If such an observation is true

The following text is about Rachel Whiteread’s "Memorial to the 65,000 Murdered Austrian Jews" at the center of Juden Platz square. Does "such an observation" is referring to Jonathan Jones's quote? How about the highlighted "this"?

What does "to salvage something specific from the pure abstraction" mean here? What is that "specific" thing?

In Juden Platz Whiteread plays on the notion of the square’s supposed ‘correct proportionalism’. The dimensions of the library correspond to those of a room in one of the surrounding Baroque buildings and account, along with its colouration, for that initial impression of ‘belonging’, of taking its place in the mise en sc`ene. In effect, though, this is a room that has been displaced: figuratively stripped bare, skinned and torn from the building that would house it. Thus, it is implied, the facades of Juden Platz can no longer conceal what lurks behind them, for right in their midst there now sits an awkward interruption of their symmetry: an impenetrable, unreadable, out of place room of nameless books that makes its devastating mark via minimalism’s ‘natural elegiac poetry’, as Jonathan Jones has suggested of such Holocaust installations. If such an observation is true, it would be important, though, to salvage something specific from the pure abstraction this might suggest. At a physical distance you may, indeed, see nothing more than a stacked-up extension of Carl Andre’s famous ‘pile of fire bricks’ piece, Equivalent VIII, in which it was the metaphysical ‘space around’ them that you were supposed to be provoked into contemplating. Whiteread’s memorial does more, though, not in the sense of signifying memory but in facilitating its performance. By that I mean that it implicitly engages with the conflicted context of its siting, enabling the contradictory narratives of Juden Platz to be drawn out into the open and urging the public of Vienna to participate in a debate that is not pre-empted or prescribed by representation.