Touching Trauma: On the Artistic Gesture of Bracha L. Ettinger (original) (raw)

Art after atrocity: post-Holocaust representation and affect

2019

The thesis investigates how to effectively address (through visual art) events of war and traumatic memory, with particular focus on the Holocaust and its subsequent visual representation. Through critical analysis and interviews with artists, theorists, historians, philosophers, writers and curators as well as the studio-based outcomes: the research creates a detailed analysis of traumatic, memory based visual representation and effective memorialization, and its purpose in contemporary society. The PhD advances the role, positioning and association of memory within the representation of horrific experience, and how this affects the creation, presentation and affecting qualities of art based on perpetrated atrocities and near incomprehensible human experience (Art After Atrocity). Accompanying the written research is a single, large-scale artwork produced in parallel to the written research. This artwork, Deathgate, consists of an individually handmade ceramic 'stone' for e...

Post-Holocaust Art and Post-Memory Art: A Reevaluation

Art of the Holocaust until 1989: Beyond an East/West Divide - Central Europe University, Budapest, 2022

A renewed attention has been paid after 1989 to the relationships between art and the Holocaust. This renewal might be enlightened by the questions and issues artworks made before 1989 raised in their time, and more specifically thanks to those which were produced in the direct aftermath of the Holocaust. In this regard, throughout this paper, post-Holocaust art will designate artworks and artefacts made by people who were active during and after the Holocaust, most of them with an experience of it, whether it has been direct or not. Postmemory art thus refers to an art whose authors did not experience this period of time, since they belong to the second or third generation. This distance allowed them to consider the situation with different eyes, maybe more theoretical ones. Notwithstanding, my main hypothesis is that a limited but highly significant number of issues post-memory art raised were already present, somehow in nuce, in post-Holocaust artworks. This is why those deserve a reevaluation, both as testimonial and artistic propositions. A rapid survey of the last four decades bibliography can help us to draw a state of the arts, and to understand the ongoing evolution of the successive perspectives in which relations between arts and the Holocaust art have been regarded.

Expanding Spaces and Porous Borders in the Artworking of Bracha L. Ettinger

This dissertation examines the written and artistic production of the Israeli-born artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha L. Ettinger, whose practice of artworking incorporates her theoretical development of the Matrix and Metramorphosis into the act of painting. Ettinger’s work offers a feminist re-negotiation of the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis within the realm of aesthetics and ethics, issues that are universal, yet tied to specific experiences between the I and non-I, the known and the unknown. Ettinger’s theoretical and artistic advancements promote connection rather than separation, expanding borders from the limited social constructions of interaction to the limitless feminine space of the matrixial web. Ettinger, in her series of paintings entitled Eurydice, proposes a matrixial re-working of the mythological figure of Eurydice, moving away from the classical emphasis on separation and loss in favor of connection and retrieval. In Ettinger’s feminist version of the myth, “looking back” is a positive and ethical gesture of remembrance, an act which weaves together the past and the present into the surface of her paintings, and offers an arena for potential future encounters. The porous spaces of Ettinger’s work present passageways that allow the viewer and reader to move through and between the various levels of text and image, theory and art, in a constant shift between modes of production. Ettinger’s ethical aesthetics intends art as a latent space of healing, a borderspace of connections that are positive, active and aware. Ettinger incorporates text, photographs, India ink line drawings, oil paint, and recycled paper into her artwork, a process of artworking digitally manipulated by her hands and by the photocopy machine that reproduces the grains of photographic images and words. The photographs that Ettinger uses are culled from personal and historical archives, documents which both directly and obliquely reference the traumatic and destructive history of the Holocaust, a practice which I relate to the work of French artist Christian Boltanski. The images that Ettinger employs function as mnemonic prompts within her paintings, urging the viewer to engage in an ethical act of remembrance in the role of what she names the wit(h)ness.

On the Charge of Memory. Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation

Arcadia - International Journal for Literary Studies, 2011

On the Charge of Memory Auschwitz, Trauma and Representation What does a field of dogs, arranged like seagulls watching the ocean, suggest about the representation of trauma and Auschwitz? The question, posed in homage to Andrzej Munk's film Pasazerka (The Passenger, 1963), has a long answer. The answer developed here has philosophical and theoretical implications that take us deep into the structure of trauma as understood in the aesthetics of films of consequence. Munk's film provides a particularly forceful example of what representation might mean, as it links Jewish trauma to that of political resistance, yet tells this tale with consummate and poignant irony through the eyes of a Nazi who reexamines her subjective memory, and the testimony she made in bad faith. This makes the movie into a particularly complex example of Holocaust fiction; as one of the most hauntingly composed films of the twentieth century, it underscores a maxim of progressive modernist art: form embodies meaning. What does a field of dogs, arranged like gulls surveying the ocean, suggest about representations of trauma and of Auschwitz? This question, posed in homage to Andrzej Munk's film Pasazerka (Passenger, 1963) has a long answer, one that I will begin to develop here. My answer has philosophical and theoretical implications that take us deep into the structure of trauma as it is understood within the aesthetics of ambitious films. Let me underline the phrase, "representations of trauma and of Auschwitz," for in that phrase Auschwitz becomes a microcosm for both the legacy of genocide and for the unjust brutal incarceration, torture, and the murder of innocents. It also stands for the symbolic threat to the best hopes of humanity in resistance to totalitarian systems. The trauma we associate with Auschwitz includes both the trauma of survivors and the trauma of communities. As the major victim of the Holocaust, European Jewry, in all its diversity and potential solidarity responds artistically to that trauma and thereby offers other communities infinitely harmed and reduced by the Holocaust, and all those who identify with them, an impressive collective poetic testimony to the nature of trauma. Trauma in this context takes on extraordinarily large and overlapping occurrences, for the event structure of trauma must here be conceived as multifaceted. Not simply a single tragic event, the Holocaust unfolds as a nexus of arcadia Band 45 (2010) Heft 2

Trauma Studies and the Traumas and Art Practice in the Post-Traumatic Era

Rosa’s Wound, Taipei, Museum of Contemporary Arts, pp.41-46.(ISBN：978-986-96518-0-6) , 2018

The curator of MOCA Taipei's exhibition, Rosa's Wound, used Paul Celan's poem to name the exhibition, which showcased artworks by artists from various Asian countries to discuss the relationship between art and trauma. The background of these artworks involved a wide range of issues, including the history of martial law, political prisoners, colonization, suppression, racial violence, and war. Without any knowledge of the background and context of these ideas, the general audience would have difficulties understanding the purpose of such an exhibition as well as the curatorial efforts made in the process. In this article, I have sorted out the development and trends of trauma studies in recent years, and proposed that the concept of the "post-trauma era" could help us contextualize this exhibition and gain a better understanding. Modern History and the History of Trauma Etymologically speaking, the English word "trauma" comes from Greek, originally meaning "wound," especially one that penetrates the body. The word was first used in psychology in the nineteenth century to refer to shocking experiences in modern life (such as the shock suffered by WWI soldiers in the battlefield), in which the mind's protective mechanism that was supposed to function like a shield was "penetrated" due to excessive external stimulation. 1 From the psychoanalytical perspective, trauma falls into the domain of the "Thing," which cannot be objectified. "The 'Thing' is traumatic and brings pain. We do not know where it causes pain, or even that it causes pain. It strives to be known by the mind, but fails, and can only be temporarily liberated in symptomatic repetitions." 2 The British art historian, Griselda Pollock, has dedicated her recent years to the study of the relationship between trauma and art by adopting psychoanalytical points of view (especially Israeli psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger's revisions of Lacan's theory). Pollock concluded her study in 2013 and stated five characteristics of trauma: 1. Trauma seems to exist in a non-temporal, non-spatial realm: it exists permanently and is non-temporal. Like a stranger that lives in the mind, it colonizes the host. The 1 Griselda Pollock, Afetr-affects/After-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum, Manchester: Manchester, UP, 2013, p. 2. 2 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, " Traumatic Wit(h)ness – and Martrixial Co/in-habit(u)ating " , parallax, vol. 5 no. 1, 1999, p. 89.

Gazing at Eurydice: Authorship and Otherness in Bracha L. Ettinger

Analyses/Rereadings/Theories Journal, 2020

A historical photograph of women and children from the Mizocz ghetto taken in 1942 just before their execution constitutes one of the most recurring motifs in Bracha L. Ettinger's visual art. By means of her artworks, Ettinger endeavours to retrieve these women's dignity and work through their traumas at a point when they are unable to do it themselves. Yet, one cannot ignore a number of questions that arise in the context of this kind of aesthetic practice; after all, Ettinger uses an archival photograph, taken by an anonymous photographer, and her acts of altering and decontextualising this "ready-made" material are aimed at producing a certain artistic effect. The objective of this article is to reflect on the issue of authorship in Bracha L. Ettinger's theory and art. Having introduced two Eurydicial artworks, I proceed to unravel the status of a matrixial artist-author. In order to do so, I analyse such notions as ready-made art, matrixial Otherness, trauma of the World, gaze, and appropriation.

Relational Viewing: Affect, Trauma and the Viewer in Contemporary Autobiographical Art

This dissertation examines the communicative relationship between contemporary autobiographical art and the viewer. By analyzing the work of six artists, Richard Billingham, I maintain that lived experience and personal history condition the way viewers respond to autobiographical art. I turn to literary theory as a critical methodology to argue that autobiographical art operates as a catalyst for identification, memory and self-discovery. I use affect and trauma theory to demonstrate how artwork produces meaning and discourse through the viewer's feelings, emotions and bodily sensations. Consequently, I survey the importance of affect in generating ethically appropriate responses to trauma-related art. With the viewer's subjective gaze in mind, I also weigh the possibility of trauma-related artwork triggering traumatic affects in the viewer through conscious and unconscious forces. My response to affect theory further reconceptualizes how empathy and community form new social relationships between the viewer, the artist and others irregardless of physical, cultural and ideological differences. In this regard, my study shows that autobiographical art is a pedagogical instrument for learning about others while learning about the self as well: through the artist's life one may come to better understand their own. With extensive research and close analysis of select visual material, this dissertation proposes several interrelated points. Chapter one considers the types of responses that photographs of family tragedy generate in the viewer, how viewers connect to these photographs and what meaning can be gained from these encounters. In chapter two I examine three different philosophies of community to argue that inclusion, identification and universality are capable of transforming existing social structures and political relationships. The third and final chapter iv problematizes the communication of memory by deconstructing how conventional memory is performed. It also addresses why the logic of representation collapses during the artist's communication of trauma and explains how the conscious and unconscious reverberations of pain surface unexpectedly through the haptic sense. Overall, the dissertation seeks to contribute to contemporary research on autobiographical art, affect, trauma and their complex relationship to spectatorship.