Title: Inscription
Top: Installation view
Bottom: Book of Norma's Words
Date: 2001
Curated by: Elizabeth Thomas, Bill Judson
Location: Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Inscription
Inscription, a multimedia installation by Diane Samuels, evolved from her encounters with two individuals, Norma Perlmutter and Otmar Gotterbarm, whose lives and memories intersected with major events in world history and touched her deeply. In 1996 Samuels began tape-recording them telling their stories and over the course of the next five years developed Inscription. Using the words of their stories, Inscription explores the private and communal and moral elements of refiguring memory through art.Perlmutter’s story was one of emigrating from Poland to the U.S. in 1922, at the age of 5-1/2 and her subsequent life in the U.S. right to the moment of the recording. Gotterbarm recalled a single momentous event in his life, when on March 18, 1944, at age 3-1/2, he saw an American airplane shot from the sky above his village of Unterwilzingen, Germany.
In the manner of an amanuensis, Samuels hand-transcribed the recorded stories, over 8,000 words in total. She then “wrote” the texts invisibly, by watermarking every word into paper as it was hand-made from pulp containing bits of the subjects’ clothing and correspondence. The pair of 90-page books appear to be blank books at first, but the texts reveal themselves and are readable when the pages are held open, to the light.
Despite the literal reproduction of Perlmutter’s and Gotterbarm’s narratives, the stories in Inscription cannot be read beginning-to-end. Rather, the piece is experienced as fragments of story, revealed in details like archaeological shards. Without ever being less than exhaustively faithful to the particulars of these two memories, Inscription is actually experienced as an act of memory-shaping, in which we grasp and lose and reshape the past in order to care for it.
