Dan Smith: 'Uriel Orlow's Housed Memory'

Published in Stets gern für Sie beschäftigt (Berlin: ifa, 2005), pp. 24-25.

As Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin approaches its official opening, it seems as necessary as ever to consider memory and commemoration not as a singular and definitive authorial gesture, but as a set of contested and historical processes. Memorials do not appear spontaneously, but are subject to the needs and desires of conflicting groups and individuals, whether they be governments or survivors. In trying to determine what the first forms of Holocaust memorial might actually have been, it is necessary to provide two distinct categories of commemoration and memory, and two apparently opposed notions of site. In his work on memory and the Holocaust, James E. Young has independently suggested two apparently contradictory forms of proto-monument. On the one hand, he has suggested that the first monuments were the actual places of destruction themselves. In 1944, Majdanek was designated as a museum and memorial by the Soviets, and in 1947, Auschwitz-Birkenau was granted protected status by the Polish government, a memorial built by the very people it commemorates. Yet elsewhere, he has argued that the first Holocaust Memorials can actually be found in narrative. For those without graves, or even corpses to bury, tombstones could be symbolically evoked by memorial books known as the Yizkor Bikher, turning the act of reading into a space of memorial.

However, I would like to suggest that it is not just within this psychic space that books function as a committed and active form of memory. Their status as monuments is dependent not only on acts of reading, but also in the long term by their continued presence, survival and potential for further use. As if to counter the enduring image of books fuelling the Nazi pyres of destruction, itself a metaphor for the destruction of lives, we cannot forget that without documents and paper, remembrance will be incomplete. This is the territory that frames Uriel Orlow's Housed Memory (60,000 books, 2,500 runs of periodicals, 10,000 original documents collections, 2 million newspaper cuttings…) Part of a project consisting of three video works under the collective title Housed Memory, the piece is comprised of a series of tracking shots, following a length of shelf to its end, at which point the shot ends, cutting to the start of the next shelf along, the visual structure of the work determined by an architecture of storage. The shelves are filled with books, files and boxes containing various documents, items that make up the collection of the Wiener Library in London. This is an institution that specialises primarily in modern Jewish history and Fascism. While it deals with material relating to the rise and fall of the Third Reich, there is also a cautionary emphasis on the survival of Nazism and Fascism since the end of the Second World War. The Library itself makes a claim for being the oldest Holocaust memorial institution, tracing its origins back to the departure of its founder, Alfred Wiener, from Germany to Amsterdam, where he set up the Jewish Central Information Office. Originally a service for disseminating news about events in Nazi Germany, when Wiener moved to London in 1939, he made the collected materials available as a resource for British intelligence . The Library, as it had become, was later used to provide material for the United Nations War Crimes Commission.

But perhaps one of the most poignant aspects of its history is the initiative begun in the 1950s to gather eyewitness accounts transcribed from interviews. These accounts form a unique part of its collection, which is comprised not only of books but also photographs, and a document archive with material ranging from family papers to official records. To view the whole of this part of Housed Memory would take just over nine hours, a length determined by how long it takes to actually show all of the material as an accumulation of tracking shots. While this is a work that is in part constituted by the visual representation of this material as a vast collection of physical artefacts, the images are accompanied by the sound of interviews, animating the objects with the memories and experiences of people. In this mirroring of the Library's own collection of first-hand accounts, Orlow has interviewed the staff, both paid and voluntary, who are entrusted with the maintenance of this archive and facilitate its use as a resource. This combination of inscribed word, and the presence of the voice, finds a space somewhere between the ungraspable totality of the archive as a whole, and the realm of individual experience. Neither are prioritised or negated, but rather combined in an engaging synthesis. Nor is this an isolated encounter with the Library, but one of three different points of approach.

One of the counterparts, Inside the Archive, is a series of still images segued together into a sequence that resembles a slide show, while The Wiener Library shows the exterior of the Library from the street. But behind this image of the archive as a geographical location in London can be seen a scrolling text that describes the collection in terms of searchable keywords. As a site, this is a constitution of the Library as a simultaneity of multiple spaces. These combinatory approaches, amounting to a single project, resist depicting memory as a singular form. Instead, Housed Memory generates a set of possibilities relating to memory and memorial. Writing about the presence of memory in the contemporary Western cultural landscape, Andreas Huysen suggests that what is most striking is not a sense of amnesia as such, but rather manifestations of what appears to be an obsession with the past, a museal sensibility that occupies an ever increasing part of everyday life. Yet the account of this tendency as museal is itself a reference to Adorno's use of the term to describe a distancing of people to objects, a negation of vital relationships with memory. Orlow suggests an attempt to re-engage with memory, as complex articulations that can be determined spatially and temporally. Rather than focusing on monuments that fix events in the past, memory is articulated in Orlow's work as an active process taking place in the present.