Psychic Wounds: On Art and Trauma by Griselda Pollock

Psychic Wounds: On Art and Trauma Reviews

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  samantha

  Psychic Wounds: Gavin Delahunty
  • Moma reopens in 2019
  o No longer chronological presentation but diff. groupings
  o They place Picasso next to a piece that reflects on Guernica
  o in reimagining itself, MoMA began to expand its responsibility to show the diverse and multicultural story of modern and contemporary art via these two depictions of urban trauma, reminding us that the traumatic has been an inescapable condition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
  • One of the earliest texts to address trauma in the visual arts is Leo Steinberg’s 1972 essay on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), “The Philosophical Brothel,” where he argues that the viewer—replacing the men visiting the brothel—is forced to confront the prostitutes’ gazes head-on.'
  o The energy powering Picasso’s abstraction is the trauma of sexual encounter
  • Yve-Alain Bois pushes this towards psychoanalysis, speaking of Picasso’s death anxieties
  o Picasso’s painting forces seismic psychological disruption, or trauma, in the viewer
  • Trauma
  o Any understanding of trauma must include Sigmund Freud, who in 1895 described melancholia to his friend Wilhelm Fliess as analogous to “an internal hemorrhage . .. which operates like a wound.” Such a wound, he concludes, constitutes a “hole ... in the psychic sphere.”'-'
  o Freud’s summary of traumatic memory as “inherently unstable or mutable owing to the role of unconscious motives that confer meaning in it.”*® It is against the background of these conceptual issues that Psychic Wounds has been realized. The intention is not so much to cast the etymological or historical origins of trauma, but to explore how artists’ external experiences can relate to their work and how we can use the images and symbols in a visual work of art to gain insight into unconscious impulses. It is a modest response to Freud’s question, “in what, now, does the work which mourning performs consist?”
  o Trauma, Freud remarked, “appears to us as a borderland concept between the mental and the physical.” Psychic Wounds is an invitation to step into that borderland space.
  • “Lacan defined the traumatic as a missed encounter with the real. As missed, the real cannot be represented: it can only be repeated, indeed it must be repeated.'”* The implication of Foster’s argument is that art cannot substitute experience, incident, or event but it can usefully repeat it—the act of making providing physical form to conscious and unconscious thought.
  • Ettinger
  o Her Matrixial theory posits that trauma is “not based on loss and separation, instead it discloses parallel strings ofyearning for connectivity and an inescapable potential for hospitality and compassion towards the other.”'*’* From the Matrixial perspective, we can relate to the pain or trauma ofthe other because we share it, as well as its traces, bear it, transport it and its traces, and can use it to recognize our co-humanity rather than anxiously policing boundaries of difference. Ettinger’s radical idea opens up the possibility that within the formation of the human psyche, we are first connected in the real in differentiated ways before we are separated, and tools such as art have the capacity to reconnect us to what has been disremembered.
  o BORDERLINKING: “prior to identity, prior to any question of construction, a psychic landscape that gives itself as partial object, as grains and crumbs, as remnants that are, on the one hand, the result, the scattered effects of an unknowable history of trauma, the trauma that others who proceeded us have lived and, on the other hand, the very sites in which a new possibility for visual experience emerges, one that establishes a temporality in which the past is not past but is not present, in which the present emerges, but from the scattered and animated remains of a continuing, though not continuous, trauma.’
  Painting History-Painting Tragedy Robert Storr
  • Joseph Beuys “know your wounds”
  • Beuys pantomimed his culture’s wounds; Richter stuck his finger into them.
  • Frequently modern historically minded art hasn’t been painting at all.
  • Recovery definition of tragedy that, idk, hurts:
  o These days the word tragedy is carelessly applied. Every airplane crash, every cataclysmic flood or fire is a tragedy
  in the headlines, prompting Warhol’s voyeuristic but dry¬ eyed correctives to the oversold drama of tabloid death. True tragedy involves more than unforeseen or accidental calamity. The pathos of such banal misfortunes is basically unproblematic; however, tragedy is always and essentially problematic. Classically it results from defects in human character and the misapprehension of human situations that lead ineluctably to the undoing of those condemned to play out the parts they have chosen or accepted. Richter’s statements about the respective conduct of terrorists and the state implicitly recast the story of the RAF in this mold.
  o Aristotelian tragedy rests on the concept of catharsis. In the end, Creon’s rigidity precipitates not only Antigone’s death but Haimon’s suicide as well, and with it the destruction of his father’s world.
  The Architecture of Trauma by Beatriz Colomina
  • The art of Louise Bourgeois who duels herself in creative process. The figure of shock is connected to domestic spaces. To escape the panic of the duel, she reconstructs these spaces, reconstructs them precisely to get rid of them
  • If all of Bourgeois’ work is concerned with the physical locations of her memories, these spaces are all domestic and all associated with trauma.
  • Slippage between lyrical and traumatic
  • re-creating the spaces, the figures, and then mutilating them, dismembering them, cutting their parts out. And if the bodies are identified with the spaces, the spaces will also be cut, as when a guillotine passes right through an exact model of one of the houses of her childhood
  • It is not that Bourgeois reproduces the houses in order to re-create them as presences, as places to inhabit. She reproduces them in order to liquidate them and consume them.
  • There have been other dining tables, other horrifying wounds.
  • Abandoning a house that abandoned her sets off a never- ending chain reaction of detachment and reattachment.
  Traumatic Encryption: The sculptural dissolution of Alina Szapoczikow by Pollock
  • The choice facing the artist is, therefore, to produce objects that lack the formal beauty and technological order of the machine age, emblematic of an inhuman modernity, and instead exhibit their own deformation as testimony to the ontological misery of human corporality and an acute sense of mutability and mortality.
  • Szapocznikow’s fascination with “personal fate and the functioning of our bodies, biological, cultural, existential, and social”
  • Engaged in questions of equilibrium
  • Forms at first erect and grounded in the classical manner o fsculpture shift to a horizontal axis and succumb to a progressive dissolution of form
  • The terrible irony of imminent and excruciating premature death from an already mutilating disease after twice defying extinction charges the Tumours with almost unbearable pathos—these lumpen confrontations with biology run amok made from rubbish, newspapers, imprinted photographs and cloth bunched into clumps
  by polyester resin.
  • Are they exorcisms, externalizing the invisible, autogenetic killer within? What happens when, in some cases, these tumour forms are personalized with human features? Arc they being claimed back by the subject whose body and hence whose locus of subjectivity they were destroying? How these clumsy objects register or dispel the repeated battle with ir.ortality or register and dispel accumulating, and repeating, trauma in the face of death?
  • Tender and pathetic, the meditative Herbarium works counter the awkward litter of the 'clumsy forms’’ of the Tumours, which lie scattered, on a horizontal axis on beds of naked earth or pebbled stone, suggesting both burial and disinterral.
  • Both series insist on the organic physicality of the body, its own generative distortions, its fragility and its eventual disappearance leaving, however, imprinted traces. Both
  the body represented and its imprint have suffered.
  • Any study of this artist’s career, however, that did not pay due respect to the enormity of her encounters with one of the most traumatic events of the catastrophic twentieth century, the Shoah/Holocaust, or to the nature of her own struggle with one almost untreatable illness that robbed her of her fertility aged twenty-three and then with fatal cancer would be guilty of an egregious ethical failure.
  • Reading her not through TRAGIC but through TRAUMA
  • transcryptum
  • In studying melancholia occasioned by profound loss, psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok argued that the loss, sometimes not even one's own but inherited from other generations or from surroundings, can induce a psychic entombment of unspeakable secrets deposited in the specific life-histories of individual subjects which bypass signification. The crypt forms a kind of hyperlinked network between sounds or between syllables or between visuals through which the encrypted trauma, however, continuously leaks.
  • Abraham and Torok identified a “poetics ofhiding” that has implications for understanding the relays between trauma and aesthetics. My suggestion is that we might well consider the “movement” in Szapoeznikow’s work from solid to molten, from formed to disintegrating, as indications of both the psychic entombment of trauma and the paradoxically affecting aesthesis of dissolution by which its encrypted traces “surface,” not as a known story that can be consciously “expressed,” but as that which operates its poetics of hiding and forced disclosure through displacement into de-signified materiality and (de)form(ation). THESIS **THIS IS GOOOOOOOOOD
  • Hans Holbein the Younger paints The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb in 1521
  o RELENTLESS IN ITS HORIZONTALITY, the compressed space allocated to the corpse is oppressive. The painting’s extended rectangle increases the sense of enclosure, entombing the cold, yellowing and tortured body with its distorted features and contorted hands still registering the prolonged agony endured prior to and during an excruciating death
  o In her study of melancholia. Black Sun (1982), Julia Kristeva devotes a chapter to Holbein’s dismal painting exploring his aberrant figuration of the dark and unattended, unwitnessed, rarely represented stage between entombment and resurrection. She places the work in its cultural- historical moment of early sixteenth-century European humanism and iconoclasm which marked the emergence of Protestantism and its novel theology. Hans Holbein the Younger is the subject of this moment; his intellectual, theological and artistic significance is stretched between the desolate, ascetic and lonely image of the derelict, dead Jesus and his other famous work, the danse macabre: the dance of death, a parallel commentary on human mortality, its defiance and disavowal.
  o this painting, according to Kristeva, offers us “an unadorned representation of death” which conveys to the viewer “an unbearable anguish before the death of God, here blended with our own, since there
  is no hint of transcendence”: everything save a tiny touch
  of light on the toe produces a feeling of permanent death. Christ’s dereliction is seen here at its worst.
  o Kristeva senses that, in Holbein’s confrontation with the entombed body, “Humanization has reached its highest point.” Thus she concludes that Holbein’s vision is the Renaissance vision of “man subject to death, embracing Death, absorbing it into his own being, and enjoying
  a desacralized destiny that is the foundation of a new dignity,”-^ Holbein was not melancholic, but rather the painting is the register of the melancholic moment of its creation that witnessed a “loss of meaning, a loss of hope,
  a loss of symbolic values, including the value of life.”
  The structure of the painting proposes itself to a “solitary meditation of the viewer in disenchanted sadness.”
  • I am using Kristeva's reading of Holbein’s image and
  its moment to make visible an even more radical rupture in representability associated with the chronotope “Auschwitz.” For the truly thoughtful. “Auschwitz” rendered it impossible to maintain the relations between Western aesthetic conventions for representing the human body in its mutable and mortal condition and what had actually happened in the real. Aesthetic models were exploded by the dreadful transformation if not obliteration of human death brought about by a novel crime: racially targeted, industrialized genocide coupled with totalitarian experiment to extinguish the human in bodies subjected to a lingering dehumanizing dying in the concentration camps.
  • Adorno on the barbarism of aesthetics “After Auschwitz” argued that something had happened in the real “when men beat people until their bones break in their bodies” (Sartre) which act of inhuman brutality seems to stand in for that to which Adorno had given the generic name of a time and a place: “Auschwitz.” The real, having happened, was so atrocious that metaphysical speculation, imagining, was henceforth knocked out completely."
  • He said what had happened had changed the conditions of all human dying
  o Reversing the one sacrificial death that according to Christian thought might save all humanity, mass murder went beyond the merely cruel and sudden ending of a life. The death camps did not “murder.” They manufactured corpses from which were extracted a range of resources desecrating the very body whose dignified and respectful disposal after death defines human culture.
  o Holbein’s model proves inadequate to the enormity of the event “Auschwitz” precisely because after what was done and seen, the human body could no longer be retrieved to signify the deeper horror of the destruction of the human perpetrated by the Nazi state, even in such frank abjection as Holbein’s vision of the battered incarnated divinity who would, nonetheless, promise to defeat death.
  o What does it mean to live after Auschwitz?-' What does it mean to have survived? Is it living on, after but always oriented towards chose who did not? Is it living with unbearable knowledge but also with the imprint of the real upon the entire sensorium of the survivor’s body?
  • How will we read this artistic project, dealing with life and death, sex and destruction, while overshadowed by a specifically feminine encounter with mass annihilation? What of the trauma of fatal disease attacking a locus of her sexuality and symbol of her femininity?
  • Sculpture is the least propitious but the most necessary site for this battle against representation that is nonetheless to become grotesquely eloquent and tenderly violent. Encountering, enduring, surviving the horror of attempted racist genocide are given a kind of aesthetic anti-inscription in Szapocznikow’s work because the attempt to remake the body through sculpture unravels from within itself, not representing the damaged body but performing the impossibility of restitution in the face of that history.
  • The life and work of Alina Szapocznikow stages
  the collision of different kinds of encounter with death
  that is not at all abstracted from sensuous, embodied subjectivity. That is why aesthesis, a form of knowing and an economy of affects that holds the sensuous, sentient and reflective together without the Christianocentric division of reason versus flesh, does not become a site of consoling beautification. It is instead a means to encounter the traumatic residues of real, and sometimes awful, actualities. AESTHESIS DEFINITION 3
  • Restany’s thoughts about the art of Alina Szapocznikow sets off a fascinating rewriting of Freud’s misunderstood statement that “anatomy is destiny.”
  • FREUD: ANATOMY IS DESTINY
  o he was explaining the phantasmatic structure of the Oedipus Complex.'*- The phantasizing child attributes the psychological meaning of difference (presence/absence/having/not having/wholeness/ mutilation) to a minor detail ofbodily difference, thus investing anatomy as a support for a purely logical di lemma of acquiring a sexed identity in relation to a binary logic of presence/absence. DEFINITION
  
  Obscene, Abject, Traumatic by Hal Foster
  • Shift in the conception of the real
  o From the real understood as an effect of representation to the real understood as an event of trauma
  • Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
  o distinguishes between the look/the eye and the gaze
  o The gaze is in the world.
  o Gaze, like language, preexists the subject
  o Lacanian subject feels gaze as threat: the gaze, qua objet a, may come to symbolize this central lack expressed in the phenomenon of castration
  o The gaze traps the subject, but the subject may tame the gaze: this is the function of the screen: to negotiate a laying down of the gaze as in a laying down of a weapon
  • I want to suggest that much contemporary art refuses this age-old mandate to pacify the gaze, to unite the imaginary and the symbolic against the real. It is as if this art wanted the gaze to shine, the object to stand, the real to exist, in all the glory (or the horror) of its pulsatile desire, or at least to evoke this sublime condition. To this end it moves not only to attack the image but to tear at the screen, or to suggest that it is already torn. THESIS
  • Cindy Sherman best exemplifies this shift from the image-screen to the object-gaze
  • Obscene” does not mean “against the scene,” but it suggests an attack on the scene of representation, on the image-screen. As such it also suggests a way to understand the aggression against the visual so evident in contemporary art and alternative culture—as an imagined rupture of the image-screen, an impossible opening onto the real.*’ For the most part, however, this aggression is thought under the label of the abject, which has a different psychoanalytic valence.
  • According to the canonical definition of Kristeva, the abject is what I must get rid of in order to be an I at all. SUCCINCT ABJECT DEF
  o phantasmatic substance not only alien to the subject but intimate with it—too much so in fact, and this overproximity produces panic in the subject.
  o In this way the abject touches
  on the fragility of our boundaries, of the spatial distinction between our insides and outsides as well as of the temporal passage between the maternal body and the paternal law. Both spatially and temporally, then, abjection is a condition in which subjecthood is troubled, “where meaning collapses”
  o A crucial ambiguity in Kristeva is the slippage
  between the operation to abject and the condition to be abject. For her the