chantal Ackermanian blues and greys of the photographs, and the subdued voices of the staff as they describe the delicate materials with which they are dealing and their meticulous work practices, steep the work in an atmosphere of vulnerability, absence and loss. Again and again, viewers come up against the impervious surfaces of the collection; against the inability to see what is written inside the books or hidden inside the boxes; against the impossibility of digesting the vast amounts of information and containing them in memory or of rescuing the human uniqueness of the separate items from drowning in the impersonal institutional meaning of the whole.

The subject of the Holocaust holds many pitfalls for the artist, from banal pathos and “sublime” mythmaking to sheer insensitivity. Orlow’s unique strategies avoid these with unassuming aplomb. Especially fascinating are the personal stories of the library workers, who gradually engaged with the process and opened themselves to Orlow, supplying him with material over and beyond official policy. In a Borgesian move, the management finally asked Orlow for a copy of the work so they could add it to the archive.