Let Them Haunt Us: How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable 9783839450468

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Anna-Lena Werner Let Them Haunt Us

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Anna-Lena Werner, born in 1985, is a researcher and curator of contemporary art and performance. She received her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 2019, where she is currently research associate at the Institute for Theatre Studies. She worked as a research associate for inter-institutional projects with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. Since 2011, she has been editing the online magazine artfridge.de.

Anna-Lena Werner

Let Them Haunt Us How Contemporary Aesthetics Challenge Trauma as the Unrepresentable

This book received generous support from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de

© 2020 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Omer Fast. Continuity (2012). Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Proofread and copy-edited by Jana Obermüller Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5046-4 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5046-8 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839450468 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements ...................................................................... 7 Introduction .............................................................................. 11 1.1 Structure...................................................................................................... 13 1.2 Methodology.................................................................................................. 14 1.3 Challenges.................................................................................................... 16 1.4 Current State of Research................................................................................ 18 A History of Trauma ..................................................................... 25 2.1 Railway Spine ................................................................................................ 27 2.2 Hysteria .......................................................................................................28 2.3 Traumatic Neurosis and Shell Shock ................................................................. 32 2.4 Traumatic Neurosis of War.............................................................................. 36 2.5 The Unrepresentable in Psychoanalysis ............................................................. 38 2.6 Female Trauma.............................................................................................. 41 2.7 PTSD ........................................................................................................... 42 2.8 Body-Memory: Traces of Trauma .......................................................................45 2.9 Collective Trauma and Terror............................................................................50 2.10 Cultural Trauma as a Social Construct ................................................................54 2.11 Truth and Trauma .......................................................................................... 57 Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable ............................................ 59 3.1 The Testimony: Transmitting Trauma, Performing Trauma...................................... 61 3.2 Secondary Traumatisation ...............................................................................64 3.3 Empathy as a Mode of Perception...................................................................... 67 3.4 The Unrepresentable in Trauma Studies .............................................................69 3.5 The Unrepresentable in the Aesthetic Theory of Adorno and Lyotard ........................ 77 3.6 Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable....................................................... 83 3.7 Are Some Things Unrepresentable? .................................................................. 85 3.8 Intolerable Images .........................................................................................90 3.9 “To Remember, One Must Imagine” ................................................................... 93

3.10 “The Exercise Of Art” ......................................................................................95 Trauma Narratives ...................................................................... 101 4.1 Omer Fast................................................................................................... 103 4.2 Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller ...............................................................126 4.3 An Infinite Story ........................................................................................... 145 Trauma Spaces......................................................................... 149 5.1 Paul McCarthy .............................................................................................. 152 5.2 Forensic Architecture .................................................................................... 172 5.3 Memories in Motion ....................................................................................... 194 Trauma – Curational Perspectives ...................................................... 199 6.1 Space and Time Frame.................................................................................. 202 6.2 Traumatised Art........................................................................................... 204 6.3 Trauma in the Contemporary Art Museum ......................................................... 207 6.4 Contemporary Art on Conflict and Trauma in the War Museum ............................... 218 6.5 Aesthetic Strategies ..................................................................................... 225 Conclusion and Outlook ................................................................ 231 Bibliography............................................................................ 239 List of Figures.......................................................................... 255

Acknowledgements

From the beginning, it was the artworks that left their mark on me. The more I saw and the more I thought about them, the bigger the space they occupied in my mind’s eye, and with this the urge to contextualise them also intensified. The representation of traumatic events, narratives and conditions in contemporary aesthetics practices grew to become a central research concern, both before and during the process of writing the present text. I recently stumbled across a quote by the French author Stendhal from 1822: “One can acquire everything in solitude — except character.”1 This statement sums up my own thoughts when I reflect upon the people who have accompanied me throughout the process of writing my study — which did not turn out to be as lonely as I had anticipated prior to undertaking this work. I feel honoured to have received essential aid from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, which generously funded my research with a PhD scholarship, believed in my endeavour and allowed me to fully concentrate on this work. I am also grateful for the aid from the ErnstReuter-Gesellschaft, which helped make this publication possible. Throughout the entire time I have been lucky to receive indelible support from supervisors, colleagues, artists, curators, friends and family. First and foremost, I am grateful for the valuable guidance, endless encouragement, trust and constructive criticism provided by my supervisor Prof. Dr. Annette Jael Lehmann. Her thoughtful motivation helped me find the confidence to formulate my ideas and defend my arguments publicly throughout this long-term project. Likewise, I am grateful that both she and my second supervisor Prof. Dr. Matthias Warstat took the time to evaluate this text critically. Prof. Dr. Christian Freigang has been the most helpful and always extremely kind academic liaison, supervising my progress for the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. I am also thankful for analytical input by Dr. David Dibosa, who supervised my master thesis on how the work of Berlinde De Bruyckere addresses sensations of trauma and pain at Chelsea College of Art in London, and for the motivating conversations I had with the college’s guest lecturer Dr. Andrew Conio, who once suggested that I might consider doing a larger study

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Stendhal (1975) [1822], 217.

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“against Lacan”. I am extremely thankful for the precious mentoring by Dr. Ehren Fordyce who, as a guest lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin in 2009, supervised my bachelor thesis on “Architecture as a Frame for Trauma — Video Installations by Paul McCarthy”, as well as encouraging me and helping me to publish it. I could not have written this book without encountering works of art and aesthetic practices that initially inspired me to put my thoughts into written form. Therefore, I am also most grateful to the artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Omer Fast, the collective Forensic Architecture – particularly Christina Varvia and Lawrence Abu Hamdan – and Paul McCarthy, who each took time to answer my questions, provide me with information and insights and thus added visionary and concrete perspectives to my (initially rather abstract) hypothesis. In like manner, Prof. Dr. Dr. Andreas Maercker was kind enough to assist me with current research in psychology on media as a trauma criterion, and the curators Sanna Moore and Sabine Eckmann provided me with helpful insights regarding the exhibitions they have curated and the central issues they faced. My thanks also goes to my wonderful editor Jana Obermueller, whose competent editing and correction skills considerably elevated this text’s quality and made me feel more comfortable along the way. For providing me with preciously honest advice, introducing me to helpful or inspiring sources and people, or encouraging me to carry on in moments of doubt, I also wish to thank my friends and colleagues, in particular Anneli Botz, Jürgen Dehm, Louisa Meyer-Madaus, Markus Mießen, Lea Schleiffenbaum, Andreas Schönrock and Amy Sherlock. I am tremendously grateful to my parents, Gabriele und Klaus, as well as to my grandfather Emil, who have all supported me in every decision and stood by my side along the way. Finally, Lars and Oskar deserve the biggest gratitude for their patience and endless love.                              

      “Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.” Susan Sontag (2003), 102.

Introduction

This book attempts to observe the status of trauma in contemporary aesthetics, and to open up the possibilities for formulating a new theory thereof. My interest in the relation between contemporary art and trauma stems from the urgency that the discourse entails: the rising artistic research that engages with trauma provides performative and reflected methods to help understand the humanitarian consequences of violence, warfare and global conflicts, as well as actively participate in their inquisition and learn to see traumas’ far-reaching effects on visual culture and collective memory. The aesthetic realm serves as a forum via which we may be reminded of and aided in understanding current conflicts, while the manifestation of the relevance and potential of these practices calls for a re-evaluated theoretical basis. It also urges us to recognise the ability said practices have of making trauma and its discourse available to a spectatorship. My investment in this subject is not related to one specific event, period or biography. Instead, I regard trauma as a productive framework and search term via which we may explore individual, collective and cultural conflicts, and identify art concerned with these conflicts beyond geopolitical borders. If trauma has become, as Sabine Sielke believes, a ‘global condition’1 , and if it provides, as Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue, “a language in which to speak of the wounds of the past,”2 I pose the question how this condition and this very language are established and challenged in contemporary aesthetic practices, and how they are approached in current curatorial strategies. The majority of trauma literature proves to be of little help for making any attempt to answer these requests, seeing as the traditional canon defines trauma as unrepresentable and restricts its symbolisation to an aesthetic of absence. This definition (trauma as a void) is rooted in a complex network of historical crosslinks, primarily informed by psychoanalysis, post-Holocaust theory and postmodernism. For different reasons, these sources commonly expect representations of trauma to fail in regard to their ethical responsibility, their moral obligation to register accuracy, their mimetic historical function or, in cases of psychological trauma, their

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Sielke (2010), 387. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 281.

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ability to symbolise the presumed dichotomies of past versus presence, expression versus repression. That is: an insuperable past event that penetrates the present, and an experience that is repressed while it is re-experienced. My attempt here is to re-evaluate and rationalise the reasons for the representational limitations of trauma in order to question whether the definition as unrepresentable upholds validity for a concept of trauma in contemporary aesthetics. Challenging both the concept of trauma as the unrepresentable and the mimetic functions of representation, the hypothesis brought forth in this book is underpinned and informed by theoretical sources and philosophers such as Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman, as well as several sources of aesthetic and curatorial practices that plead for the necessity of a representational position. While emphasising two approaches – narrative and spatial aesthetic strategies – I introduce four case studies from contemporary art practices that explicitly engage in different forms, expressions or instances of trauma, and which, in turn, point at its effects on humanity and on image culture. Selected works of the Canadian artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller and the Israeli-American artist Omer Fast will be analysed in regard to their use of narrative strategies, probing and manipulating traumatic narratives. An investigation from the London-based international research collective Forensic Architecture and several works from the American artist Paul McCarthy will be explored in regard to their utilisation of spatial and architectural tools. By utilising different materials and strategies, I investigate how the artists’ practices refer to the concept of trauma, how traumatic conditions of war, violence, fear and torture feed into their work, how they work out trauma’s patterns and rhetorical structures, and how they critically reflect traumatic image cultures. I explore whether and how the works question, transform or attempt to transmit trauma, and question if their practice can provide a lead as to how visual culture may engage in diverse communicated perspectives of global atrocities, their causes and their effects. I thus seek to legitimise artistic research and aesthetic practices as critical voices of a current public debate on trauma, as well as a tool of productivity for the active engagement in current conflicts and humanitarian and socio-political crises. The detailed elaboration of the four positions thus intends to highlight a concern that activates many practitioners: to contribute to finding a new vision for a contextualisation of trauma in contemporary art, and to provide a place for representations of trauma within the space and time frame of the exhibition. This focus eventually shifts to the role of the exhibition and the exhibition maker within the discourse of trauma in aesthetic practices. Led by the question of what influence and responsibility museums, art institutions and curators may have in regard to the representation of global crises, my research highlights a selection of curatorial positions, as well as exhibitions, their challenges and their opportunities, in order to engage with the practice-based knowledge production about trauma, and the

Introduction

communication of atrocities, warfare, human rights violations and governmental suppression in and through aesthetic practices.

1.1

Structure

Laying out the contextual groundwork for my own research, the second chapter, “A History of Trauma”, provides an overview of the historical development of the term ‘trauma’ — from its first psychologisation, to hysteria and PTSD up until presentday research around trauma’s epigenetic effects. An apercu of the clinical, psychoanalytical, juridical and political influences on the terminology will also be provided. Looking closely at historical information, with a particular eye on events that led to the definition of trauma as unrepresentable, I look to emphasise occurrences connected to trauma’s visualisation, visual proofs or attempts thereof, thus focussing on the complex relation between concepts of trauma and truth. A brief introduction that opens up the discourse about cultural trauma analyses the difficult analogies between psychotraumatology, collective memory and cultural symptoms, focussing on the development of social constructions and tropes of trauma. In the following chapter, I formulate my hypothesis “Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable”. This includes expressing my doubts concerning the claim for an exclusive aesthetic of absence and presenting my argument in favour of a less restrictive position by critically unravelling relevant theories that led to the presumption of trauma’s unrepresentability. This chapter thus examines persistent tendencies concerning trauma’s cultural representation developed in humanistic research in trauma studies since the 1990s, such as the transmission of trauma, the testimony versus the fictional narrative, problems of secondary traumatisation and secondary witnessing and modes of perception in a cultural context. Particular attention is paid to the logic of the unrepresentable and its ‘moral imperative’, both in trauma studies as well as in psychoanalytical theories and postmodern aesthetic theory. Putting forward an argument against this traditional canon, I refer to Didi-Hubermann’s representational position and Rancière’s notion of an aesthetic regime, to underscore the necessity of aesthetic practices engaged in trauma. While the first part of this book focuses on theoretical and historical sources, the second part is concerned with contemporary aesthetic and curatorial practices. I elaborate how contexts and aesthetic tools are being employed in order to get to a sense of truth, revealing patterns and tropes of image cultures, de-mystifying images of trauma, trying to make it experienceable und intelligible for an audience. There is an emphasis on how these standpoints address trauma’s position in regard to fiction and reality, as a cultural construction versus a psychological disease, and how representational issues are being dealt with. Four case studies are analysed indepth, divided into two contextual subthemes. The chapter “Trauma Narratives” in-

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troduces and analyses several works, including the video 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011) by Omer Fast and the installation The Killing Machine (2007) by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, particularly in regard to the junctions of fact and fiction, memory and history, the testimony and the perpetrator. I compare resemblances to dramatic structures and explore the incorporation of traumatic imagery, the roles and opportunities for spectators, exhibition presentations and the respective modes of experimental storytelling. Subsequently, the chapter “Trauma Spaces” is concerned with the performances and video installations of Paul McCarthy, such as Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994), as well as with investigative aesthetics, particularly Saydnaya. Inside a Syrian Torture Prison (2016), produced by Forensic Architecture. In both case studies, I analyse how spaces, architectures and exhibition settings act as research tools allowing for the investigation of and within trauma, a frame to represent it and how physical and virtual spaces influence the perception of trauma within the surroundings of the art institution. The final chapter, “Trauma – Curatorial Perspectives on Past Exhibitions and Future Possibilities”, introduces both experimental and traditional curatorial strategies and visions discussing the possibilities of trauma’s representation, such as are put forward by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Theodor Ringborg. This chapter provides the space to introduce and critically compare a short survey of three recent exhibitions at contemporary art museums that have explicitly addressed trauma as a global phenomenon or a cultural condition in their curatorial agenda. To compare possible institutional problems and limitations posed by the setting of the contemporary art museum itself, I go on to discuss an exhibition focused on trauma and terror in a war museum. A brief summary of aesthetic strategies employed in these exhibitions specifies key contexts, formal solutions, themes and aesthetic tools that are used repetitively and through which a rhetoric pattern of trauma may be identified. This overview also aims to underline my intention to see a democratising potential in the framework of trauma, allowing to move singular works and exhibitions beyond contextually limiting aesthetic, geo-political and historical borders.

1.2

Methodology

By honing in on research on diverse artistic practices utilising multi-media in visual art as a forum of experimental knowledge production and the exhibition as a collaborative and interdisciplinary framework, this study proposes a less restricted view on singular genres and formal borders — borders that often prevent new perspectives outside traditional canons. Instead, I focus on contextual parameters in the works of the artists discussed, highlighting how aesthetic practice and artistic research merge in both documentary and imaginative constructed narratives and

Introduction

spaces. After the spatial turn, collapsing genres and expanding boundaries of visual culture,3 the artists discussed in this text challenge categorisation by reconfiguring the texture of space and time in the context of the exhibition. I have furthermore exclusively chosen artistic positions that are active practitioners, available to respond to the questions that I have about their work and their intentions. This seems important to mention, as I attempt to create knowledge not only through theory but also my personal experience of the works and interviews with their creators. The description of my own experience and the format of the interview are substantial materials of this study, helping me avoid inscribing meaning into a work without taking into account or misreading the intentions of its producer. Therefore, all artists discussed in this text are engaged in issues of trauma and have, for different reasons, a pronounced interest in its representation — a premise to the selection of the works discussed. They each explore underlying processes of visualising traumatic imagery, symptoms and memories of trauma, as well as emphasising the correlated issues of aesthetic perception that accompany the trauma paradigm. At the same time and within this context, however, trauma must also be read in its function as an element of shared interest that gathers global artistic positions, juxtaposing their practice from only one specific angle. Trauma is a starting point from which their practice may but must not necessarily be read. I would also like to propose reading the art works discussed here from a performative perspective. This implies not aligning the representative requirements along the traditional concept of ‘mimesis’, but rather art’s capacity to create experiences, social and relational spaces, and in constituting new realities and modes of perception instead of imitating existing ones. This approach of analysing art through its experience, as Sandra Umathum has emphasised in the methodology of her book on art as a performative event,4 is furthermore informed by theatre theory, which might serve as a helpful exchange between theatre and art theory, in order to investigate the inter-subjective situation of experience that art works are able to create.5 I also feel the need to mention that the aim here is not to discuss any intentionally therapeutic, self-healing, redemptive or cathartic qualities of ‘trauma art’, but rather highlight contemporary works of art that use the framework of the exhibition to reflect on trauma and its consequences. In the works that are introduced here, trauma is addressed as an event, a psychological or social condition, a conflict of memories or an aftermath of mourning and melancholia. It is also reassembled, re-staged and dissected into its very structure and its vocabulary through the act of

3 4 5

See also: Annette Jael Lehmann and Philip Ursprung (eds.) Bild und Raum. Klassische Texte zu Spatial Turn und Visual Culture, 2017. Cf. Sandra Umathum, Kunst als Aufführungserfahrung, 2011. Ibid.,16.

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image, space and sound-making, employed as a rhetoric tool. Trauma, in some of the works that are presented here, is abstracted and thus released from historical or mimetic functions. In other works, trauma is fictionalised, playing with anticipations and the effects of manipulation. In other works still, the borders between the aesthetics and investigative works blur, so that the aesthetic production serves an inquisitional purpose.

1.3

Challenges

A terminological question remains, as the common-language use of the term ‘trauma’ does not only imply the traumatic event, but also the aftermath following that event. It includes individual and collective traumata. It refers to symptoms of PTSD or genetic dispositions, to collective mourning and cultural trauma. Ultimately, trauma also indicates a trope that exists both in media and in political language. Having various historical ties to theories rooted in psychoanalysis, clinical psychology and cultural and social studies, the question therefore is: how specific could the term ‘trauma’ ever be? Here, I attempt to clarify the various stages of disciplines, cultural backgrounds and political periods that ‘trauma’ has undergone, hoping that this genealogy will help locate the term’s implications, facilitating an understanding of its complex evolvement until the present day, without writing one exclusive definition of trauma. To the degree of vagueness that seems tolerable, I have continued employing the term ‘trauma’, but wherever possible, I have tried to be as specific as possible. Amongst the most common concerns I have come across during my research, are the presumed risks of trivialising trauma into an aesthetic concern or, worse, of turning trauma into a matter of entertainment. In light of a rising fascination for images of horror and torture, both are valid concerns that are being addressed repeatedly throughout this study. Irrespective of whether it is fictional or documentary material that is being used, it seems necessary to emphasise that representations do not trivialise trauma per se. Instead, the complexity of finding a measured and respectful tone – without intentionally hurting spectators or trivialising trauma – requires artists to consider modes of perception, agency and respective contexts of their productions. The curator Theodor Ringborg considers these ‘unique capacities’ to be art’s ability to not only make work about, but also through the traumatic and violent image. He argues, “[w]hile journalists, activists, citizens and surveillance technologies can create images in which the violence of war is made visible, the artist can work through the image. Especially today, as war-painters of old have been replaced by contemporary artists who not only de-

Introduction

pict but also examine the function of the image itself and the politics formulated as a consequence.”6 The academic discourse of trauma has intersections with various other research areas, such as Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies and gender studies. I am not an expert in the aforementioned disciplines, but being aware of their exceptional influence in the trauma discourse and in aesthetic theory, I have tried to incorporate these sources wherever it seemed valuable. In an effort to maintain a neutral position and not prioritise the uniqueness or unprecedentedness of one particular traumatic event, historical period or geographic location, I have primarily focused on art works that engage in conditions of trauma and the aesthetic perception thereof. And I have only considered art works that engage in current political, social or cultural conflicts happening in the world. A majority of positions discussed in this text are both male and from the ‘global North’, something I unsuccessfully tried to avoid throughout my research. I identify two reasons for this: I have been in contact with artists who do not want to see themselves labelled as victims and who feel that the trauma terminology may disadvantage their position in the art world. In an effort to emphasise the condition of trauma from a more general and neutral perspective, I took the decision to exclude aesthetic practices primarily evolving from autobiographical trauma; this also led me away from many positions addressing personal traumatic experiences. I regard multi-disciplinary discussions on trauma as a tendency or a sign for a current shift of activation from various academic and non-academic backgrounds, discarding the notion of unrepresentability. This underscores that investigating trauma in contemporary art, as is done in the present book, is only one of many possibilities for exploring and supporting a rising movement. However, by seeing them as being part of a political movement, must they consequently be subsumed as activist, socially engaged or political artists? One might argue that these categories are not only non-functional and restrictive, they also reduce artistic practices in favour of sorting them into (market-friendly) genres. Terminologies, or the complexity of their usage, as art theorist and curator Jill Bennett highlights, pose one of the basic problems in this discourse: “The notion that art responds – much like the idea that art is ‘about’ – is at once reductive and somewhat grandiose, ascribing both fixed meaning and high ambition […].”7 Seeking a better term, Bennett thus suggests establishing the political function of aesthetics in a terminology that she coins in her book of the same name as ‘practical aesthetics’. This, she argues, is “an aesthetics informed by and derived from practical, real-world encounters, an aesthetics that is in turn capable of being used or put into effect in a real situation. […]

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Ringborg (2017). Bennett (2012), 36.

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It is, then, the study of aesthetic perception at work in a social field.”8 Informed by Foucault and Deleuze, Bennett argues in favour of art’s capacity to ‘reassemble’ the components of an event in order to rethink history. Her comprehension of ‘practical aesthetics’ has thus helped me challenge the risk of either reducing art to a single function (representing trauma) or overestimating its historical accuracy (mimesis) and its direct political effects (activism). Bennett instead suggests regarding art’s task in abstracting the traumatic event and evoking it as a virtuality: “Art, in other words, does not represent what has already occurred, but generates a set of aesthetic possibilities, which may in turn inform political thinking in regard to particular circumstances. If art can in some way evoke the pure event as a virtuality, the test is whether the virtual event is then amenable to different actualities.”9 Another notion influencing my research was Juliane Rebentisch’s emphasis of “art’s autonomous logic of aesthetics” which she defines as a unique realm in which art can open a specific experience of intensity and quality, creating a discourse through distance and an uncertainty towards understanding the aesthetic object.10 Both of these readings of the political engagement of art have informed my analysis.

1.4 1.4.1

Current State of Research Artists

While none of the case studies discussed in this book have previously been subject to extensive research in academic trauma discourse, their practice can only offer a glimpse into numerous artistic approaches addressing trauma in their work and the research that has evolved from the perception of these works. This study does not maintain the pretence of dealing with more than but selected aspects of a subject so rich in varieties and cultural differences. Even a short generalising or empirical survey of what may be subsumed, for reasons of practicality, under the vague category of ‘art engaged in trauma’, proves to be a problem, “as much of the work associated with this rubric addresses neither the event as it occurs in historical time nor the subjective expression of a personalised traumatic memory.”11 Seeing as common aesthetic terminology has not yet found an overarching term, the ‘trauma’ term is tiptoed around, referencing instead concepts such as ‘void’, ‘neuroses’, ‘global fear’, ‘conflict’, ‘wound’, ‘violence’, ‘terror’ or ‘abject’. A clear termi8 9 10 11

Ibid., 2-3. Ibid., 51. Cf. Rebentisch (2003), 279. Ibid., 41.

Introduction

nology could be helpful, but it could also, as Kristin Stiles argues, “risk subsuming traumatic imagery in overarching aesthetic frames that remove art from the events to which artists have attested, sequestering and trivialising their work in the art industry as a trauma commodity.”12 Despite the lack of clear terminology or an aesthetic frame, it is possible to identify a selection of current and recent practices, acknowledged for making sustainable work engaged in trauma, thus frequently chosen for international exhibitions, public monuments or publications that address trauma or closely related subjects.13 With varying contexts, these positions include the work of Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Doris Salcedo, Mike Kelley, Niki de Saint Phalle and Francesca Woodman regarding representations of their personal trauma or, as in the work of Kristof Wodiezko or Phil Collins, traumatic testimonies of others. The work of Marina Abramovic, Valie Export, Gina Pane and Ana Mendieta, addresses autobiographical trauma too, with a strong focus on the female body and the female role in society. This is also essential to the work of Shirin Neshat, who explores the role of women in Muslim societies, but also in the sculptures of Kiki Smith or the photographs of Hanna Wilke, who documented her dying body suffering from cancer. Traumatised and pained bodies are also central to the wax-sculptures of Berlinde De Bruyckere, as well as to the work of David Wojnarowitz and Robert Mapplethorpe, who have both addressed the physical invasion of AIDS during the 1980s and 1990, and the physically traumatic confrontation with death in Chris Burden’s shooting performance. Psychological violence and sensations of fear and claustrophobia are decisive factors in several immersive installation works of Gregor Schneider or the video installations of John Bock. The numbing trauma of grief has been relevant to the practice of Doris Salcedo, Félix González-Torres or Eva Hesse, who each addressed the aftermath of mourning beloved persons. In contrast, the dystopian vision of losing human emotions and relations in a growing digital society are narrated as empty, post-traumatic scenarios for example in the work of Ed Adkins, Hito Steyerl and Ryan Trecartin, or as a world of war in the virtual-reality work of Maurice Benayoun. Traumata caused by ecocides, disasters and the effects of climate change has been of concern to a number of artists, including Jacob Kirkegaard and Olafur Eliasson, who explore the effects of melting ice in the Arctic, or Rosa Barba and Marina Zurkow, who address the catastrophic effects of oil extraction. The trauma of living in exile or being forced to migrate is a major theme in many artists’ works, such as in Dan Voh’s personal installation practice, in Wu Tsang’s

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Stiles (2016), 20. This contextualisation does not automatically imply the artists’ confirmation, however, and might sometimes even only be suitable for a certain work series that the artists produced.

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use of magical realism, addressing the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ as a crisis of representation, as well as in the work of Mona Hatoum and, again, Shirin Neshat. The traumata of slavery and of racist discrimination are central to Kara Walker’s work with cut-paper silhouettes addressing issues of racism American history, to Arthur Jaffa’s or Larry Achiampong’s video installations on racial conditioning; or William Kentridge’s animated films that address the collective trauma of the South African apartheid system. The conflicted mediatisation of traumata has also been central to the practice of Alfredo Jaar as illustrated in his works dealing with the representation of the Rwanda genocide in the Western media, or Johann Grimonprez’ video collage of news broadcasts reporting various aeroplane hijacking events. Following an art historical tradition, traumata emerging from periods of war and terror are amongst the most salient and vast issues addressed in art. Current practices that are frequently presented in exhibitions addressing the representation of war include, to name but a few, The Atlas Group by Walid Raad concerning the Lebanese wars; Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s audio work on the Syrian war; Gerhard Richter’s painting of the Twin Towers attack September (2005)14 ; Anselm Kiefer’s reflections on Germany’s history; Martha Roesler’s notions of bringing the war home in her photo montage work; Harun Farocki’s video works that address the impact of technology in current warfare and PTSD treatment with soldiers, or Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of the Gulf War in Kuwait or the Rwandan genocide. The representation of the Holocaust has a unique position in the history of art, as the forthcoming chapters will show. There is an on-going polemic between the aesthetic dichotomies of absence versus presence, abstraction versus figuration, documentation versus fiction. Many current anti-representational strategies are still inspired by some of the earliest pioneers of reduced aesthetics, such as American Expressionist art. As a direct reaction to World War II, the painters Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman published a five-point manifesto in the New York Times in 1943, which included the statement, “We favour the simple expression of the complex thought. […] We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.” 15 Other artists, such as Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt

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Gerhard Richter’s small painting September (2005) speaks of the impact of terror communicated via a single, singular image that circulated around the globe. The original photo, published in the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2001, captures the moment when the second plane hit the Twin Towers, resulting in a large explosion of fire. Richter, who has segued back and forth between figurative and abstract forms of oil on canvas since the 1960s, first painted the image with each little detail and subsequently used a knife to scrape the paint over and over from one side, until the white priming layer was visible again. (See: Butin, (2014), 27-28). Richter’s work is of interest because it reflects the polemic between trauma’s representation and anti-representation. Gottlieb; Rothko; Newman (1943).

Introduction

and Clifford Still, would follow this credo. Addressing concerns about the Holocaust’s representation through his work, Frank Stella produced an all-black painting titled Arbeit macht Frei (1958). In 1948, Newman published the essay “The Sublime is Now”, in which he asks, “in a time without a legend or a myth that can be called sublime […] how can we be creating a sublime art?”16 In sculptures of commemoration and public memorials for the Holocaust’s atrocities, many artists have employed a similarly reduced aesthetic, often suggesting the traumatic event as unrepresentable by means of the anti-representational aesthetics of absence. The Nameless Library (2000) by British artist Rachel Whiteread, for instance, addresses this kind of reading with a negative cast sculpture presenting a library filled with white, inward turned books, located at the Judenplatz in Vienna — a symbol of the Vienna book burnings. In a memorial for the 1933 Nazi book burnings in Berlin, the Denkmal zur Erinnerung an die Bücherverbrennung by Israeli artist Micha Ullman is in the form of an inaccessible underground sculpture at Bebelplatz, showing an empty library, which can only be seen through a thick layer of glass from above. Taking a less visible approach, the artist Jochen Gerz designed an ‘invisible commemoration square’ in Saarbrücken, located exactly where the Gestapo’s headquarters used to be. His work 2146 Stones - Monument against Racism (1993) consists of 2146 pavement stones, which were engraved with the names of all the Jewish cemeteries in Germany before the war began, turned upside down and subsequently re-installed at the public square — making the names of the cemeteries present but invisible in analogy to the psychological dialectic of traumatic memory. At the extreme opposite pole in respect to formal realisations are transgressive artworks that address the aftermath of the Holocaust, such as the performative and cathartic body of work produced by the Vienna activists. This includes Günter Brus, Valie Export, Kurt Kren, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who outspokenly addressed the trauma of their parents’ generation that was inflicted with anti-Semitism and fascism. Concerning the aesthetics of the transgressive, it should be mentioned in brief that ‘abject art’ has maintained an outstanding relation to contexts of trauma, which is reflected in numerous exhibitions and corresponding theory. Rooted in a discourse nourished by the notions of the Freudian ‘uncanny’,17 the Barthian ‘punctum’, the Lacanian ‘real’ or ‘touché’ and the Batallian ‘informé’, the reception of Julia Kristeva’s coinage of the ‘abject’18 relates to contexts

16 17 18

Newman (1948), 53. Cf. Freud (2003) [1973]. The term ‘abject art’ was developed alongside an influential exhibition of the same name held at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1993. The theoretical work it drew upon in particular: Julia Kristeva: “Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection”, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

21

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Let Them Haunt Us

of mortality, sexuality and trauma. Having both been defined as formless and repressed, the suggested analogy of the ‘abject’ and the Lacanian traumatic ‘real’ was in part deducted from its conception as unrepresentable.19 Abject art’s outspokenly shocking and visceral aesthetics, such as in the works of Jake & Dinos Chapman, Kira O’Reilly or Andrea Serrano, have thus been related to Kristeva’s notion of the ‘abject’ being a repressed object that would “collapse of the border between inside and outside.”20 Abject art was also central to Hal Foster’s monograph on the Return of the Real (1996), which included an interpretation of Andy Warhol’s photographic car crash series Double Disaster (1963) as producing trauma and defined abject art as “drawn to the broken boundaries of the violated body.”21

1.4.2

Theory

Compared to the vast amount of aesthetic practices engaging with trauma, there are only few theoretical and critical reflections on these global positions in art history, let alone a wider contextualisation of current or more recent aesthetic practices. It seems as though there is still a general avoidance of psychological or sociological references in art historical and culture theoretical texts, with preference being given to Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytical interpretations, prioritising these over current research on PTSD and collective trauma. Therefore, taking the unrepresentability of trauma as a given rule still dictates the tone of many theories. This traditional canon leads to another problem in art theoretical research on trauma, which is the affirmative approach towards the traditional concept of trauma itself, often avoiding a critical perspective towards its appearance as a trope in current image culture or its utilisation as a political tool.22 The third problem is one of moral and historiographical pressure, in which theory often expects art to have healing and socially enlightening powers, or accuracy in regard to events and their true chronology. Taking these obstacles into consideration, the first influential publications for art historical trauma studies, all of which were first released in the 1990s, included Leo Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption (1990) and Ernst van Alphen’s Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory (1997) which includes discussions of works by Christian Boltanski, makes the attempt to relieve art about 19

20 21 22

In a similar vein as the psychoanalytical conception of trauma’s representational limitation, Denis Hollier argues, “the abject cannot be shown; it cannot be told either, because of the ineradicable metaphorocity of language.” Bois, Buchloh, Foster, Hollier Krauss, Molesworth (1994), 20. Kristeva (1982), 12, 53. Foster (1996), 152. See for example Franziska Lamott “Trauma as a political tool.” In: Critical Public Health, vol. 15, no. 3 (2005): 219.

Introduction

the Holocaust from its “moral imperative” and gained much attention for integrating and legitimising the subject of trauma in the aesthetic discourse. With Emphatic Vision (2005) and Practical Aesthetics (2012), Jill Bennett wrote two of the most relevant monographs on the analysis of global traumatic events appearing in contemporary art, all the while remaining critical of using traditional trauma theory in relation to aesthetic practices. Informed by Deleuze, Rancière and Foucault, she analyses works that address trauma in a context of activism, reassembling the perception of traumatic events and as an alternative way of writing history. Kristine Stiles, who recently published a collection of her essays on artists in the monograph Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma (2016), and who presumably had less of an impact within the field of trauma studies, introduced trauma theory in relation to contemporary art to a readership of art historians. In five thematically embedded chapters, her book presents case studies from the current and the previous centuries which she relates and contextualises under the concepts of trauma and destruction. An edited volume by Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg titled Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (2006) explores the effects of trauma on different cultural fields and genres, separating chapters into the categories Image, Monument, Performance and Installation, Film and Historiography, spanning the past decades and even beyond. A few contributions on contemporary practices include Gwendolyn DuBois’s essay on the “Re-Memory of Slavery” in the practice of Kara Walker, Mark Jarzombek’s essay on the “Post-Traumatic Turn and the Art of Walid Ra’ad and Krzysztof Wodiczko” and Saltzman’s essay on the video art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, “A Monument Bears Witness”. German researchers Aleida Assmann, Karolina Jeftic and Friederike Wappler edited a publication on the representability of trauma titled Erinnern und Vergessen. Zur Darstellbarkeit von Traumata. (2005), in which an essay by Hubertus Butin on Gerard Richter’s evolvement of the September painting and an essay by Friederike Wappler on Bruce Nauman’s reaction to the Vietnam War in his conceptual practice related trauma specifically to contemporary positions. Other edited volumes addressing trauma in art and culture – most of which also include literature, film and theatre – are Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present (1999) edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer; Image and the Witness – Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture (2007) edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas; Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives (2010) and Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media (2011), both edited by Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso, and The Edges of Trauma: Explorations in Visual Art and Literature (2014) by Tamás Bényei and Alexandra Stara.

23

A History of Trauma

In order to speak about trauma in the context of art today, a look back across and into history is required to follow the non-linear development of the term, and to afford an understanding of its implications today. But, as with any term that has evolved over so many decades and throughout global cultures, there is no singular history of trauma. Rather, its complex narration consists of simultaneous and often paradoxical research. I will nonetheless attempt to reconstruct how said histories of trauma have shaped the manifestation of our contemporary comprehension of trauma. Influenced not only by the progress of science, but also by political, social, moral, medical and legal interests, the term ‘trauma’ has been subject to a range of ambivalent significations, ruptures and often interdisciplinary disagreements. These originated somewhere between neurology, psychology and psychoanalysis, defining what is known today as psychological trauma, and later expanded to the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and others, often referred to as collective or cultural trauma. Trauma theorists, such as Judith Herman, describe its formation as a ‘forgotten history’, believing that the history of trauma has been a traumatic process itself and that “[l]ike traumatised people, we have been cut off from the knowledge of our past.”1 Others, such as the editors of Understanding Trauma, consider trauma – and the metaphor it implies – a ‘generative trope’.2 Assigned with frequently changing discourses and diagnoses, the concept of trauma has been formed throughout its various epistemological stages. But trauma has also influenced the history of our time, and has perhaps even turned into a tragic history, as Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue.3 Collective traumata, evoked through historical atrocities such as the Holocaust, the Rwanda Genocide or 9/11, created the notion of a trauma culture, defining the victimhood of entire generations, inhabitants of a country or a city, and diverse social groups as affected by wars, torture, discrimination and slavery.

1 2 3

Herman (1992), 2. Barad, Kirmayer and Lemelson (2007), 4. Cf. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 275.

26

Let Them Haunt Us

In this chapter, I will attempt to show that the various historical approaches to trauma and the investigations of its ontology and origin were always accompanied and motivated by both a search for the visual manifestation of trauma, and by a refuting of the impossibility of its perceivable presence. The reason for this seems to be a simple one: if trauma were openly visible, it would be more easily detected, legitimised and potentially cured. If trauma were visible, tangible, if it could be x-rayed, photographed or painted, it would not only be intelligible and easier to resolve, it would also serve as proof of the reality of its initial cause: the traumatic event. The search for trauma’s visual manifestation also serves another purpose: the attempted visualisation of the mind and psyche in general — a deeply seated and manifested social urge to understand and explore human behaviour and interaction. The history of trauma is therefore also a history of searching for the truth, of representing memory and using it as a testimony to compensate for the lack of visual proofs. As I will attempt to underline, the conflict of the difficult visualisation of trauma and the speakability thereof has thus always been interconnected with its very nature, eventually becoming one of its major criteria and something that psychologist Judith Herman determines as “the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”4 In order to understand how the term ‘trauma’ evolved and grew over the past two centuries, and how it is embedded in our culture, this chapter will provide an overview of its implications, both in previous decades as well as today. While attempting to trace its path following a chronological order, I should point out the impossibility of such an undertaking in a globally valid coherency.5 By introducing and exploring different perspectives, events and cultural influences, I will highlight some events more so than others, particularly those related to trauma’s visual appearance. I trace the epistemological history of trauma and its various presumed visual forms in regard to its development of meanings, the research in its nature and its origin, and to the public significance it reached in different stages of its exploration.

4 5

Herman (1992), 2. Influential and well-researched books about the history of trauma include Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1992) which looks at trauma from a feminist perspective and investigates political interests that formed trauma throughout history. Sociological and anthropological perspectives, favouring a constructivist perspective, include Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul and Allan Young’s Harmony of Illusions (1995). Didier Fassin’s and Richard Rechtman’s The Empire of Trauma (2009) also employs a constructivist perspective, and offers a historical analysis from a French perspective.

A History of Trauma

2.1

Railway Spine

In the 17th century, the term and construct of trauma belonged to a language that referred exclusively to a physical wound on the body. The meaning of the Greek root of the term having been preserved, ‘traumatic’ was first mentioned in the British language in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1656. Physical trauma was presumed to be a shock — an idea that has influenced the notion of trauma throughout its various stages.6 Although the path of trauma’s ‘psychologisation’7 – the discovery of a psychological wound and shock – can be traced back to classical antiquity (i.e. Homer’s poem Iliad and its central figure Achillis), the investigation of trauma’s psychological nature began with its formation in the realm of hysteria. First initiated by Pierre Briquet, who published his research and possible treatment methods of hysteria Traité historique et thérapeutique de l’hystérie in 1859, the French psychiatrist was concerned with hysteria’s unintelligible nature, comparing it to an olm. Like this cave-dwelling amphibian, hysteria may be seen as being “[a] proteus who presents himself in a thousand guises and cannot be grasped in any of them.”8 Although Briquet based his research on the observation of 430 solely female patients, he assumed the cause of the symptom to be located in the brain9 and not, as most of his colleagues believed at that time, in the uterus.10 In a subsequent study published a few years later, Danish-British surgeon John Eric Erichsen described and lectured on symptoms of anxiety in passengers who had experienced and survived a railway accident. In his book On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System (1867), he attributes the distress in the nervous system to a concussion or to micro lesions in the spinal cord, causing him to popularise the condition as a “railway spine” and later a ‘railway brain’. His study – which was presumably largely influenced by its legal relevance for railway accident survivors who sued the companies for compensation11 – generated much attention among his national and international colleagues (specifically in England, France and Germany), both in the discipline of medicine and of psychiatry.

6 7

8 9 10 11

Cf. Barad, Kirmayer, Lemelson (2007), 5. A word coined by Esther Fischer-Homberg, who wrote a historical study about the emergence of the traumatic neurosis. Die Traumatische Neurose: Vom Somatischen zum Sozialen Leiden. Bern: Huber, 1975. Briquet (1859), 5. Cf. Briquet (2008), 128. Cf. Ellenberger (1970), 142. Cf. Hacking (1995), 186.

27

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2.2

Hysteria

Only two years after Erichsen’s publication, the British physician Russel Reynolds suggested that the patients’ paralysis of the ‘railway spine’ was produced through a subsequent “idea and emotion together,”12 showing similarities to hysteric women. Adapting this thesis, the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who was convinced of the condition’s neurological and inherited origin, integrated the ‘railway spine’ into the category of hysteria. Sceptical of Erichsen’s notion, the beginning of Charcot’s research also marks the start of a splitting of two scientific lines: one that would trace the somatised path of traumatic memory, and one that would trace its psychologised version.13 Charcot worked at the Salpêtière14 by Paris from 1862 onwards, transforming the old hospital into a modern facility for neurology capable of housing a large study on hysteria – initiated and directed by Charcot himself – in 1881. While the railway spine was not Charcot’s central interest, the shared symptoms to hysteria, as Ian Hacking argues,15 were useful to him as potential proof of the possible application of the hysteric condition on both sexes, thus affording the analysis of hysteria beyond the borders of gynaecology. He extended the concept of hysteria to other vaguely analysed and often occult phenomena such as witchcraft and various states of possession, providing scientific diagnosis criteria and treatment methods, which usually resorted to hypnosis, but also electroshock treatments and genital manipulation. The Salpêtière was not at all a place of neutral healing practices — it was, in fact, predefined by its long tradition of accommodating thousands of ‘insane’ women who were suspected of suffering from venereal diseases, turning them into incurable madwomen. Only a few years before Charcot formulated the condition of hysteria, the vocabulary for the cause of the women’s behaviour was still highly precarious. The dominance of moral reasons for women’s suffering, i.e. being presumed guilty of causing their own misery, becomes apparent in the report of the hospital’s “Service of the Insane” in the year 1862. Along with serving to provide information related to work distribution, such as one clinician being responsible for five hundred patients as well as meal plans that included a two-portion, a oneportion and a starvation diet,16 Monsieur Husson, the Director of the General Administration of Public Assistance, also used the report to provide reasons for the deaths of 254 women in the past year. As George Didi-Huberman brought to light, 12 13 14

15 16

Reynolds (1869) quoted in Hacking (1995), 186. Cf. Young (1995), 21. For an elaborate and critical analysis of Charcot’s time at the Salpêtière and his theatrical treatment of hysterical women, see George Didi-Huberman Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (2003). Cf. Hacking (1995), 187. Didi-Huberman (2003), 17.

A History of Trauma

“Monsieur Husson compiled a total of sixty: thirty-eight physical causes (including masturbation, scrofula, blows and wounds, debauchery and licentiousness, cholera, erotomania, alcoholism, rape), twenty-one moral causes (including love, joy, ‘bad reading habits’, nostalgia, and misery), and one category that regrouped all the ‘unknown causes’.”17 When Charcot received substantial parliament funding to create a “Clinical Chair of Diseases of the Nervous System” in 1881, he was already popular amongst his international peers as well as in Parisian high-society. Every Tuesday at his private residence, Charcot would give spectacular lectures to a broad (and specifically nonclinical) audience, in which he would expose hypnotised hysterical women during hysterical attacks as to offer live demonstrations of their conditions. Like Briquet, his curiosity was triggered by the quality of inaccessibility of hysteria, and he attracted his spectators by suggesting his study as being both an exploration and a disclosure of the unknown. Thus, although artists and actors made up a large part of the spectatorship in an effort to gain formal inspiration for their own work, one of Charcot’s major concerns was forming an image of hysteria — the challenge of representing it visually. Employing an “autopsy on the living,”18 he observed his patients’ behaviour, drew sketches of them, had mimetic sculptures made and finally attempted to localise the origin of the hysteric condition through observations made of lesions in the brain after his patients’ death. His primary tool to prove the reality of hysteria, however, became the photo camera, with which he portrayed his patients. During long posing procedures, Charcot staged the women according to their type of hysteria and required them to dramatically perform different stages of their own condition. As Didi-Huberman suggests, he thereby invented the phenomenon of hysteria photographically. The photographs were eventually published as the volume Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtière (1875-1880) and became proof of the condition’s truth, helping to generate a common imagery right at the very beginning of its rediscovery.19 Charcot’s success and the financial support he received from the government also had political reasons, as Judith Herman has highlighted. Set in republicanled France, the Third Republic having just been established in 1870, the major political conflict of the new secular government was to defeat the monarchy and its established Catholic religion. The initiative for the study of hysteria and its

17 18 19

Ibid. 15, quoting from A. Husson “Rapport sur le Service des Aliénés du Département de la Seine pour L’Année 1862”, Paris: Dupont, 1863. Didi-Huberman (2003), 17. According to Judith Herman, Charcot’s interest in the connection between dramatic aesthetic compositions and the condition of hysteria also surfaced in another project of his, in which he retrospectively diagnosed hysteria in several portrait paintings throughout the history of art. Cf. Herman (1992), 15.

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attempted demystification “was intended to demonstrate the triumph of secular enlightenment over reactionary superstition, as well as the moral superiority of a secular world view,”20 which Charcot, himself a member and entertainer of the new Bourgeoisie, believed in. Interested in the phenomenon of hysteria, Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud – two of the most influential early clinicians to shape the psychoanalytic theory of trauma – joined the Salpêtière and became Charcot’s students. Freud joined the study in 1885 and Janet followed in 1889. Although strongly inspired by Charcot, both Janet and Freud investigated the nature of hysteria, its aetiology, attempting to find its cause via talking to patients, as opposed to Charcot’s rather passive observations. By the mid 1890s, they had independently discovered a connection between hysteria and a previous psychological trauma, additionally exploring the recovery from hysterical symptoms through the verbalisation of traumatic memories.21 Janet, who is lesser known today but whose theories, particularly on the symptom of dissociation and the subconscious, regained influence in the 1980s, introduced the notion of the victims’ incapability to integrate traumatic experiences in their cognitive structures in his doctoral thesis L’Automatisme Psychologique in 1889. For him, as opposed to Charcot, there was no link to an anatomical cause: he considered hysteria as a psychological illness22 and stated: “subconscious acts is the sign of a mental disease, but it is, above all, the sign of hysteria.”23 In this sense, he defined trauma as being a shock, causing psychological reactions, such as “dissociation, not only of an idea, not only of a feeling, but of one mental state of activity.”24 He also argued that memories of an external traumatic event would be separated and thus dissociated from the consciousness, due to the impossibility of their integration. Janet argues, “Whereas old remembrances relating to periods previous to the malady are well preserved […] recent events pass without leaving any trace. It is a disturbance of memory, which I have described under the name of continuous amnesia.”25 Moreover, he observed his patients as being incapable of producing narrative memories of the traumatic event; instead, sometimes triggered by confrontations with their past, Janet discovered that psychosomatic pain and flashbacks replaced the actual memory of individual patients. These discoveries led to Janet’s conclusion that working with traumatic memories could function as a treatment method for hysteria. The discovery of repressed memories, and the assessment of their initial triggers, were crucial to the formation and knowledge 20 21 22 23 24 25

Herman (1992), 16. Cf. Herman (1992), 12. Cf. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 31. Janet (1920), 289. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 314.

A History of Trauma

of the origination of trauma. While the terms ‘repression’ and ‘dissociation’ were already coined in the 1790s26 to describe a new process of amnesia that had been recognised by clinicians, discovering their relation to psychological consequences in the nervous system that were caused by a shock would take much longer. Not only due to having had most of his case reports destroyed by burning prior to his death, Janet’s early theories slipped from the collective centre of attention. Although the invention of PTSD circled back to his notion of trauma – particularly to his emphasis on traumatic memory being outside of representation and dissociated from the subject – it was Freud and his key theories of psychoanalysis, such as the scheme of repression [Verdrängung]27 that received clinical interest and influenced trauma theory in the decades that followed. While Freud came to similar conclusions in his earliest research as Janet had done, the degree of differences between their works is still a topic of debate amongst theorists to this day. Together with his collaborator Josef Breuer, Freud focused on memory and premature sexual exploitation, such as assaults, as a cause for traumatic neurosis. His research, published as Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie in 1896,28 was disapproved of by his colleagues. As Judith Herman argues, his inquiry into hysteria and the condition’s relation to premature sexual experience was a delicate and potentially polemic hypothesis to put forth given the social setting of his newly established practice: “Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct […] he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris […], but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice.”29 Folding under his peers’ disapproval, Freud retracted his so-called ‘seduction theory’, as well as his case study results of the displeasing and socially unaccepted effects of premature sexual abuse, specifically the incest genesis, and their relation to the condition of hysteria.30 Changing course, he shifted his focus to the role of repressed infantile sexual desires and fantasies that would result in hysteric behaviour as a belated symptom. With Freud’s termination of the ‘seduction theory’, the notion of trauma and its origin automatically shifted from the cause of a presumed infantile sexual experience – an external stressor or event – to his instinct-

26 27 28 29 30

Cf. Young (1995), 13. Cf. Freud (1999) [1914]. Cf. Freud (1962) [1896]. Herman (1992), 14. As many researchers have noted, the turning point in Freud’s psychoanalytic work had vast ramifications on the subsequent study of trauma. See also: Gast (2005), 79; Visser (2011), 273; Leys (2000), 4; Herman (1992), 14.

31

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driven Oedipal model — a psychodynamic mechanism. By arguing that the neurotic patient would not be able to distinguish between real and fictional memories, Freud retrospectively provided an explanation for his retracted seduction theory: “Once I had come to realise that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, or were only fantasies that my patients had dreamt up, or that I had possible even suggested them myself — I was at a loss for some time. […] Having then composed myself, I drew the correct conclusion from my experiences: that the neurotic symptoms were not directly tied to real experiences but to wishful fantasies, and that the psychological reality is more determinant for the neurosis than the material one.”31 The events and circumstances during this early stage of the study of hysteria drastically shaped the common understanding of trauma: Freud’s rejection of the ‘seduction theory’ would draft an understanding of a past and fictional trauma that was merely the imagery of a patient’s repressed sexual fantasies. Along with Freud’s scepticism regarding the veracity of his patients’ experiences came a general notion of mistrust towards individuals suffering from a neurotic condition, which often led to their stigmatisation as malingerers. Moreover, new labour laws and insurances providing financial compensation for workers who had suffered accidents on the worksite re-enforced the debate, causing some forensic medicine clinicians to cynically label the patients’ condition as ‘claim neurosis’,32 alleging they would use their status as victims solely for economic interests. By the beginning of the 20th century, the scepticism towards symptoms of hysteria and neuroses had grown and, partly because there was no common agreement on their causes, they were often regarded with suspicion.

2.3

Traumatic Neurosis and Shell Shock

Around the same time as Charcot was practicing his extensive study on hysterical women, French statisticians published the volume On the Influence of Great Commotions on the Development of Mental Illness in 1874. Focussing on the psychological effects of the Franco-German War (July 1870–May 1871), it was comprised of reports of over 300 French civilians, of both sexes, who suffered from mental illnesses, 31

32

Freud (1948) [1924], 59-60. My translation. Original: “Als ich dann doch erkennen musste, diese Verführungsszenen seien niemals vorgefallen, seien nur Phantasien, die meine Patienten erdichtet, die ich ihnen vielleicht selbst aufgedrängt hatte, war ich eine Zeitlang ratlos. […] Als ich mich gefasst hatte, zog ich aus meiner Erfahrung die richtigen Schlüsse, dass die neurotischen Symptome nicht direkt an wirkliche Erlebnisse anknüpften, sondern an Wunschphantasien, und daß für die Neurose die psychische Realität mehr bedeutet als die materielle.” Cf. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 38.

A History of Trauma

such as amnesia, supposedly caused by a shocking experience. A few years later, the medical student A.-M.-P Roulliard subsumed some of these cases under the term ‘moral trauma’ in his 1885 thesis33 and was thus – before Freud and Janet, it would seem – the first clinician to bring the psychological effects of shock to light. While these evidences were not given as much notice as the studies on hysteric women, the search for trauma’s origin continued: like many of his international colleagues, the German neurologist Hermann Oppenheim returned to the explanation of an organic cause, suggested by Erichsen’s term ‘railway spine’. In 1889, Oppenheim published the study Die traumatischen Neurosen, thus coining the term ‘traumatic neurosis’. According to him, traumatic symptoms would be of neurological nature, caused by damages and lesions in the brain. His term gained a new – and decidedly masculine – relevance during World War I (July 1914–November 1918), when the poor state of returning soldiers became such an undeniable problem that psychiatrists felt obliged to find a name for their condition, to locate it and to develop new methods to treat it. Charcot’s hysteria concept simply would not fit. Caught somewhere between the role of the victim, the perpetrator and the witness, symptoms similar to earlier cases of hysteric women – such as emotional numbness, amnesia, arousal or insomnia – were reported by soldiers. While their breakdowns were first attributed to physical injuries, British psychologist Charles Myers was the first to claim that the extreme psychological reactions were caused by the loud noise of exploding shells, subsequently naming the symptom ‘shell shock’. However, seeing as it was not only soldiers exposed to explosions who suffered from neuroses the term never gained an official medical standing, although, much like its German equivalent ‘traumatic neurosis’, it gained widespread usage. One reason for this was, once again, that it provided an intelligible origin of what caused the condition; another was the presumed disassociation of the stigmatisation and moral burden that had previously been coupled to the condition. But with the rise of symptoms labelled as ‘shell shock’, ‘traumatic neurosis’ or ‘combat neurosis’, clinical controversy once again questioned the patients’ moral character,34 as well as their credibility. Reinforced by the circumstances of wartime, military psychiatry and forensic medicine gained significant influence on the study of trauma, changing its framework so as to fit the measures of war, modifying or ignoring earlier theories and adjusting them according to military services. In doing so, suffering soldiers were classified either as presumed malingerers or – much worse – they were attributed with cowardice and seen as persons who disregarded patriotic ideals. Presumed to spread anxiety contagiously, and representing the exact opposite of their original profession and ideals, neurotic soldiers were treated 33 34

Cf. Roulliard (1885), 87. Cf. Herman (1992), 20.

33

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with electroshock therapy and subjected to various techniques of punishment so as to provoke either a recovery or a confession. This shift was not, as Fassin and Rechtman emphasise, a natural development of the history of trauma and hysteria, but instead a new line of clinical investigation that began with an ethical and highly judgemental idea of war neurosis: the event, i.e. the combat, was not the cause of the neurosis; rather, it merely exposed those who were too weak and not worthy of fighting the patriotic battle.35 While the military and forensic psychiatric opinion of trauma and the significance of its effects on returning soldiers remained unchanged for many years after World War I as well as during World War II, it was psychoanalytical models of trauma therapy suggested by Karl Abraham, Sándor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Simmel and Victor Tausk that offered new and less brutal methods of treatment, speculating that it was, in fact, an unconscious mechanism – and not necessarily a weak character – that afforded the rise of neuroses. Abraham, Ferenczi, Simmel and Tausk served as psychoanalysts in the Austro-Hungarian armies, and each drew from Freud for their own research.36 Although he had rejected the seduction theory, Freud’s model of trauma maintained that its presence was unconscious: published in 1920, his genesis Beyond the Pleasure Principle famously analysed the act of repetition compulsion and traumatic dreams with a direct link to trauma, deriving both the death drive and the pleasure principle, as well as the theory of belatedness [Nachträglichkeit], from this research.37 According to Freud, trauma was neither an event nor a direct psychic consequence of an event. The latter could only potentially become traumatic retrospectively, through the act of recollection and understanding. Neither the initial event nor the realisation thereof, as Irene Visser highlights, “need be intrinsically traumatic, but it is the act of remembering as deferred action that constitutes trauma.”38 As we will see in the following chapter, this notion persisted as a key concept even up until current cultural trauma studies. Although Freud presumed trauma to be a process that exceeded the psyche’s capacities of adaption, he was not able to provide an image of comprehension. As he argued, “The symptom complex of traumatic neurosis approximates hysteria. 35 36 37

38

Cf. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 45. Ibid. 58-59. Freud underpinned these thoughts with the so-called ‘Fort-Da’ game that he observed as a disturbing habit in a one and a half-year old boy who was often left alone by his mother: The boy would throw objects, such as a wooden reel, away from him saying “o-o-o-o” (the mother and Freud agreed on interpreting this as ‘Fort’ meaning ‘gone’) and then pulling the reel back to him, joyfully hailing “Da” (‘there’). This game, Freud believed, replayed and re-staged the distressing experience of his mother’s absence and her return. The boy was thought to repeat his trauma in a game, thereby acting against the dominant Pleasure Principle, and, as Ed Pluth suggests, instead following the notion of the death drive. Cf. Freud (1940) [1920]; Cf. Pluth, (2004), 24. Visser (2011), 273.

A History of Trauma

[…] A complete comprehension has not been achieved for either war neuroses or for traumatic neuroses during times of peace.”39 From his experience with hysteria, Freud knew that dreams and memories played a crucial role in his patients’ ability to cope with a traumatic experience. He therefore suggested dreams as being the most reliable path to approaching trauma: “We may consider the study of dreams as being the most reliable source for exploring mental processes. […] Only, I am not aware that those suffering from traumatic neurosis would spend much time memorising the accident in their conscious life. In fact, they may be rather inclined to not think about it.”40 This argument indicated a remarkable departure from earlier psychoanalytical studies and previous psychiatric methods, as the patients who suffered from traumatic neurosis were suddenly exempted from guilt and blame for their condition: their sickness was thought to be controlled by their unconscious minds. The shocking event in itself, however, was still not considered as being the cause for the condition. Instead, personality, personal history, preconditions, relationships and behavioural patterns – some undefined form of otherness – were said to produce the illness.41 Although the new psychoanalytic thesis on subconscious mechanisms were accepted and partly used in psychiatry, the fields of forensic medicine and military and colonial psychiatry remained the most important disciplines to inform and shape public perception of traumatic neuroses, which continued to be viewed with a great amount of suspicion regarding patients’ interest in financial compensation and their lack of patriotism and community spirit.42 Located somewhere between military psychiatry and psychoanalysis, the study of traumatic neurosis had developed a double line of investigation that searched for either a pathological or a personal cause of the symptoms.

39

40

41 42

Freud (1948) [1924], 9. My translation. Original: “Das Zustandsbild der traumatischen Neurose nähert sich der Hysterie […]. Ein volles Verständnis ist bisher weder für die Kriegsneurosen noch für die traumatischen Neurosen des Friedens erzielt worden.” Ibid. My translation. Original: “Das Studium des Traumes dürfen wir als den zuverlässigsten Weg zur Erforschung der seelischen Tiefenvorgänge betrachten. […] Allein es ist mir nicht bekannt, dass die an traumatischer Neurose Krankenden sich im Wachleben viel mit der Erinnerung an ihren Unfall beschäftigen. Vielleicht bemühen sie sich eher, nicht an ihn zu denken.” Cf. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 62. Ibid., 55.

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2.4

Traumatic Neurosis of War

With the onset of World War II, the interest in traumatic neurosis once again increased in Europe and in the USA, showing that the social meaning of war had a strong impact on shaping the relevance and the consideration of the nature of trauma.43 The condition had been clinically and officially approved, although the traumatising cause was still suspected of being hidden in the personal history of the patient. The American anthropologist and psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner, who had been analysed by Freud in Vienna, investigated the subject of trauma and combat neurosis, publishing the research in his book The Traumatic Neurosis of War in 1941. In it, he identified symptoms such as hysterical paralyses (or so-called ‘pseudo paralysis’), irritability, stuttering, tremors, a loss of interest in the world or anxiety states, grouping them as ‘functional nervous disorders’.44 Kardiner’s book is comprised of 24 case reports, the first of which dates back to 1917, showcasing veterans who could not be recovered by means of military psychosomatic treating techniques.45 Through psychoanalytical sessions with his patients – Freud’s so called ‘talking cure’ – Kardiner came to the conclusion that, “Trauma means injury. […] Properly speaking we would say that an adaption is injured, spoiled, disorganised, or shattered. […] Trauma […] is an external factor which initiates an abrupt change in previous adaption. […]A traumatic neurosis is a type of adaption in which no complete restitution takes place but in which the individual continues with a reduction of resources or a contraction of the ego.”46 Kardiner’s publication thus introduced a new and groundbreaking perspective on traumatic neurosis: it defined the condition as a mental defence mechanism against an external trauma – an event and not a neurological lesion, a personal history or an inherited disease – that would destroy the patient’s adaptive capacities, altering and weakening the pre-traumatic ego.47 Like Freud, he believed 43 44 45

46 47

Cf. Barad, Kirmayer, Lemelson (2007), 5. See also: Young (1995), 89-91. As opposed to military psychiatry (which, by this time employed newer techniques such as cathartic hypnosis to treat soldiers), Kardiner and his collaborator psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel realised that the traumatic memory could not simply be erased. See also: Herman (1992), 26. Kardiner (1941), 74, 79. Although Kardiner’s definitions were respected, they were seen as a threat in the sense of the increasing amount of malingerers. According to the otherwise laudatory book review by Winfred Overholser, more people could identify as victims “thanks partly perhaps to the Government’s very generous policy of paying compensation so long as the symptoms are retained. Indeed, even now, almost twenty-two years after the Armestice, over 35.000 veterans are being compensated for disorders of this type, at an average rate of about 50 US-Dollar per month!” (1942), 181.

A History of Trauma

that suffering veterans would encounter and replay their traumatic experience in their dreams, rather than involving them in their conscious memory. Moreover, he discovered a cinematic quality and fragmentation of the past event in the patients’ traumatic dreams: “Instead of the condensation and the compactness of action in the dreams of the psychoneurotic, we have here a process of dilution and retardation, like the picture of a normal piece of action slowed down by the motion-picture camera, the film’s being cut off before the action is completed.”48 More explicitly formulated than in Freud’s early theory of the unconscious mind or Janet’s theory of the subconscious, Kardiner introduced a new notion of traumatic memory that was literally concealed from the person who owned it. Allan Young, who dedicated a book to the historical construction of traumatic memory, highlighted that “The discovery of traumatic memory revised the scope of two core attributes of the Western self, free will and self-knowledge – the capacity to reflect upon and to attempt to put into action one’s desires, preferences, and intentions. […] At the same time, it created a new language of self-deception […] and justified the emergence of a new class of authorities, the medical experts who would now claim access to memory contents that owners (patients) were hiding from themselves.”49 As opposed to Kardiner, American Neurologists Roy Richard Grinker and John P. Spiegel subsumed the category of war neuroses as a form of anxiety. In War Neuroses (1945), they describe an exceeding and overwhelming anxiety that challenges the capacity of the mind, and in Men under Stress (1945) they suggest treating patients with sodium amytal, a truth serum that was presumed to retrieve memories. According to Judith Herman, however, they were aware that treatment should aim to integrate (and not only to retrieve) traumatic memories through catharsis.50 Although the confrontation with conditions variously named ‘shell shock’, ‘gross stress reaction’, ‘war and combat neurosis’ and ‘battle and combat fatigue’ had led psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to create new knowledge and new methods of treatment, the public interest in trauma was marginal, apart from the periods during the two World Wars. The lack of a generally accepted terminology did little to legitimise the disabling effects of traumatic neurosis. And, although trauma was now partly presumed to originate from an event, it still missed a visual identity that could facilitate its comprehension.

48 49 50

Kardiner (1941), 88. Young (1995), 4. Cf. Herman (2009), 133.

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2.5

The Unrepresentable in Psychoanalysis

In trauma studies, there are important disagreements regarding the reasons for the reconsideration of traumatic neurosis and the later invention of post-traumatic stress disorder. While many scholars agree that the critical turn first occurred after the anti-war movement in post-Vietnam culture,51 I am inclined to consider an argument by Fassin and Rechtman who suggest that the psychoanalytic reading of psychologically-affected Holocaust prisoners provided the necessary circumstances for generating the crucial transition from patient to the dual role of the victim and the survivor.52 Officially categorised as the ‘survivor syndrome’ in the 1960s, and theoretically supported by previous concentration camp studies conducted by psychologist Bruno Bettleheim,53 the stigmatised image of the neurotic coward or the greedy malingerer was being replaced with the notion of the victim. More importantly, however, the shift in the traumatic paradigm departed from the psychogenic approach to trauma, adding an external ontological cause and origin instead. Survivors were simultaneously witnesses and victims of a shocking experience. Trauma was thus given an explicit source that nevertheless remained obscure and inaccessible to third parties: it was an event that had become defined as unspeakable and incommensurable, while at the same time comprising the knowledge of the ultimate truth. Fassin and Rechtman argue, “Trauma […] became the locus of a particular kind of knowledge that eminently suited, it would seem, the psychoanalytic paradigm: the subject’s own knowledge of himself and his limits, knowledge of others who did not survive the ordeal, and knowledge of man in general. […]”54 The notion of trauma as being unspeakable and of victims as being witnesses to a certain horrible truth – or collective reality that nobody could describe – has since then been one of the central issues of cultural, social, literary, philosophical and psychoanalytical publications on trauma. So how did this come about? Presuming that Fassin’s and Rechtman’s thesis is correct, then the notion of trauma’s

51

52 53

54

Ruth Leys, for example, believes that the ‘survivor syndrome’ had not aroused much public interest in trauma and had not caused its shift; instead, she believes it was formed by social, activist and political efforts post Vietnam War. Cf. Leys (2000), 5. Cf. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 70-76. His essay “Individiual and Mass Behaviour in Extreme Situations” was published in 1943. However, Bettleheim also had an ambiguous approach to the traumatised victim. He believed that the event and the personal motivation to escaping death (whether driven by psychological or moral reasons) were equally responsible for survival. Thus, the survivor was, once again, often suspiciously presumed to be guilty of acting to his or her advantage in order to live. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 72.

A History of Trauma

unrepresentability would have emerged due in lesser part to the direct influence of psychoanalysis, but rather from the use of psychoanalytical theories applied to the incomprehensible horror that the Holocaust produced. The pictorial vocabulary that Freud and specifically his scholar and later colleague Jacques Lacan had created, delivers a theoretical base for this assumption. Before Freud wrote about the difference between the presence of traumatic images in anxiety dreams and the absence of these images in the conscious mind in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he had analysed the anxiety dream during his case study on The Wolfman. Visiting Freud between 1910 and 1914, the patient Sergei Pankejeff received this pseudonym as it described the reoccurring dream he had: Pankejeff dreamed that outside of his bedroom window there was a tree full of white wolves staring at him. Freud assumed the nightmare to have emerged belatedly from a repressed and fearful relationship that Pankejeff had had with his father.55 The key of his theory was the assumption that the experience was repressed and obscured – inaccessible in a sense – as it would be too overwhelming to be processed directly in the conscious mind. The actual traumatic experience had been rendered pictorial and timeless, and replaced by a fictional memory. In his lecture Discourse Analysis and Ego Analysis (1954), Jacques Lacan picked up on Freud’s discourse, which brought him to “[…] the problem of the feeling of reality which I touched on the other day with respect to the genesis of the Wolfman's hallucination. I put forward the quasi-algebraic formula, which has the air of being almost too transparent, too concrete — the real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists symbolisation absolutely. In the end, doesn't the feeling of the real reach its high point in the pressing manifestation of an unreal, hallucinatory reality?”56 In Lacan’s terms, trauma is marked by a withdrawal from symbolisation and representation because it lies beyond the imaginary and the symbolic order. In lectures given after 195357 in particular, Lacan focuses on the importance of the ‘Real’ — the third psychoanalytic order. Trauma, according to him, had to be understood as the missed encounter with the impossible ‘Real’: “the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence”.58 He followed Freud’s trajectory of the unconscious and believed that the only possible encounter with the real could take place either in a hallucination or in a traumatic dream. This is particularly interesting in regard to his imagination of trauma’s (impossible) appearance, as La-

55 56 57 58

Cf. Freud (2010) [1918], 36. Lacan (1988) [1975], 66-67. Cf. Evans (1996), 10. Lacan (1991) [1978], 164.

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can was a strong supporter of the surrealist movement and a dedicated admirer of surrealist paintings, which were famously inspired by their creators’ dreamscape. In his lecture The Nucleus of Repression, held in 1954, Lacan vividly re-phrased Freud’s notion of repression and explained the problematic integration of the trauma and its latent presence: “The trauma, in so far as it is a repressing action, intervenes after the fact nachträglich. At this specific moment, something of the subject becomes detached in the very symbolic world that he is engaged in integrating. From then on, it will no longer be something belonging to the subject. The subject will no longer speak it, will no longer integrate it. Nevertheless, it will remain there, somewhere, spoken, if one can put it this way, by something the subject does not control.”59 Trauma, from Lacan’s point of view, is transfigured into a quasi-mystic entity that resists definition or description and cannot be grasped. His curiosity in this inaccessible category, as well as his complex (and sometimes paradoxical) way of approaching it, are striking: in 1964 he once again returned to Freud’s Wolfman case study and re-investigated the path that Freud had taken through his patient’s repetitive fantasies. A path that, according to him, was primarily motivated by the question of trauma’s origin — the real. In order to elaborate on this origination and its repetitive character, Lacan introduced two terms in his text “Tuché et Automaton”, which he drew from Aristotle. In 1964 he defined the tuché as “the encounter with the real” and the automaton as “the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the signs […]”.60 He further elaborates, “The function of the tuché, of the real as encounter – the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter – first presented itself in the history of psychoanalysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma.”61 He continues by locating the ‘Real’ in an imaginary space between the reality of the trauma and the fantasy that the trauma triggered, “The place of the real, which stretches from the trauma to the fantasy – in so far as the fantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinant in the function of repetition – this is what we must now examine.”62

59 60 61 62

Lacan (1988) [1975], 191. Lacan (1994) [1973], 53. Ibid, 53-54. Ibid, 60.

A History of Trauma

While many previous clinical investigations of trauma had resulted in considering traumatic memories as being elusive and inaccessible, Lacan attributes these characteristics to trauma itself, providing a theory of the traumatic as the unspeakable ‘Real’. As we will see, Lacan’s thesis was less influential within the field of psychology than for cultural studies, particularly at the beginning of the post-modernist thinking and aesthetic theory up until the present day: the possibilities of trauma’s representation were thus limited for any media, any voice, any image that attempted to communicate a trauma. Lacan’s interpretation and extension of Freudian trauma theory had radically manoeuvred trauma towards an incontestable definition of resisting representation on all levels. But his notion of unrepresentability did not necessary stop the inquiry in trauma’s visualisation; in fact, it presumably enhanced interest in challenging this assertion.

2.6

Female Trauma

While the late 1950s and early 1960s advertised a new life-model for women, promising female fulfilment in the role as wife and mother, the beginnings of radical feminism questioned the female repression and demanded gender equality.63 By the end of the 1960s, women began to raise their voices against sexual violence: violence and trauma, they stressed, occurs not only in war zones and instances involving accidents, but – more frequently yet – within the private sphere, in the form of terror and sexual assaults against women and children. Trauma thus seemed to be more common than initially expected. Public and legal lawmakers were forced to address this issue when feminist advocates teamed up with a parallel movement that fought against child abuse; this cumulated in a breakthrough when paediatricians reported wounds, thus affording legal protection for children in light of recognised traces of violence.64 As opposed to those paediatricians acting in acute situations, however, clinicians treating female victims of previously perpetrated sexual violence could not retrospectively find visual proof for what the women claimed had happened. Neither could psychoanalysis, to which the feminist movement had an ambivalent relation. Although psychoanalysis had, by then, discarded Freud’s contested and criticised fantasy theory, which denied the full truth of narrated traumatic events, the

63

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See also: Griselda Pollock’s notion of feminism as a traumatic event in, i.a. “After-effects/After-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum,” Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; and “Is feminism a trauma, a bad memory, or a virtual future?” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 27 (2): 27–61. September 2016. Cf. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 79-84.

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seduction theory, which initially explained the hysteric condition as a belated psychological response to a (sexual or even incestuous) traumatic event, was not fully accepted either. Sexual violence and discrimination first gained more widespread attention after the New York Radical Feminists held their first public speech about rape in 1971. The psychological response to rape was categorised as a complex symptom pattern referred to as ’rape trauma syndrome’ (RTS), which was described in 1974 by the psychiatric nurse Ann Burgess and the sociologist Lynda Holmstrom. Only by the end of the 1970s had all fifty states in North America initiated the rape reform legislation.65 Marital rape was first acknowledged as a crime in England only as recently as 1991, in Germany in 1997 and in Switzerland in 2004. In a few countries, such as Morocco or Syria, rape is still not considered a felony if the rapist decides to marry his victim afterwards. In the 1980s, sociologist Diana Russell conducted the first survey regarding sexual assaults, showing that one woman in four had been raped, and one in three had been abused during childhood.66 These shocking numbers helped raise awareness as well as locate the traumatic source not only in war zones, but also in women’s and men’s domestic lives.

2.7

PTSD

More than ten years before PTSD was coined, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961) was crucial to the subsequent formation of critical theories of trauma,67 without ever literally mentioning trauma, but instead referring to figures of darkness, shadows and nightmares that surround the human being. It took another fifteen years after this precise description of what is known today as a (complex) post-traumatic stress disorder for clinical theory to publish research in psychiatric manuals and journals. By the mid 1970s, after the Vietnam War, military psychiatry still distinguished between civilians suffering from ‘survivor syndrome’ and military casualties (military personnel were said to suffer from war neurosis). Strongly influenced by the feminist movement and their rallying call to speak about trauma out loud, as well as by hundreds of American anti-war veteran ‘rap groups’ for returning soldiers,68 the American Psychiatric Association included a new category under the anxiety disorders of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM) third edition: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Its official legitimisation was introduced and officially defined in 1980 in the DSM-III. 65 66 67 68

Cf. Herman (1992), 29. Ibid., 30. Cf. Stiles (2016), 2. Cf. Leys (2000), 5.

A History of Trauma

The recognition and provision of an official diagnostic label had social, political and clinical implications: the PTSD category was transformed into a political tool, increasing funding for new medicine and establishing clinical research and emergency disaster centres.69 It heavily affected labour laws and social justice. It was the first category to unite all previous syndromes and conditions, including not only violence experienced through war,70 but also individually experienced sexual violence, assault, domestic violence, as well as natural, accidental and deliberately caused disasters. As long as they were “outside the usual range of human experience,”71 they were presumed to be potentially traumatic. Seeing as PTSD offered rational and unified criteria of the symptom complex of trauma, it has since been standardised in clinical psychology and psychiatry. Following its release in 1980, the definition of PTSD was primarily formulated by the DSM and, to a lesser degree, by the International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD). It was then published by the World Health Organization (WHO).72 Both manuals publish periodically, delivering standardising categorisations, statistic classifications of health disorders, symptom criteria and diagnostic codes, and assisting clinicians and researchers in conducting “clinical assessment, case formulation, and treatment planning.”73 Attorneys, universities, health insurances and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the legal system, also rely on the systematic classifications laid out by both publications.74 Today, PTSD provides the framework for understanding psychological trauma and its symptoms. According to the DSM-V – the manual’s latest edition – PTSD has eight major diagnostic criteria, and the course of symptoms, which can begin shortly after or with a delayed temporal distance to the initial traumatic event, is summarised. These criteria, as opposed to previous psychoanalytic descriptions, 69 70

71 72

73 74

Cf. Everly and Lating (1995), xi. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association published a small text on claims of several military leaders, both active and retired. These argued that the term “disorder” would render soldiers experiencing PTSD symptoms reluctant to ask for help. Instead they suggested renaming the disorder posttraumatic stress injury — a term that, according to them, was linked to military vocabulary and could thus help reduce stigmatisation. DSM-III-R (1987), 309.89. While the DSM has been published by the American Psychiatric Association since 1952 and is most commonly used in the US, the ICD is mainly in use in Europe. Following its first edition in 1900, the ICD first included mental disorders in its sixth revision, in 1949. DSM-V (2013), 25. Both the DSM and the ICD are subject to extensive criticism: not only are their reliability and validity questioned, but they also neglect to include variations of PTSD arising from culturally different backgrounds. The major problem, specifically in relation to the DSM, is that of financial interests of pharmaceutical and health care companies. Additionally, DSM and ICD stand in competition to one another and, as is stated in DSM-V, “Even when the intention was to identify identical patient populations, DSM-IV and ICD-10 diagnoses did not always agree.” (DSM-V (2013), 11).

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read as being very rational: the first DSM criteria is (1) the exposure to actual death or its threat, serious injury, or sexual violence, and the ICD describes it as an event with “an exceptionally threatening or catastrophic nature, which is likely to cause pervasive distress in almost anyone.”75 These traumatic events must either be directly experienced or directly witnessed. Witnessing, or the “exposure to aversive details of traumatic events,” – this is an important sub-passage in the DSM – “does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures, unless this exposure is work related.”76 Further criteria suggested with small variations by the DSM77 and the ICD78 include (2) intrusion symptoms (i.e. involuntary and repetitive distressing memories, dreams, flashbacks, fear); (3) avoidance (i.e. of related stimuli or people); (4) negative alterations (i.e. dissociative amnesia, numbness, negative view and emotions, depression, blunting, estrangement) and (5) arousal (aggression, self-destructive behaviour, alertness, insomnia). Other criteria additionally require (6) the minimum duration of the symptoms as being longer than one month, (7) the subject’s functional capacities to be significantly compromised and the assurance that (8) the symptoms were not caused by substances or medical conditions. The ICD summarises the symptoms as follows, “Typical symptoms include episodes of repeated reliving of the trauma in intrusive memories (“flashbacks”) or dreams, occurring against the persisting background of a sense of “numbness” and emotional blunting, detachment from other people, unresponsiveness to surroundings, anhedonia, and avoidance of activities and situations reminiscent of the trauma. Commonly there is fear and avoidance of cues that remind the sufferer of the original trauma. Rarely, there may be dramatic, acute bursts of fear, panic or aggression, triggered by stimuli arousing a sudden recollection and/or re-enactment of the trauma or of the original reaction to it.”79 Given its extraordinariness, it would seem that only few people experience an actual trauma. Studies by Keane, Marshall and Taft show, however, that “most people experience trauma in the course of a lifetime,” but “only 8% of them develop PTSD.”80 According to the DSM, the risk of suffering from PTSD depends on the frequency, the variety and the intensity of the trauma81 – the initial stressing event – since “the 75 76 77 78 79 80

81

ICD-10, F43.1, 120. DSM-V (2013), 309.81 (F43.10), 271. Cf. DSM-V (2013) 309.81 (F43.10). ICD-10, F43.1, 120. Ibid. Keane, Marshall and Taft (2006), 161. These statistics also apply even when an event is as highly traumatic as rape; other studies show relatively low numbers of around 25-30%. Cf. Ressnick et al. (1993). In her book Trauma and Recovery (1992), Judith Herman suggests separating PTSD into two categories, one of which would be called Complex PTSD in order to account for the effects of chronic trauma, specifically experienced during war, repetetive torture or sexual abuse

A History of Trauma

greater the magnitude of trauma, the greater the likelihood of PTSD […].”82 That is to say, trauma, and the way it has been approached throughout the course of history, has split into two parallel existences from the current clinical perspective: the traumatic event on the one hand, and PTSD on the other. While the traumatic event – the external stressor – has since been generally defined as the trauma, PTSD is the condition83 — a psychological dysfunction and disorder. The discovery of trauma as being located outside of the subject led to a separation of origin between cause and symptom. As trauma researchers Goldsmith and Satterlee have outlined, PTSD is “unique as a diagnosis in its recognition of the role of context in psychological dysfunction because it requires an external stressor as a diagnostic criterion.”84 Following the general acceptance of the location of trauma being external, it became possible to differentiate between trauma as a psychological condition and, later, also as a social process, and a trauma, as a potentially traumatic event.85

2.8

Body-Memory: Traces of Trauma

As they are now received as two separate entities, how are trauma, the psychological condition, and a trauma, the event, still connected to one another? According to Allan Young, it is the mechanism provided by memory that links trauma and disorder within the construct of PTSD and holds them together. “PTSD is a disease of time. The disorder’s distinctive pathology is that it permits the past (memory) to relieve itself in the present, in the form of intrusive images and thoughts and in the patient’s compulsion to replay old events.” 86 As Pierre Janet had observed long before, memories have a unique function in the process of trauma, because their content reflects the traumatic event in the form of a manipulated, fragmented version. Traumatic memory is not saved as a

82 83

84 85

86

during childhood. The latest revision of the WHO's ICD 11, which was approved in May 2019 and will come into effect in 2022, incorporates this crucial distinction for the first time. DSM-V (2013), 309.81 (F43.10), 278. As Barad, Kirmayer and Lemelson argue, “PTSD is just one of many clinically recognisable responses to trauma that often co-occur.” According to the aforementioned, the prominence of PTSD is caused by the concept’s proximity to “animal models of fear conditioning that have allowed experimental studies to begin to tease apart underlying biological mechanisms.” (2007),1. Goldsmith and Satterlee (2004), 39. It is trauma researcher Griselda Pollock who suggests this small grammatical differentiation. She refers to the phenomenon as “trauma” while “a historical event of extremity that overwhelms a subject’s capacity to integrate what has happened to him or her in their lives” should be called “a trauma”. Pollock (2009), 44. Young (1995). 7.

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past event, but instead it makes the victim re-live the event as if it were happening in the present moment. It can withdraw content and erase it; change its intensity or its vividness. According to clinicians Iris-Tatjana Kolassa and Thomas Ebert, “[i]t is a common experience in clinical practice that PTSD patients have extreme difficulties verbalizing their traumatic experiences because the quality of emotional memories while re-experiencing is more emotional and sensory in nature.”87 The traumatic memory is a path for exploring the nature of the traumatic process in direct relation to the traumatic event. In the category of PTSD, the process of forgetting and what had been previously coined as elusive traumatic memory is today described as a symptom of dissociation — a word that, as we have previously seen, has been used in medical contexts since the end of the 18th century. Thus, it is important to look at the role of dissociation in the concept of trauma and traumatic memory: aside from the presumed incommensurability of the event, it provides an additional explanation for the returning attribution of trauma as being an inaccessible and unspeakable phenomenon. In the DSM, dissociative symptoms are categorised in subtypes of dissociative amnesia, dissociative identity disorder and other dissociative symptoms such as depersonalisation and derealisation. Dissociative Amnesia is a possible, but not a necessary, symptom of PTSD, classified as an “inability to recall important autobiographical information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature.”88 In less clinical terms, it refers to an involuntary separation between mind and body, reality and fiction, presence and absence. The search for trauma’s visual appearance persisted precisely between these presumed dichotomies of dissociation in the early 1990s: some clinicians, specifically neuroscientists and neurobiologists, explored the visibility of the traces of trauma – the ‘imprint’ and the ‘mark’ that it would leave on victims – embodied in another inaccessible form: the elusive traumatic memory. This notion was based on the contentious idea that trauma would leave a physical ‘body-memory’89 even after recovering from PTSD. Presumed cortical lesions in the brain could supposedly prevent the extinction of fear responses. The making-visible of trauma thus reached a new level when neuroscience began tracing the appearance of trauma in the memory structures of the brain. By investigating possible explanations for trauma’s intense impact, and in an effort to find new methods to cure, this new search also provided – as it had in previous decades – a possible path to delivering proof and legitimisation of the existence of trauma by recording its organic visibility via brain scans (and other clinical imaging techniques). One of the first and most prominent psychiatrists to claim the existence of a visible trace of trauma were Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart. In their

87 88 89

Ebert and Kolassa (2007), 324. DSM-V (2013) 300.12 (F44.0), 298. Cf. van der Kolk (1994).

A History of Trauma

co-authored piece “The intrusive past: The flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma”,90 van der Kolk and van der Hart refer to Pierre Janet’s early differentiation between automatically integrated habit memory (implicit memory), for familiar experiences, and attentively integrated narrative memory (declarative memory), for new experiences. While narrative memories would commonly have a beginning and an end, the authors consider traumatic memories to be non-declarative and timeless.91 According to them, these memories would latently coexist in the victim’s ordinary life, though never fully belonging to either past or present.92 Traumatic experiences, they argue, would instead remain unintegrated and unavailable, leading to episodic memory: “[They] either may be remembered with particular vividness or may totally resist integration […] existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences […]. When that occurs, fragments of these unintegrated experiences may later manifest recollections or behavioural reenactments.”93 Janet’s original theory of dissociation, i.e. regarding the difficulty of fully integrating traumatic memories, is the basis of van der Kolk’s notion of trauma as ‘speechless terror’, which “cannot be organised on a linguistic level.” The notion of an unintegrated traumatic memory that van der Kolk and van der Hart introduce in their study is a commonly accepted theory. However, this theory puts forth the notion that a trauma is never fully remembered and never entirely owned by the person who experienced it. Instead, it is suggested that traumatic experiences are encoded and arranged on a “somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic sensations, behavioural reenactments, nightmares, and flashbacks.”94 Recovery, according to van der Kolk, would only be possible if victims attempt to verbalise their experience. Reminiscent of Kardiner’s earlier observations on the cinematic quality of traumatic dreams back in the 1940s, psychiatrists such as Ellert Nijenhuis, Kathy Steele and, again, Onno van der Hart believe that “episodic memory concerns memories of events that we recall in an almost scenic or cinematic way.”

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92 93 94

Both psychiatrists jointly published several studies and texts. This text has been published in an edited book about the literalness of traumatic memories by literary scholar and trauma researcher Cathy Caruth. Or at least subjectively experienced as timeless, as van der Hart would state a decade later. The withdrawal of the claim that traumatic memories are universally timeless may have come about due to criticism, e.g. trauma researcher Allan Young, who argues that PTSD and traumatic memory are not timeless, but rather historical products, which are nonetheless real. See Young (1995), 5-6 and Nijenhuis, E.R.S.; Van der Hart, O. & Steele, K. (2004). Cf. Van der Kolk and van der Hart (1995), 179. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 172.

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Although they “include reproductive elements, they are not exact replications of overwhelming events” involving “fantasy and misperceptions” while excluding other parts.95 They also argue that the traumatised subject experiences a dissociation of the premorbid personality: referring to the book Shell shock in France 19141918, published in 1940 by psychologist Charles Samuel Myers, the so-called ‘Emotional Personality’ (EP) “is stuck in the traumatic experience that persistently fails to become a narrative memory of the trauma. The ‘Apparently Normal Personality’ (ANP), on the other hand, is associated with avoidance of the traumatic memories, detachment, numbing, and partial or complete amnesia.”96 Only in the last two decades have clinicians put forth the notion that brain structures could change even after childhood, calling this phenomenon neuroplasticity. The term refers to the brain’s ability to reform and choose new paths, patterns of emotions and thinking. French psychologist Alain Brunet used this method to help his patients recode and decrease the intensity of their traumatic memory. Brunet gives the patients propanolol – a medicament against hypertension which he suspects lowers the emotional aspect of the memory – and subsequently asks them to allow the memory related to the event to return and to write it down. The plasticity is increased in the moment of memorising; in the absence of employing the medicament, memorising a trauma usually increases and manifests the traumatic memory even deeper. After writing, patients were asked to read their story out loud. Repeating the reading sessions for five weeks, each patient continued taking the medicaments while reading their traumatic story out loud. After the five week period, three out of four patients did not fit the PTSD criteria any longer, seeing as their neuronal network had changed and built a distance to the feared memories. According to Brunet, patients were thus able to integrate the traumatic memory as if it were a ‘normal’ bad memory. He concludes, “propranolol blocked the reconsolidation of the traumatic memory, which in turn led to symptom reduction.”97 In other studies, the ‘encoding’ of traumatic experiences in the brain is also referred to as a conditioning and subsequent biology of fear, which could trigger reactivations of the trauma, and relapse even long after recovery, potentially turning into a chronic response to the initial trauma.98 As Thomas Elbert and Iris-Tatjana Kolassa have been able to prove, the brain changes when patients suffer from PTSD or when they have been exposed to one or 95 96 97

98

Nijenhuis, E.R.S.; Van der Hart, O. & Steele, K. (2004). Ibid. Brunet et al. (2011), 549. See also: Brunet et al. “Effect of Post-Retrieval Propranolol on Psychophysiologic Responding During Subsequent Script-Driven Traumatic Imagery in PostTraumatic Stress Disorder.” In: J Psychiatr Res vol. 42, no.6 (2008); Birmes P, Brunet A, CoppinCalmes D, et al.. “Symptoms of Peritraumatic and Acute Traumatic Stress Among Victims of an Industrial Disaster.”, in: Psychiatr Serv. vol. 56, no. 1 (2005). Cf. Bouton and Waddell (2007), 54.

A History of Trauma

more traumata (traumatic events). In both instances, the left hippocampal volume shows a smaller volume compared to non-exposed subjects, while PTSD patients also show a smaller volume than those who have solely been exposed to traumata. Elbert and Kolassa found out that PTSD also decreases the left amygdala volume, and discovered a disturbed function of the ACC, causing flashbacks and intrusions in patients.99 Similarly, psychiatrist J. Douglas Bremner has been able to prove that traumatic stress affects and potentially damages the brain. The effects include longterm changes in the brain regions of the amygdala, hippocampus and frontal cortex, which are crucial to memory and learning functions, but also to the individual’s fear and anxiety control.100 Drawing on Babette Rothchild’s report The Body Remembers (2000), philosopher Charles E. Scott describes the traumatic effect on the human as a ‘limbic speechlessness’, pointing out the difference between the memory function of the amygdala, which stores instinctive memory but cannot save information about place or time, and hippocampal function, which provides this very context: “As long as there is a cooperation between these two functions, a person experiences a traumatic event as past and can remember its emotions in a spatial context as well. […] But if there is only amygdalic impression without hippocampal qualification, the instinctual memory in that dissociation will lack context and the traumatic stress could come to presence at any time or place. The situation will be as though the traumatic event were not past whenever something triggers this timeless, placeless memory.”101 While several clinicians have recognised that trauma may leave such traces on the brain or memory structure, recent in-depth studies show that traumatic events could have a potentially molecularly toxic effect, damaging the DNA as the cells register and save the individual’s environment. While it has been recognised that there is a possibility for the pathological transmission of fear and emotional trauma from mother to infant,102 a new study by Rachel Yehuda et al. from 2015 was the first to prove that psychological trauma can have epigenetic intergenerational effects. Their study with Holocaust survivors and their children demonstrates the transmission and the epigenetic changes of parental trauma to their offspring, that is, the epigenetic heritage of trauma.103

99 CF. Ebert and Kolassa (2007), 323. 100 Cf. Bremner (2005). See also: Paula P. Schnurr and Bonnie L. Green “Trauma and health: physical health consequences of exposure to extreme stress”, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004. 101 Scott (2009), 118. 102 Cf. Debieca and Sullivana (2014). 103 Cf. Yehuda, et. al (2015).

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Another study focused on testing the epigenetic effects of trauma on mice, based at the ETH in Zurich and led by Isabelle Mansuy, shows that trauma is inheritable throughout four generations. She suspects a biological transmission though RNA (ribonucleic acid), which appears in both egg cells and sperm cells: “With the imbalance in microRNAs in sperm, we have discovered a key factor through which trauma can be passed on,”104 Mansuy explains. Psychological trauma, it seems, has become not only detectable, visualiseable and potentially curable, it is now also considered as being a defining element of one or many persons’ identities.

2.9

Collective Trauma and Terror

By the end of the 20th century, and specifically post-9/11, the study of trauma separated into two parallel directions that soon would only share a common history and a basic framework. Increasingly known under the term psychotraumatology, individual, personal or psychological trauma would continue to exist within clinical and medical terms on the one hand, while the notion of so-called collective, historical or cultural trauma105 emerged in the 1990s, and began to generate a much larger community of experts and related disciplines. Particularly the declared ‘war against terror’ underlined how unspecific categories such as collective traumata caused by acts of terror had become. The effects caused by singular and mass events causing traumata began to blur, particularly in political rhetoric; as Jacques Rancière underpins: “Terror is precisely the name that trauma takes in political matters and is one of the catchwords of our time. […] To talk of a war against terror is to connect the form of these attacks to the intimate angst that can inhabit each one of us in the same chain.”106 The agency of employing trauma as a part of this rhetoric, as Rancière argues, lies in turning the war against terror into an indisputable, “absolute right […] identified with the direct demand to protect the security of a factual community. This enabled humanitarian war to be turned into an endless war on terror: a war that is not a war but instead a mechanism of infinite protection, a way of dealing with a trauma elevated to the status of a civilizational phenomenon.”107 Caused by this development, the semantic borders of trauma expanded swiftly and vastly, as did the literature on trauma: it had been freed from its exclusive clinical existence and successively employed in cultural and social concepts. These two 104 Mansuy, et. al (2014). 105 See e.g. “Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity” by Ron Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, Piotr Sztompka, Berkley: University of California Press, 2004. 106 Rancière (2009) [2004], 114. 107 Ibid.,117.

A History of Trauma

kinds of traumata do not, however, exclude each other, but coexist and often merge. One of the earliest attempts to formulate a separation of the two kinds of traumata was published in 1976 by sociologist Kai Erikson. He researched the effects of a flooding catastrophe on an Appalachian community and distinguished between an ‘individual trauma’, which would be “a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defences” and a ‘collective trauma’ which would be “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.”108 Although there is no general definition, collective trauma has been established as a massive umbrella term to embrace the idea of collective memory (or knowledge), particularly resulting from a traumatising event or traumatising period of time, which has been experienced by a community – be it the inhabitants of a city, a generation, members of a religion, a class, or a minority group – and continues to affect them.109 The contextualisation of ‘collective memory’, a term that has been discussed primarily in memory studies, is no less complex: it has come up against much criticism for its generalisation of an individual’s neurological functions, for example by Susan Sontag who suggests renaming it as ‘collective instruction’,110 after Foucault’s ideas on power, authorities and instructions. For Aleida Assman, on the other hand, who has done considerable research on collective memory, there are many different categories of the social manifestation of memory and its construction through institutions, entailing “symbols, texts, images, rites, ceremonies, places and monuments”.111 “Collective memory,” as Silke Arnold-de Simine believes, “has become inseparable from social consciousness.”112 It could thus be presumed that several reasons initially evoked the splitting between individual and collective trauma. One of them, as Irene Visser argues, is the gradual expansion of PTSD from the direct victim to witnesses and testimonies, to the relatives, listeners and friends.113 While Visser evaluates this development as negative, referring to a possible trivialisation of trauma, we may also consider it as an extension, since psychological trauma (PTSD) could not be attributed to everyone who has been affected by or has been exposed to a traumatic event. For this reason, Anne Kaplan, author of the book Trauma Culture (2005), distinguishes between several different positions and types of trauma-encounters: the direct trauma, the bystander, the relative, the worker, the clinician and the mediatised trauma, for example via television or newspapers. Kaplan discusses the term ‘vicarious trauma’ based on the question of how trauma 108 Erikson (1976), 153. 109 The DSM and the ICD have not yet agreed on how to treat collective trauma from a psychological perspective. 110 Sontag (2003), 76. 111 Assmann (2004), 26. 112 Arnold-de Simine (2013), 11. 113 Cf. Visser (2011), 272.

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can be passed on to secondary witnesses. Her intention is to bridge the different positions, legitimising each as relevant and interdependent: “One finds the complex interconnections between individual and cultural trauma – such that, indeed, where the ‘self’ begins and cultural reactions end may seem impossible to determine.”114 Fassin and Rechtman have formulated another reason for the separation between individual and collective trauma. They hold the argument that the early feminist movement’s criticism of the Freudian fantasy theory caused a disconnection between the language of psychoanalytic conceptions of collective trauma, connecting the traumatic event with the collective memory, and the clinical practice that relocates the event in the individual’s history. Freeing trauma from clinical practice and extending its theory into the collective and the cultural, they believe, testifies to the aim of instrumentalising trauma as a political tool.115 Moreover, the retrospective categorisation of survivor syndromes among a number of victims who survived genocides, wars, or catastrophes enforced the separation between trauma as an individual and as a collective experience, while simultaneously loosening the category of trauma from its strict classification parameters. This, however, provoked one of the central issues regarding cultural or collective trauma: the act of psychologising the behaviour of a community, a race or a gender in consequence of having experienced a specific event, in structural analogy to an individual trauma. The transfer of concepts commonly appointed to the individual psyche to an entire culture must be, as Fassin and Rechtman highlight, considered fundamental to the contemporary politics of trauma. They emphasise this analogy by using the example of the Holocaust: “The memory of the holocaust is, then, a paradigm for trauma […] it developed after a period of silence […]. It is because of that delay between the event and its painful exposure to the public gaze that the process can be qualified as trauma.”116 Attributing the basic mechanisms of individual trauma to cultural trauma is an act that significantly shaped our common understanding of what cultural trauma is and, moreover, what (the construct of) trauma implies today. It refers to a pattern of symptoms and processes that is borrowed from both psychology and psychoanalysis. The characteristic dichotomies of psychological trauma, such as its belated nature, its unrepresentability and its unspeakability – its inherent dialectic, which I referred to at the beginning of this chapter – thus apply to the present day common understanding of cultural trauma in a similar, if not an equal way. For this reason, the issue of psychological trauma’s non-representability has often been transferred to cultural trauma, creating an analogy between the two that has been

114 115 116

Kaplan (2005), 2. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 84. Ibid., 18.

A History of Trauma

widely accepted. Given that clinicians had only slowly begun to diagnose PTSD in the 1990s – about a decade after its first legitimisation – psychological trauma had little time to recover from the scepticism it had previously been exposed to, when its concept was already beginning to be blurred, overused, even trivialised, by science, by media, by the public and by visual cultures. Embedded in its terminology, cultural trauma was constructed by culture. As opposed to Kaplan, who is in favour of a theory of cultural trauma, the historian Wulf Kansteiner criticises the concept of cultural trauma for having been turned into “a widely employed conceptual tool”117 and he furthermore considers it as a ‘category mistake’, because it combines both philosophical and psychological sources and research methods: “But the attempts to integrate these very different research traditions and concepts of trauma have ultimately not been successful. The writings on cultural trauma display a disconcerting lack of historical and moral precision, which aestheticizes violence and conflates the experiences of victims, perpetrators and spectators of traumatic events.”118 Kansteiner suspects the main cause for this problem to be the previously mentioned equivalency “between the allegedly traumatic component of all human communication and the concrete suffering of victims of physical and mental trauma.”119 Kansteiner and his colleague Harald Weilnböck, a scholar of German studies and psychoanalysis, jointly elaborated five major problems of the concept of cultural trauma. First, its vague and morally problematic metaphorical characteristics; second, its lack of curiosity regarding trauma research conducted in other disciplines such as psychology and, third, media studies; fourth, its concept as being non-narrative and fifth, its anti-empirical asethetisation of trauma.120 While I agree with this take on the insufficient precision of cultural trauma and its lack of curiosity for other disciplines as true accounts, it is my belief that both authors fail to acknowledge the interdisciplinary development of a new body of theory that attempts to explore the subject of trauma in and through the aesthetic realm. While Kansteiner states that the term ‘cultural trauma’ is misleading as a metaphor of ‘entertainment’ and should thus be replaced, I believe that cultural trauma inevitably evolved from interdisciplinary interpretations — something that Barad, Kirmayer and Lemelson call “Trauma and the Vicissitudes of Interdisciplinary Integration” in their multidisciplinary edited volume on trauma in neurology, psychiatry and culture. They argue,

117 118 119 120

Kansteiner (2004), 194. Ibid., 193. Ibid, 194. Kansteiner and Weilnböck (2008).

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“Although diagnostic categories have utility for treatment providers working within biomedical health care systems, they may not fit the popular cultural models by which people make sense of historical events and subsequent suffering. […] Stories of trauma can be constructed for different purposes: to guide scientific research; to assign causality, identify responsibility, and apportion blame; to allow individuals to make sense of and get over their fears and suffering; to enable people to live together despite the injuries of the past; or to write a history that informs their identity and warrants the social and moral order. The story that works for one of these purposes may not have the same efficacy for the others.”121 Cultural trauma has indeed become a conceptual tool — but it is one that hasn’t been explored to the extent of settling on a legitimate and acknowledged definition, both in psychology and in the humanities. While it is impossible to think of cultural trauma as entirely detached from psychological trauma, the implications of cultural trauma allow for a different, wider and non-psychological investigation of a current phenomenon in present-day societies. Cultural trauma can be regarded as a symptom of victim culture, but it would be wrong to narrow it down to only this. Instead, cultural trauma can be considered an extended and helpful approach to trauma, a construction that enables researchers from all fields, even cultural producers, to investigate trauma, its causes and symptoms as a social condition.

2.10

Cultural Trauma as a Social Construct

Often considered as being the greatest difference between psychological and cultural traumata, cultural trauma does not necessarily imply the reality of a psychological dysfunction, seeing as it is a culturally constructed concept. That is why cultural and psychological trauma could be considered two ontologically different entities.122 Ron Eyerman’s publication Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004) was partly responsible for coining and establishing the term ‘cultural trauma’. Most of its authors explore the differences between cultural and psychological trauma,

121 122

Barad, Kirmayer and Lemelson (2007) 463, 472. As opposed to the common assumption that psychological trauma existed as a shattering mechanism, sociologist Jeffrey Alexanders holds the contestable argument that there is no such thing as an inherently traumatic event, and that psychological and cultural trauma both require the knowledge of their own formalisation. “For trauma is not something naturally existing; it is something constructed by society […] Trauma is a socially mediated attribution. […]” In regard to infantile trauma, complex trauma, or repeatedly various traumata it has, however, been reconsidered as possibly existing. (See e.g. Elbert and Kolassa (2007), 321.)

A History of Trauma

adding a strictly constructivist perspective to the discourse. Neil Smelser, for example, argues that psychological trauma “gives insights about cultural traumas” and that “cultural trauma refers to an invasive and overwhelming event that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several essential ingredients of a culture or the culture as a whole”. He considers trauma to be a process of negotiation and “not a thing in itself but […] a thing by virtue of the context in which it is implanted.”123 Ron Eyerman believes that cultural traumata, such as slavery, colonialism or natural disasters, imply a shattering effect on the identity and on meaning for the community that has been affected. Unlike psychological wounds caused by an individual trauma, Eyerman argues that not every (or any) member of a community or group needs to directly experience or sense cultural traumata in order for it to become real for them.124 Although Eyerman intends to separate psychological and cultural trauma, his text provides yet another analogy between the two: where individual trauma requires a psychological mechanism – a response to a potentially traumatic event – to set in, Eyerman opines that cultural trauma requires a social mechanism; something he calls ‘trauma drama’ — a social response, evoked by mediation and representation: “While it may be necessary to establish some event or occurrence as the significant ‘cause’, its traumatic meaning must be established and accepted, a process which requires time, as well as mediation and representation. A cultural trauma must be understood, explained and made coherent through public reflection and discourse. […] mass-mediated representations play a decisive role. […] we sometimes call it [this process] a ‘trauma drama’, when, with the help of mass mediation, collective representation, the collective experience of massive disruption and social crisis becomes a crisis of meaning and identity.”125 Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander narrows this argument down to the following: “For traumas to emerge at the level of the collectivity, social crises must become cultural crises.”126 Both authors thus imply that cultural trauma develops through communication and representation, trying to make sense of social crises, rendering it recognisable and passing it on to the next generation. In this sense, cultural trauma is suggested as being born out of societies and cultural languages. Based on the idea of cultural trauma’s and collective memories’ existence through a transmissibility within generations and communities, trauma researcher and literature scholar Marianne Hirsch elaborated a theory of trauma’s transmission, which is in a sense similar to Eyerman’s notion of a ‘trauma drama’.

123 124 125 126

Smelser (2004), 38, 34. Cf. Eyerman (2004), 160. Eyerman (2004), 160. Alexander (2004), 2, 8, 10.

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In her research of memory and trauma in the second and third generation of Holocaust survivors, she argues that cultural trauma can be transmitted or passed on as a second-hand memory that relies on narrations, imagination and construction. She coined the term ‘Postmemory’ for her theory in 1997, which “characterises the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by the traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated.”127 According to Hirsch, ‘postmemory’ has a direct approach to the past traumatic event, because it “is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.”128 Here, as in Eyerman’s theory, the construction of cultural trauma is often related to aspects that oppose the incommensurable truth of trauma: its fiction, imagination and fantasy. Alexander formulates this notion even more drastically by considering an affected collective as ‘actors’ or ‘agents’, staging and dramatising their experience as ‘carriers’. He believes that “[c]ollective actors ‘decide’ to represent social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are”129 and thus imputes an intention to a plural of victims, who express and thus represent the trauma they have experienced as a collective wound. Although I disagree with his argument regarding purposeful intentions, I find the performative approach he drafts around the representation of trauma worth noting, for it is not representation in the term’s traditional sense that he refers to: from his point of view, the representation of trauma resembles a speech act, such as it was coined by John Langshaw Austin in 1962.130 Like a speech act, he argues, the representation of trauma shares the elements of a speaker, an audience and a situation, through which a new narrative of 127 128 129 130

Hirsch (1997), 22. Ibid. Alexander (2004), 10. First coined by John L. Austin in his lecture series “How to Do Things with Words” on language philosophy in 1955 at Harvard University, Austin deducted ‘performativity’ from the verb ‘to perform’, so as to claim that not only constative but also performative sentences exist. A performative utterance, according to Austin, cannot only describe something; it can also act and constitute a new reality. Performative expressions are thus qualified in “doing something […] rather than reporting something.” Another influential theorist for the comprehension of performativity is philosopher Judith Butler. Her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988) forms an argument based on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, who think of the body as an active process of embodiment of particular cultural and historical options, that is, a process of adaption. From her perspective, gender identities are constructed in repeated, everyday performative acts, in which both the public audience and the ‘actors’ perform while believing in these modes. Both of these theories form the dom-

A History of Trauma

trauma and of suffering would be created. To him, trauma is a fictional construction, the performative constitution of a traumatic truth, which is nurtured with new material.

2.11

Truth and Trauma

As I hope to have shown in this chapter, the concepts of truth and trauma have approximated each other since the first psychologisation of trauma, and have since been connected by the search for a visual proof of their existence. From Freud’s notion of the unconscious (das Unbewusste), Janet’s subconscious (le subconscient) or Lacan’s definition of the Real, the frequent search for trauma’s visual form and its graspable nature carves a path through its complex social and medical history. Trauma has been defined as an internal organic lesion in the brain or the spinal cord, a personal weakness, an acoustic shock, an external event or trigger and, eventually, a category co-existing between a psychological disorder and a social construction. While Charcot attempted to represent his notion of trauma in staged photographs of hysteric stages in patients, neuroscientists now try to prove trauma’s traces in the RNA, by means of brain scans, or in the encoding of memories. I have briefly introduced the phenomenon of cultural trauma, which has developed its own genealogy coexisting alongside PTSD since the end of the 20th century. It has expanded the current notion of trauma considerably. This also helped unfold the paradox of an analogy between psychological trauma and cultural trauma, automatically transferring the clinical condition’s symptoms, such as its unspeakability or its belatedness, from one category to the other, thus stylising, even romanticising and mystifying, the category of trauma in society as such, and constructing it. The chapter has hopefully clarified that the direct application of psychoanalytical theory to current cultural trauma theory is not only based on frequently outdated as well as politically or morally burdened study results, but that it also tends to situate an unspeakable trauma in a cloud of obscurity. A sense of mystery has been connected to trauma and its presumed impossibility of being communicated, but a large part of this notion relies on early theories of dissociative symptoms formulated by psychoanalysis. Seeing as I consider the psychoanalytical approach as being a contestable path that leads to the misconception of the current trauma term, I will make use of the next chapter to challenge the notion of trauma as being the unrepresentable. inant part of performativity’s current reception and informed most of the deductions that took place in various cultural disciplines.

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The modern day genesis of trauma theory1 can be traced back to the initial explorations of the limits of the Holocaust’s representation; today, it often serves as a framework for analysing cultural practices addressing trauma and traumatic narratives.2 Rooted in North American humanities, with many crossovers to postcolonial studies, it is the continuation of the search for trauma’s representational possibilities and its limitations. Informed by a post-modernist discourse, in particular by the theories of the sublime and the unrepresentable by Theodor Adorno and Jean-Francois Lyotard, and influenced by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, trauma theory opens up the discussion about the role of trauma in the genres of literature, theatre, film and visual art. Post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima and post-Vietnam, during the second wave of feminism, and in the middle of the AIDS crisis, trauma theory in the early 1990s identified the difficulty of making visible traumatic realities, thus kicking off a crucial exploration of the question of how to deal with psychological and historical traumata. The research conducted during this period has provided an essential foundation for our current understanding of the cultural reflections of trauma. Research intentions were often ethically or morally driven: an urge to increase awareness of trauma through cultural channels in order to sustainably prevent its manifestation and repercussions in future generations, by sensitising readers, listeners or spectators. In some instances comparable to a traditional model of Aristotelian catharsis, these theories would often build on a hypothetical spectatorship’s or readership’s emotional response, favouring empathic perception or compassion in order to formulate a system for an ethically ‘correct’ or ‘adequate’ reaction towards the traumatic event, its victims and their testimony. 1

2

See also, e.g.: Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony (1992); Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) and Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001); Geoffrey Hartman, On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies (1995); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (1996); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (2000); Trauma: Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster. Elizabeth Bronfen, Birgit Erdle, and Sigrid Weigel, eds. (1999). Cf. Visser (2011), 270.

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The formation of trauma studies was, and still is, a relevant academic effort to developing strategies and theories that work against a sense of general indifference towards historical events. It poses questions on how we might relate to those memories in the future, and how cultural practices enable us to be critical and aware. Working with the research output of trauma studies nonetheless also requires a critical perspective on this field of study. Purposefully written in a subjective tone, many texts lack necessary pragmatism — a key factor required for the debate regarding the ethically complex handling of traumatic imagery and traumatic heritage. There is an important difference between individual and cultural trauma — a fact that has not been emphasised clearly enough in most of trauma theory. There are exceptions, of course: Dominick LaCapra introduced several trauma categories, such as structural, transhistorical and foundational trauma, which have contributed to solving the problem of how to define which trauma is being referred to. Likewise, Griselda Pollock differentiates between structural and historical trauma: “Structural trauma refers to what is theorized by psychoanalytical tradition as inevitable events in the formation of subjectivity, which are subjected to primal repression, Urverdrängung. Trauma as event concerns the series of losses, which mark and by which subjectivity is formed: birth, loss of the breast, castration and loss of the loved object as well as the primal scene, and/or seduction. Historical trauma refers to overwhelming events or experiences by which we, having become subjects whether children or adults, may be afflicted in the course of our lives: abuse, death of loved ones, exile, torture, accidents, political terror and so forth.”3 Aside from the missing differentiation that would help more clearly distinguish and define individual and cultural traumata, another issue inherent to trauma studies is what Stef Craps describes as a ‘monocultural bias’ — the ignorance of geographical and cultural nuances between different traumata and those who suffer from PTSD. Craps considers trauma theory and its founding texts to be ‘in crisis’, as difficulties have resulted from false ethical promises in the humanities: “Trauma theory […] emerged in the mid-1990s as a product of the ‘ethical turn’ affecting the humanities, promising to infuse the study of literary and cultural artefacts with new relevance. Amid persistent accusations that literary scholarship, particularly in its deconstructive, post-structuralist, or textualist guise, had become indifferent or oblivious to ‘what goes on in the real world’, trauma theory confidently announced itself as an essential apparatus for understanding ‘the real world’ and even as a potential means for changing it for the better. […] It is

3

Pollock (2009), 43.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

something of a surprise, therefore, to note that the founding texts of the field […] largely fail to live up to this promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.”4 Despite its potential to help guide current discussions on the intersections of trauma and culture, the field of trauma theory (and particularly its founding texts), as Craps subsumes, is slow to gain relevance in the discourse of cultural reflections on trauma. For these reasons, I will be introducing the academic field, while using these sources critically.

3.1

The Testimony: Transmitting Trauma, Performing Trauma

Most texts that have been published in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s are driven by a central question: how can trauma be represented? The authors rarely provide a straightforward answer, seeing as the majority consider trauma (and especially the trauma of the Holocaust) to be defined by its resistance to representation. The central question is thus turned into a central dilemma. And this dilemma, in turn, becomes a tautological problem: Can trauma be represented? No, because it is defined as unrepresentable. Although this ‘rule’ as a given prescription has been widely accepted, much effort in trauma studies has been invested into researching the why and the how for the presumed impossible representation of trauma. One example would be by applying rhetoric alternatives, i.e. different terminologies that circumvent the traditionally contentious act of ‘representation’. In some publications,5 trauma was thus being ‘spoken’, ‘translated’, ‘performed’, ‘produced’, ‘repeated’, ‘mediated’, ‘transmitted’, ‘acted out’ or ‘penetrated’, in order to develop a theory that would legitimise the appearance of traumatic content in cultural forms of expression. Despite it having been proclaimed as being ‘unspeakable’, the favoured genre for conveying the supposedly incommensurable notion(s) of trauma into a commensurable form has been, amongst most trauma researchers, the testimony. Although the testimony inherently is an already altered version of reality, its dimension of subjectivity creates so-called ‘counter-stories’ that allow for the diversification of mainstream knowledge of traumatic events as suggested by historical master narratives.6 As the supposedly least manipulated form of narration, the testimony has thus often been considered as being truest to the events. Trauma scholar Ernst van Alphen makes a distinction between two conceptions of the testimony. One looks at the referential capacities of language and thus the “testimony 4 5 6

Craps (2010), 52, 53. See for example: Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004. Cf. Hoeven (2016).

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as a source of historical information,” while the other looks at constitutive capacities through a subjective access and thus the “testimony’s performative quality as a humanizing transactive process.”7 With a critical perspective on the exclusivity of testimony-based transmissions of trauma in Holocaust studies, Van Alphen emphasises in an earlier publication that “documentary realism and testimony have become the favoured genres because they are associated not with subjective interpretation, but with objective, distant presentation.”8 Van Alphen thus is aware of and criticises the exclusivity of positions favouring the testimony as a method for transmitting trauma, such as it is advocated most prominently by Cathy Caruth, writer of the most influential but also the most arguable theory around the concept of trauma. In her edited volume Trauma – Explorations in Memory (1995) and her monograph Unclaimed Experience (1995), the literary scholar takes a polemical position: she claims that “[t]rauma […] does not simply serve as a record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned.”9 From her perspective, trauma is considered as not belonging to anyone, a memory detached from both the event and the subject, as it would otherwise destroy the victim’s basic memory mechanisms. However, she attributes a non-symbolic ‘literality’, that is, a quality of truth to the traumatic flashback or dream, which repetitively conveys and “constitutes trauma and points to its enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming occurrence that then remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event.”10 According to Caruth, the impossibility of speaking this event becomes the truth of its incomprehensible nature. Her solution to the unspeakability of trauma lies in the production of written language – the testimony – that would performatively11 constitute trauma’s literality. Her analysis of trauma is based on a performative theory of language in reference to Paul de Man, arguing that traumatised victims perform their trauma, rather than representing it — thus enabling an affective transmission of the trauma to the reader, listener or viewer. A secondary witness, so to speak. Next to Caruth, another well-known trauma researcher and supporter of a performative trauma theory is the historian and literary scholar Dominick LaCapra.

7 8 9 10 11

Van Alphen (2006), 227. Van Alphen (1997), 24. Caruth (1995), 151. Ibid., 9. Like Jeffrey Alexander in the previous chapter, Cathy Caruth employs the theory of performativity to explain the transmission of trauma. However, there is a significant difference between their arguments: While Alexander’s theory addresses the construction of cultural trauma through performative processes in society, Caruth’s theory addresses the literal and true transmission of psychological trauma from the victims’ written testimony onto the thirdparty (secondary) witness.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

In his book Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) on literary reflections of the Holocaust, he claims that “[w]riting trauma is often seen in terms of enacting it, which may at times be equated with acting (or playing) it out in performative discourse or artistic practice.” He adds that, since ‘writing trauma’ would not be actually possible, it should be read as “a metaphor in that writing indicates some distance from trauma.”12 For LaCapra, the impossibility and the unrepresentable nature of trauma is ‘sacrilegious’13 (we will re-encounter this religious terminology in the analysis of trauma studies). Although LaCapra’s and Caruth’s theses lay the groundwork for expressing trauma through literary practices in various ways, the major problem – with Caruth’s argument in particular – is that she does not explicitly distinguish between the actual victim and the reader, that is: between the witness of the traumatic event and the witness of its performative narration. Criticising Caruth’s notion of traumatic performativity as a risk of trivialising psychic trauma, literary scholar Ruth Leys dedicated an entire chapter of her book Trauma: A Genealogy (2000) to counter Caruth’s argument of the inaccessible traumatic memory and of the performative transmission of traumatic content. She believes that the boundaries of trauma require strict separation: “The transmission of the unrepresentable – a transmission imagined by Caruth simultaneously as an ineluctable process of infection and as involving an ethical obligation on the part of the listener – therefore implicates those of us who were not there by making us, as Dori Laub has put it, participants and co-owners of the traumatic event.” 14 Leys also criticises Caruth’s interpretation of the traumatic and amnesiac flashback as ‘literal’: while Caruth argues “The flashback or traumatic re-enactment conveys, that is, both the truth of an event, and the truth of its incomprehensibility,”15 Leys does not agree with her “empirical claim, according to which traumatic symptoms, such as traumatic dreams and flashbacks, are veridical memories or representations of the traumatic event” and her “epistemological-ontological claim, according to which those same symptoms are literal replicas or repetitions of the trauma and as such they stand outside representation.”16 Leys is sceptical of the merging of imagination and truth, and thus points to the possible endangering of the presumed reality of trauma through fictive performances suggested in Caruth’s text. The discourse around Caruth’s notion of trauma, too, started a more general discussion of how the concept of performativity (essentially the fictive production of trauma through performative acts) can be employed to understand the reality of 12 13 14 15 16

LaCapra (2001), 186, 187. LaCapra (2003), Lecture. Leys (2000), 269. Caruth (1995), 153. Leys (2000), 229.

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the phenomenon of trauma itself. Her notion can thus be productive for a discussion of trauma in the cultural sphere, but it seems unproductive in the context of psychological and collective trauma.

3.2

Secondary Traumatisation

Trauma scholar Geoffrey Hartman coined the idea of a possible co-ownership of trauma through the act of its performative constitution or representation in a fictional or documentary realm as a ‘secondary traumatisation’. He voices his concern regarding ‘psychic numbing’ through trauma and the growing ‘fascination’ caused by the overly present media and cultural coverage of traumatic events, stating that it “would be ironic and sad if all that education could achieve were to transmit a trauma to later generations in a secondary form.”17 A possible ‘secondary traumatisation’ has also been a key focal point in the research of literary scholar Shoshana Felman. Referring to Elias Canetti’s experience of reading Kafka’s correspondences, amongst many other examples, Felman outlines a relation between the practice of writing, reading and going through trauma: “How is the act of writing tied up with the act of bearing witness […] Is the act of reading literary texts itself inherently related to the act of facing horror?”18 In her book Testimony (1992) co-written with psychoanalyst Dori Laub, the two authors develop a theory of traumatic transmissibility based on listening to the testimony of survivors, but also to literary, fictional or documentary perspectives on the Holocaust, imagining trauma to have a contagious impact. Their thesis puts forward the notion of a radical crisis of witnessing and truth. “The testimony,” Laub argues, “is inherently a process of facing loss […] which entails yet another repetition of the experience of separation and loss.”19 For Felman and Laub, the testimony becomes a relevant step in the real witnessing and knowing of trauma, and therefore the role of the listener or hearer gains relevance, as he or she “comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma in himself.”20 While Felman’s and Laub’s theories work to increase the significance of the testimony and thus the value of the narrative in regard to the conveyance of traumatic experiences, their claim of a transmission of trauma onto the reader or listener remains highly ambivalent. Another influential study regarding the notion of secondary traumatisation is Anne E. Kaplan’s theory that suggests trauma as being able to bridge differences 17 18 19 20

Hartman (1994), 8. Felman (1995), 14. Laub (1992), 91. Ibid., 57.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

between individual and collective experiences. She argues that the media is in fact capable of traumatising spectators, and that cultural productions thus carry the responsibility of fostering empathy without resorting to the media’s sensationalistic devices. She writes, “[m]ost of us generally encounter trauma vicariously through the media rather than directly. Since such exposure may result in symptoms of secondary trauma, we need to know as much as possible about the process.”21 Although Kaplan differentiates between first and second-hand trauma, she believes that viewers of a film or other form of media presenting traumatic content would “not feel the protagonist’s trauma. They feel the pain evoked by empathy – arousing mechanisms interacting with their own traumatic experiences.” In this light, Kaplan coins the idea of a “vicarious trauma” induced by image, media or film, which “is but one of several kind of responses to media dealing with catastrophe.”22 The notions of the ‘vicarious trauma’ and of a ‘secondary witnessing’ have been central to the discussion of 9/11 and its widespread media coverage. With its repetitive live-broadcast taken in by viewers all over the globe, this event was, in Jacques Derrida’s words, “ineffable, […] out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about.”23 Regarding the representation of the attacks in broadcasts, Isabelle Wallace comments in her essay “Trauma as Representation” that “here it must be said that the events of September 11, 2001, made painfully obvious the inadequacy of a discourse that continues to speak of trauma and representation. After all, isn’t it by now clear that certain representations are, in and of themselves, traumatic events?”24 While this argument seems intelligible, and while several trauma scholars deliberately speak of psychological mechanisms such as ‘secondary traumatisation’, ‘vicarious trauma’ and the ‘co-ownership of trauma’, there is to this date no official agreement in international psychological studies on whether narrations, media or images can in fact trigger a secondary psychological trauma (as suggested by Kaplan, Caruth or LaCapra), or whether they cannot (as suggested by Bennett, Fassin and Rechtman, Leys and Sielke). Relevant and evaluated material regarding the impact of traumatic media on spectators can be found in the two psychological manuals DSM and ICD: the psychological research from the DSM shows that “exposure to aversive details of traumatic events […] does not apply to exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures.”25 The DSM thus states that an individual cannot suffer from PTSD symptoms through witnessing trauma 21 22 23 24 25

Kaplan (2005), 87. Ibid., 90. Derrida (2013), 81. Wallace (2006), 4. DSM-V (2013), 309.81 (F43.10), 271.

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in media, images or art “unless this exposure is work related.” The ICD-11, on the other hand, does not mention this specific trauma criterion at all. Andreas Maercker, head of the psychological institute at the University of Zurich (UZH) and head of the working group ‘Stress-related disorders’ of the ICD-11-revisions of the World Health Organisations, states that media as a trauma criterion will not be explicitly mentioned in the newest edition of the ICD, but will instead remain implicit. He argues, “basically, the focus will be shifted from the trauma criterion to the symptomatic, that is, if all symptoms are present, then it is part of the criteria.”26 Leaving the category implicit, the ICD-11 will thus acknowledge a potential secondary traumatisation through media. Several media studies moreover show that it is not inevitable that adults will develop PTSD by witnessing trauma in media and images but rather only unlikely, while young children can potentially be traumatised, because they cannot differentiate between fiction and reality.27 The discussion about the possibility of creating secondary witnesses through the narration and representation of trauma shows how blurry the category of trauma is perceived and applied. There are many reasons to believe that since PTSD was first recognised as a condition and labelled as such, its symptoms were identified ubiquitously. The effects of trauma on the body and mind can pass through generations, while PTSD on the other hand is unique in its diagnostic approach, seeing as it is a disorder that is always triggered by an external event and could thus be explained by that event, rather than through the behaviour of the person. Questions are also asked in the field of psychology in regard to the terminology of trauma, asking, for example: “How broadly or narrowly should trauma be defined? Can trauma be measured reliably and validly? What is the relationship between trauma and PTSD?”28 These questions are also crucial to a cultural discourse — how broadly or narrowly can cultural trauma actually be defined? In light of the constant risk of trivialising trauma in our society, Irene Visser rightly identifies “a need for a more precise as well as a more comprehensive understanding of trauma. […], which would differentiate between directly vs. indirectly incurred traumatic experiences.” Where Visser suspects a dangerous trivialisation of trauma by concepts such as ‘secondary witnessing’ and Bennett argues it would be “urgent to counter the notion that trauma can be transmitted or shared through 26

27

28

Andreas Maercker, email conversation 12/10/2015. My translation. Original: “Im Grunde genommen wird der Schwerpunkt vom Traumakriterium hin auf die Symptomatik verlegt, d.h. wenn alle Symptome vorhanden sind, dann fällt es auch unter das Kriterium.“ See also, for example: Perse, E. (2001) Media Effects and Society, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.; Weimann, G. (2000) Communicating Unreality: Modern Media and the Reconstruction of Reality, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.; Potter, J. (2003) The 11 Myths of Media Violence, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Brewin, C. R., Lanius, R. A., Novac, A., Schnyder, U., & Galea, S. (2009), 367.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

art,”29 Fassin and Rechtman observe a general shift in the question of moral responsibility. They subsume, “[b]y applying the same psychological classification to the person who suffers violence, the person who commits it, and the person who witnesses it, the concept of trauma profoundly transforms the moral framework of what constitutes humanity.”30

3.3

Empathy as a Mode of Perception

Trauma theory has not only concerned itself with how trauma might be conveyed, but also with how spectators, readers and listeners might perceive it. One reoccurring common denominator in most scholars’ texts is the call for empathy. Kaplan, for example, attributes the concept of ‘empty empathy’ to the US media coverage of the 2003 Iraq War, which, according to her, focused on individuals rather than showing the entire picture of the war. ‘Empty empathy’, a state Kaplan sees as being closely linked to sentimentality, describes the sensation of seeing broadcasted war coverage that seems unreal, almost fictional. For this reason, Kaplan believes context and continuity, both in the media and in cultural productions, would help “bring the events into our own lives,”31 so that these mediums might ‘translate’ trauma and generate actual empathy in spectators. Like Kaplan, historian and literary scholar LaCapra asserts that the model of empathy could be used to strengthen a more responsible and possibly more activating sort of perception of traumatic content in cultural productions. LaCapra uses the term ‘emphatic unsettlement’, i.e. “[b]eing responsive to the traumatic experience of others, notably of victims.” On the side of production, he believes that it “should have stylistic effects, or, more broadly, effects in writing which cannot be reduced to formulas or rules of method.”32 While the notion of reasoning solely with emotion and sympathy by replacing analysis with empathy is also problematic – Fassin and Rechtman desribe the possible danger of “falling into an excess of condemnation”33 – LaCapra underlines the importance of differentiating between ‘empathy’ and ‘identity’. He draws on an argument by Kaja Silverman, who speaks of ‘heteropathic identification’ as an “emotional response [that] comes with respect for the other and the realisation that the experience of the other is not one’s own.”34 Rooted in a hermeneutical discourse in which the coexistence between emotional and analytical understanding is declared impossible – an either/or logic that is 29 30 31 32 33 34

Bennett (2005), 21. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 20. Kaplan (2005), 100. LaCapra (2001), 41. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 281. LaCapra (2001), 40.

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called into question by Martin Seel,35 for example – the notion of ‘emphatic unsettlement’ challenges this very dogma. Thus locating ‘emphatic unsettlement’ between affect and cognition, LaCapra believes this model of perception would facilitate accessing the emotional dimension of trauma, while at the same time ensuring there be no confusion regarding arbitrarily inscribing oneself in the traumatic narration. Art historian Jill Bennett provides a third model of empathy as a mode of perception: suggesting self-reflexive empathy as one form of “engagement with trauma imagery.”36 She outlines a model of ‘emphatic vision’ and a ‘process of affect contagion’ in which the spectator “feels rather than simply sees the event” and in which empathy functions “as a mode of seeing.”37 This notion, she notes, “argues for the capacity of art to transform perception.”38 More than in any other theory of empathy as a mode to help perceive trauma, Bennett links the cultural implications of empathy and affect to the heritage of Aristotle’s concept of catharsis. In the Poetics (335 BC), Aristotle defines the tragedy as a mimesis [mimêsis] of a plot [mythos] — an imitation of an act, space and time conveyed into a pleasurable language as to evoke pity and terror [eleos and phobos] in audiences.39 The purpose of tragedy is thus to provoke a purification of emotions or to free spectators from affects, which he refers to as a process of catharsis.40 As Erika Fischer-Lichte highlights, philosophers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing imagined the audience to build a sense of empathy and develop their human sensation by repeatedly visiting Bourgeois Tragedy. Therefore, he believed in the capacity of theatrical plays to transform the emotional habits of spectators for the better.41 A re-contextualised model of catharsis – of activating the audience and changing their affective response concerning social tragedy – seems to accompany the growing discourse of empathy in trauma studies and the more general discourse on cultural trauma.42 Goldsmith and Satterlee, who have studied the capacity of fictive trauma narrations to help facilitate an understanding of real trauma, argue “[i]ndeed, part of the purpose of fictional portrayals of trauma is to generate emotional responses and encourage the reader to cultivate insights into human be-

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

Cf. Seel (2007), 34. Bennett (2005), 8. Ibid.,10, 36. Ibid.,10. Cf. Aristotle (1987), 7. Original quote: “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of the play] and [represented] by people acting and not by narration, accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.” Aristotle (1987), 7. Cf. Fischer-Lichte (2012), 122. Cf. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 6.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

haviour that are not necessarily based in intellect or logic, but rather a spontaneous emotional response.”43 The philosopher Charles E. Scott asserts an extreme position on the opposite end of the spectrum, as he considers indifference as the correct mode for presenting and perceiving trauma. A certain amount of indifference and distance are, according to him, essential for a healthy mode of perception and, eventually, of coping. Scott’s perspective on trauma’s perception, which refers to the notion of the indifferent or uninterested viewer that Immanuel Kant had imagined as being the ideal spectator for art, underscores the precarious and perhaps even dangerous act of sentimentalising or anthropomorphising trauma. “Pitiless delectation seems to be an important part of making traumatic horrors come, as it were, to life for those at distance to them – and […] for those who have suffered them. […] The indifference of this distance seems to have considerable value, a value worth preserving, a value best not moralized and criticized while we benefit from it. It's the value of letting trauma go even in presenting it.”44 Both of these calls – for empathy on the one hand and for indifference on the other – strike me as being too one-sided; neither of these two sets of reactions alone will provide the spectator or reader with the equipment to encounter trauma. The main problem I have identified with the call for salutary empathy is the moral dogma and the notion of healing qualities it comes with. Encountering trauma requires more than an empathic regard for its victims: in order to serve as a tool for understanding these narratives, a fundamental elucidation of learning how to see with and through traumatic images is required, as is developing knowledge about the mechanisms of trauma in the individual, the society and the media.

3.4

The Unrepresentable in Trauma Studies

The tautological dilemma of trauma’s unrepresentability – an almost unchallenged, ‘sacrilegious’ rule in most of trauma theory’s foundational texts – has engendered the paradox of tiptoeing around solving, bypassing and re-interpreting it. This strategy takes centre stage in some publications, meaning it is addressed directly. Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg speak to the difficult balance of presence and absence of trauma, which begs the question of even simply speaking about the representation of trauma: “Our terminology suggests the unavoidable presence of a system of naming that we have already implied as unnameable.”45 The notion of

43 44 45

Goldsmith and Satterlee (2004), 43. Scott (2009), 117. Saltzman and Rosenberg (2006), x-xi.

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infinite vastness or blankness implied by this argument has been picked up by researchers, serving to underline the dilemma of representation by emphasising it in the headlines of essays, conferences or exhibitions: Kristen Brown Golden dedicates a chapter to the paradox of “Speaking the Unspeakable”46 ; Jeanne-Marie Viljoen titles an essay “Representing the ‘unrepresentable’”47 ; Sabine Sander calls a chapter of her dissertation the “Darstellung von Undarstellbarem” (“The Representation the Unrepresentable”, my translation)48 ; Isabelle Wallace uses the title “Trauma as Representation”49 and Griselda Pollock’s essay “Art/Trauma/Representation” claims that “trauma is the radical and irreducible other of representation […].”50 Pollock recognises that she is caught in a “binary, phallic logic: either/or. Trauma or representation. Void or structure.”51 Some writers illustrate the paradox of trauma’s representational problem by providing an analogy to psychological traumatic structures: LaCapra, for example, describes the paradox as rooted in symptoms, which – as Freud famously stated52 – require ‘working through’ and ‘acting out’: “[…] a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel. Working through trauma involves the effort to articulate or rearticulate affect and representation in a manner that may never transcend, but may to some viable extend counteract, a re-enactment, or acting, of that disabling dissociation.”53 The paradox of unrepresentability has led several trauma researchers to explore cultural practices, solving the dilemma. LaCapra, who also draws on Walter Benjamin’s notion of using storytelling to navigate working through trauma, considers testimony delivered via fiction to potentially be an “indirect but still possibly informative, thought provoking, at times disconcerting manner, with respect to the understanding or reading of events experienced in memory.”54 Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg describe the dilemma of representation as inherently solved through the process of picturing and imagining trauma, as they argue: “The inability to frame trauma in and of itself lends the form almost naturally to a process of

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Brown Golden (2009), 81. Jeanne-Marie Viljoen (2013). The full title is “Representing the ‘unrepresentable’: The unpredictable life of memory and experience in Waltz with Bashir.” Sander (2008), 163-252. Wallace (2006), 3-27. The full title is “Trauma as Representation: A Meditation on Manet and Johns.” Pollock (2009), 42. Ibid., 43. Cf. Freud (1999) [1914]. LaCapra (2001), 42. Ibid.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

visualization as expatiation. Put simply, we do not picture without always already framing simultaneously.”55 Although she is critical of the notion of the direct transmission of trauma through art, Bennett suggests abstract forms of language(s) as being able to bypass the dilemma: “That which is categorically ‘beyond representation’ may find expression within experimental formal languages.”56 Underscoring the fictional and imaginative element of abstract languages and their suitability as serving as channels for trauma’s (re)presentation, Elaine Scarry, author of The Body in Pain (1985), draws attention to ‘isolated’ exceptions of representation in art, literature and film, seeing as these may be able to “provide a much more compelling (because usable) form of reassurance – fictional analogues […] that can be borrowed when the reallife crisis of silence comes.”57 She specifies, “Psychological suffering, though often difficult for any person to express, does have referential content, is susceptible to verbal objectification, and is so habitually depicted in art that [...] there is virtually no piece of literature that is not about suffering, no piece of literature that does not stand by ready to assist us.” But it is not only cultural researchers who often come to the conclusion that art may be a favourable way of addressing and representing trauma. Historian Hayden White believes that events such as the Holocaust (which he refers to as ‘holocaustal’ events) cannot be historicised because they are collective traumata that function like the psychological defence mechanism of an individual’s trauma, manipulating a society’s capacity of memorising and remembering adequately. Rather than embedding them in a historical master narrative, White suggests including them in artistic, abstract and partly fictional “anti-narrative non-stories” producing a genre that White calls ‘historical metafiction’.58 Likewise, the historian LaCapra stresses “the literary (or even art in general) is a prime, if not the privileged, place for giving voice to a trauma.”59 Kaplan highlights the cinema as being the optimal space for traumatic content: “Forms such as cinema may be especially appropriate to figuring the visual, aural and non-linear fragmented phenomenon of trauma – to performing it.”60 And literary and cultural scholar Aleida Assmann begins an essay on trauma with the sentence “It is historical traumata’s feature that they obstruct their representation for a long time,”61 implying that this non-representability will

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Saltzman and Rosenberg (2006), xii. Ibid. Scarry (1985), 10. White (1996), 32, 18, 19. LaCapra (2001), 190. Kaplan (2001), 205. Assman (2005), 117. My translation. Original: “Es ist das Merkmal historischer Traumata, dass sie sich über längere Zeit der Repräsentation versperren.”

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not last forever but requires temporal distance in order to become representable. In her analysis, Assman and the co-authors Karolina Jeftig and Friederike Wappler discuss an argument by Hal Foster at length, in which Foster employs the subject of trauma so as to reintroduce the notion of authenticity to visual art from which it was absent throughout the period of postmodernism. As Foster is one of only a few art historians who dedicated his research in contemporary art to the subject of trauma, I will introduce his positions here as well. Famously, and with frequent references to psychoanalysis and the value of Lacan’s theory within the realm of contemporary art, Hal Foster’s book examines The Return of the Real (1996) in the works of Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith and other visual artists. Genres such as Pop Art, Appropriation Art, Super Realism and Abject Art are explored in regard to their qualities of the ‘traumatic real’, its emergence and the general fascination of exhibiting trauma. His hypothesis begins with the question: “Why this fascination with trauma, this envy of abjection, today?,” which Foster simply answers with, “To be sure, motives exist within art and theory […],” and he finalises his thesis, “as if the real, repressed in poststructuralist postmodernism, had returned as traumatic.”62 This ‘traumatic realism’, which Foster coins and always comes back to, is not only traumatic, but it can also be seen as being essential and authentic — two categories that are both intertwined and in conflict with the notion of trauma. The ‘real’ referred to by Foster is the very opposite of a social or cultural construction. While he ascribes a right of existence to art forms that shock people, Trangressive Art or Abject Art, for example, he also develops a theory of producing trauma by means of repetition, a quality that is inherent to certain artworks, particularly Andy Warhol’s repetitive series such as the accident photographs White Burning Car III (1963). Foster believes these picture-based repetitions of a traumatic event do not in fact aim at a ‘mastery of trauma’ as the Freudian model suggests. Instead, Warhol’s repetitions “not only reproduce traumatic effects; they also produce them.”63 Here, however, Foster is confronted with the same representational issue of trauma that other trauma scholars have faced, aligning their hypothesis to psychoanalysis.64 A reproduction and a production of trauma through the repetition of images seem to converge into a pictorial representation of trauma, which, as Hal Foster points out several times, is impossible. In a puzzling choice of words, with references to the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, he thus subsumes:

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Foster (1996), 166. Ibid., 131. Foster is, in fact, very aware of this issue and thus legitimises his use of psychoanalytic theory as an exception: “Such analogies between psychoanalytic discourse and visual art are worth little if nothing mediates the two, but here [in Warhol] the theory and the art relate repetition and the real to visuality and the gaze.”

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

“[R]epetition in Warhol is not reproduction in the sense of representation (of a referent) or a simulation (of a pure image, a detached signifier). Rather, repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need also points to the real, and at this point the real ruptures the screen of repetition. It is a rupture less in the world than in the subject – between the perception and the consciousness of a subject touched by an image. […] Lacan calls this traumatic point the tuché; in Camera Lucida (1980) Barthes calls it the punctum.”65 In a sense, what Foster describes here as a ‘rupture’ and a feeling of being ‘touched’ by perceiving an image could just as well be understood as a notion of shock, if not a notion of empathy and, once again, a call for empathetic perception. Bringing Jacques Lacan’s ‘tuché’, Jean Baudrilliard’s pop cultural theory of the ‘simulacrum’ and Roland Barthe’s photographic theory of the ‘punctum’ into one argument, Foster legitimises the paradoxical nature of his claim as essentially and meta-reflexively traumatic. He argues, “This confusion about the location of rupture, tuché, or punctum is a confusion of subject and world, inside and outside. It is an aspect of trauma; indeed, it may be this confusion that is traumatic.”66 As referred to by Foster, Barthes describes the ‘punctum’ as an affective state of being moved by an image, which runs through shocks presented in and through the image. Like Foster’s idea of the production of trauma in an artistic image, the ‘punctum’ is an activity generated by the image, particularly the photograph — a theory Barthes first developed in his discussion of ‘strictly traumatic images’ originally published in his essay “The Photographic Message” in 1961. He dedicates a paragraph to traumatic photographs that could, as opposed to all other types of photographs, imply a ‘pure denotation’: “Trauma is just what suspends language and blocks signification. Of course, certain normally traumatic situations can be apprehended in a photographic process of signification; but it is precisely because they are indicated through a rhetorical code, which distances them, sublimates them, pacifies them. Strictly traumatic photographs are rare, the trauma is entirely dependent on the certainty that the scene has really occurred. […] the traumatic photograph is the one about which there is nothing to say: the shock photo is by structure non-signifying: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorisation can have any hold over the process instituting its signification.”67 Barthes imagined the traumatic photograph as one featuring “fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes, violent deaths”68 — an image he believed to be resistant to verbal 65 66 67 68

Ibid., 132. Ibid. Barthes (1991), 19. Ibid.

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translation. But as opposed to Foster’s (and many other researchers’) interpretation, Barthes focused not only on the photographic medium, but also on the documentary and thus the non-fictional element of these images as a condition for suspending language and blocking signification, eventually becoming “strictly traumatic images”. While Barthes does not explicitly state a difference between the traumatic image of an individual or a collective traumatic event, other researchers have disconnected cultural (historical) and individual (psychological) trauma, treating the conditions with two entirely separate sets of questions regarding their representability. The concept of cultural trauma particularly seems to afford certain possibilities that are cancelled out by the restrictions tied to individual trauma. Fassin and Rechtman believe that “while the subjective experience of the victim remains inaccessible to us, the public recognition they are accorded in the name of trauma provides the key to an anthropology of the subject.”69 Reflecting on these approaches, Sabine Sielke questions the notion that while individual trauma cannot be spoken or remembered, several authors would have us believe that cultural trauma, on the other hand, “is nowadays recollected, narrated, and visualised in multiple ways.”70 While Sielke criticises the random manner in which the two trauma concepts have been merged or separated from each other, we must nonetheless keep in mind that cultural trauma was in fact established as a phenomenon of the problem of unrepresentability, and could potentially still be understood as an umbrella term for this exact representational prohibition. Critical of this notion, Wulf Kansteiner points out that there is a moral danger in the aesthetisation of trauma, that is, in using the concept of cultural trauma to render the traumatic primarily into a problem of representation. 71 This helps to underscore the notion that cultural trauma must necessarily be considered a problem that is exclusively rooted and legitimised in a cultural discourse, and that a third category – perhaps that of collective trauma – should be established in order to do justice to the psychological scope and the social effects of historical trauma. In direct comparison, all of these models of bypassing the representational dilemma surrounding trauma speak to the fact that trauma functions as a trope in the cultural discourse. As Sielke argues, it is one of unrepresentability, of forgetting, of silence, and of fracture.72 Likewise, Jill Bennett subsumes, “Within trauma studies, the question of trauma’s inherent unintelligibility, and consequent ‘unrepresentability,’ has become something of a trope. Derived from clinical and psychoanalytic accounts of trauma, the configuration of a realm of 69 70 71 72

Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 279. Sielke (2010), 386. Cf. Kansteiner (2004), 205. Cf. Sielke (2010), 395.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

traumatic memory outside the normal cognitive process is […] a discursive organization with its own genealogy.”73 Ruth Leys, who describes the concept of trauma’s unrepresentability as being a ‘modish idea’, particularly in regard to Caruth’s interpretation, also sees a risk in the aesthetisation of trauma as a possible danger for the value of the testimony. She puts forth the argument that the entire debate about trauma’s unrepresentability is stylised as to preserve the function of the favoured medium: the written word. She notes, “Van der Kolk and Caruth are committed to the widespread post-Holocaust assumption according to which any attempt to represent trauma […] is distortive […] The subject’s not knowing of the trauma […] is what guarantees the return of the truth in the patient’s traumatic repetitions. From this perspective, the concept of trauma as literal provides an essentially ethical solution to the crisis of representation posed by trauma in our time. […] We might put it that the entire theory of trauma proposed by van der Kolk and Caruth is designed to preserve the truth of the trauma as the failure of representation […].”74 The logic of trauma’s unrepresentability, as Le Roy, Stalpaert and Verdoodt point out, has primarily “been framed by Holocaust literature and Holocaust studies.”75 The discourse originates from a discussion on how to engage in the trauma of the Holocaust in and through cultural productions. One reason for considering trauma to be ‘unrepresentable’ stems from the belief that it was impudent to think that the Holocaust (or any other traumatic event of such scale) could ever be represented adequately, in its full horror and traumatic destructiveness. This ‘moral imperative’,76 as van Alphen calls it in his book Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (1997), can be discovered in the texts of some Holocaust scholars, who formulate rules or prescriptions regarding its adequate representation. Holocaust survivor and writer Terrence Des Pres, for example, notes: “1. The Holocaust shall be represented, in its totality, as a unique event, as a special case and kingdom of its own, above or below or apart from history; 2. Representations of the Holocaust shall be as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or manipulation for any reason – artistic reasons included. 3. The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even sacred event, with a seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its enormity or dishonour its dead.”77 73 74 75 76 77

Bennett (2005), 15 Leys (2000), 252-3. Le Roy, Stalpaert, Verdoodt (2011), 251. Van Alphen (1997), 94. Des Pres (1988), 217.

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Not only the moral requirements or the ‘sacred’ prohibition of representation, but also the sheer ‘impossibility’ of language and representation is a central argument in post Holocaust literature, such as in the books by the writers and camp survivors Imre Kertész, Primo Levi or Jorge Semprün. The impact of the Shoa’s horrors led Primo Levi, who was deported in 1944, to compare the concentration camps to a technical device that systematically erases language from each detainee. To him, the only element remaining from the camps were the “marches and popular songs dear to every German […] they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.”78 Thus, the unrepresentability of the life in camps was a necessary consequence of the “world of negation”79 that he experienced there. The erasure or annihilation of language in the concentration camps is also one central argument stated by Jean-Luc Nancy, who sharply analyses the debate surrounding the Shoa’s suggested unrepresentability in the chapter “Forbidden Representation” of his book The Ground of the Image (2005). Examining the “poorly formulated claim [that] continues to circulate in the sphere of public opinion,” he poses the question of whether the forbidden representation of the camps is a matter of “impossibility or of illegitimacy.”80 But while neither of these two reasons can uphold his criticism, as the ‘impossibility’ does not affect other traumatic events in history and as ‘illegitemacy’ “can only be referring to a religious prohibition that one has taken out of context with no justification for having done so,” Nancy introduces three central arguments, which he discusses at length in his text: “1. The ‘forbidding of representation’ has little or nothing to do with forbidding the production of figurative works of art. It has, however, everything to do with the most assured reality or truth of art itself: that is, it has everything to do with the truth of representation that is, paradoxically, brought to light by this ‘forbidding’.   2. Not only is the ‘representation of the Shoah’ possible and legitimate, it is, in fact, urgent and necessary — on the condition that the idea of ‘representation’ be understood in the strict sense that is its own.   3. The death camps are an act of super-representation, in which the will to complete presence plays out the spectacle of the annihilation of the very possibility of representation.”81 78 79 80 81

Levi (1959), 52. Ibid., 142. Nancy (2005), 28. Ibid., 29.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

Nancy’s third point is important as it emphasizes the role of representation – its usage for shaping the common images of ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Aryan’, as much as for the erasure and control of these very images – in the Nazi regime. In that sense, he argues, “The death camp constitutes the stage on which super-representation plays out the spectacle of the annihilation of what, in its eyes, is non-representation.”82

3.5

The Unrepresentable in the Aesthetic Theory of Adorno and Lyotard

This overview of different perspectives from trauma studies on the unrepresentable and its handling in cultural practices has shown how both Holocaust studies and psychoanalytical theory have informed these notions. Psychoanalysis first suggested trauma as the unrepresentable category par excellence, circling back to Lacan and his argument that trauma is the real and “the real […] is what resists symbolisation absolutely” and that trauma cannot be remembered but only hallucinated, thus “[i]t is only in the dream that this truly unique encounter can occur.”83 But it was not only Lacanian or Freudian theory that shaped current debates on cultural practices engaging with trauma, creating a definition of trauma as unrepresentable, but also influential post-Holocaust philosophical and aesthetic theories that helped define an unrepresentable nature of trauma and, on the flip side, the notion of trauma as the unrepresentable. A substantial element present in these theories was derived from a much bigger discourse regarding the postmodern sublime, in which trauma had often been transvalued after World War II. This was a reformulation of the Kantian sublime within his aesthetic theory: Immanuel Kant considered certain experiences, such as the power of nature or concepts such as infinity, totality or transcendence, outside of human understanding and larger than anything we could imagine, and thus determined these phenomena as being sublime [erhaben]. In his Critique of Judgement (1790) he famously argued, “the sublime is that, the mere ability to think which, shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense.”84 Art, Kant noted, was limited in its capacity of displaying the sublime, as it could only be measured by the proximity to the object of nature that it was aspiring to imitate.85 The sub82 83 84

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Ibid., 40. Lacan (1994)[1973], 59. Kant (2011) [1790], 144. §25 Translation by J.H. Bernard. Original: “Erhaben ist, was auch nur denken zu können ein Vermögen des Gemüts beweiset, das jeden Maßstab der Sinne übertrifft.” Cf. Ibid. 135. §23 “[…] das Erhabene an Naturobjekten in Betrachtung ziehen (das der Kunst wird nämlich immer auf die Bedingungen der Übereinstimmung mit der Natur einge-

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lime in art would inevitably evoke the awareness of our failing ability to represent it — that is, it would simply “be unsuited to our presentative faculty” doing “violence to the Imagination.”86 He quotes the second commandment from the Tables of Law: “Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image” (Exod. 20:4), referring to the religious prohibition of image making. Kant did, however, believe that art –especially certain German Romanticism paintings, such as by the artist Caspar David Friedrich – was able to approach the limit of the sublime of enlightenment. As opposed to the beautiful, he believed the sublime to possibly appear as formless: “The Sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it or by occasion of it boundlessness is represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought.”87 The German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno refers explicitly and extensively to Kant’s aesthetic values of the beautiful and the sublime in his book Aesthetic Theory, published posthumously in 1970, one year after his death. Adorno legitimises the meaninglessness of art because of its capacity to be meta-reflexive and self-critical, outlining a set of tasks for the present-day and future art of his time. He writes, “Today this is the capacity of art: Through the consistent negation of meaning it does justice to the postulate that once constituted the meaning of artworks.”88 In another passage he argues, “Artworks have no truth without determinate negation; developing this is the task of aesthetics today. The truth content of artworks cannot be immediately identified.”89 Without explicitly using the terminology per se, Adorno thus partakes in the manifestation of the postmodern or the negative sublime with his Aesthetic Theory. His interest in establishing the unrepresentable in the arts, and in relating it to trauma, was rooted in an essay written in 1949 and published 1951 in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, almost twenty years prior to writing Aesthetic Theory. In the essay, he famously argues: “Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. Poetry is impossible after Auschwitz. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.”90 Having returned to Frankfurt following his period of exile, Adorno was frustrated with the indifferent or even non-existing handling

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schränkt) die Naturschönheit (die selbstständige) eine Zweckmäßigkeit in ihrer Form, wodurch der Gegenstand für unsere Urteilskraft gleichsam vorherbestimmt zu sein scheint […]” Ibid. §23 Translation by J.H. Bernard. Original: “unangemessen unserm Darstellungsvermögen, und gleichsam gewalttätig für die Einbildungskraft erscheinen mag.” Kant (2011) [1790], 134. §23 Translation by J.H. Bernard. Original: “Das Erhabene ist dagegen auch an einem formlosen Gegenstand zu finden, sofern Unbegrenztheit an ihm, oder durch dessen Veranlassung vorgestellt und doch Totalität derselben hinzugedacht wird.” Adorno (1997) [1970], 201. Ibid., 170. Adorno (1982) [1967], 3. Translation by S. S. Weber. Original: “Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

of Germany’s past by circles of writers and poets, and within the cultural realm in general. He demanded a radical step: a negation, or something that would acknowledge how profoundly Auschwitz had affected global culture. Often criticised for his polemic claim,91 which could be construed as suggesting that art should be abolished altogether, he addressed his critics in many subsequent publications, notably in Aesthetic Theory, explaining that his statement had primarily been directed at the problem of indifference. For the production of culture, he stated “it would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether [rather] than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance”92 and for the spectator, he believed “[a]rt perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived.”93 He also clearly states that “[t]he abolition of art in a half-barbaric society that is tending toward total barbarism makes itself barbarism’s social partner,”94 claiming that art must act, not through its own abolition, but rather by finding a way of expressing barbarism. On the other hand, as suggested by Adorno in another publication, art is not able to abolish itself: “Art alone is not capable of such a downfall. That is why the arts consume each other.”95 He believed that “[a]rtworks remain enlightened because they would like to make commensurable to human beings the remembered shudder, which was incommensurable in the magical primordial world.”96 Therefore, his statement from 1949 does not in fact suggest a prohibition of art, but rather incorporates the question if culture after the Holocaust can be anything but barbaric. In other words: if poems could be written not after, but about Auschwitz. Adorno also criticises art as barbaric because he believed its aestheticizing formal work risks euphemising or downsizing the immeasurable brutality of Auschwitz. A notion which, according to Sabine Sander, had already been preformulated in Walter Benjamin’s essay on the artwork, in which he states that barbarism’s aestheticisation would help the masses express, but not defend their rights.97 It is thus the traumatic history and the representation of this very history, which Adorno problematizes and challenges:

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92 93 94 95 96 97

schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.” Adorno (2003) [1967], 26. According to Paul Virilio, for example, not much of Adorno’s initial statement that addresses the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz is left today. To him it appears instead as if Adorno’s wish to annihilate bourgeois culture in turn entailed the wish to annihilate himself from the art market. Cf. Virilio (2001), 12. Adorno (1997) [1970], 338. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 327. Adorno (2003) [1967],132. My translation. Original:“Solchen Untergangs ist die Kunst von sich aus nicht fähig. Darum verzehren sich einander die Künste.” Adorno (1997) [1970], 106. Cf. Sander (2008), 79, 82.

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“While the situation does not permit art any longer – and this is what the sentence regarding the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz was aiming at – it still demands it. For a reality devoid of images has become the complete contrary of the imageless condition into which art would dissolve because the utopia that is enigmatically written into every artwork had been realised.”98 Adorno did, however, find an answer to the representation of barbasism in the works of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan whose “poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative,”99 because, as he argues in another passage, “the true language of art is mute.”100 A self-proclaimed heir of Adorno’s line of thought and his problematisation of barbarism’s impossible representation, is the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, who declared his theories as a continuation of Adorno’s aesthetic notions in the introduction to Des dispositifs pulsionnels (1973). Although few extensive comparative studies have been devoted to the two philosophers, cultural theorist and philosopher Sabine Sander dedicated a significant publication to their shared interest in the topos of the unrepresentable and its relation to the experience of the Holocaust as a code for the projected dialectic of culture and barbarism in the 20th century. Both Adorno and Lyotard, so Sander argues, pose the question of how individuals can cope with such developments in culture: not only do they both acknowledge the existence of an unrepresentable entity, but both also recognise art’s task of representing the unrepresentable as unavoidable.101 Adorno and Lyotard do not define the unrepresentable, but they assess that it exemplifies itself through language.102 There is no linguistic term, no word strong enough to encompass the unrepresentable, for Lyotard describes it not only as the ‘unrepresentable’ but also as the ‘unnameable’, the ‘unsayable’, the ‘absent’ or the ‘sublime’. Having famously reformulated the Kantian notion of approximating the sublime into the postmodern sublime, Lyotard turns the impossibility of art as proclaimed by Adorno into an art that must attest to the reality and the unspeakability of the unrepresentable by making its undefined existence the central theme of art. He opines that the Kantian sublime and also the Freudian belatedness [Nachträglichkeit] ‘represent’ the unrepresentable itself. The sublime – not exclusively in art but also in general social 98

Adorno (2003) [1967], 132. My translation. Original: “Während die Situation Kunst nicht mehr zulässt – darauf zielte der Satz über die Unmöglichkeit von Gedichten nach Auschwitz –, bedarf sie doch ihrer. Denn die bilderlose Realität ist das vollendete Widerspiel des bilderlosen Zustands geworden, in dem Kunst verschwände, weil die Utopie sich erfüllt hätte, die in jedem Kunstwerk sich chiffriert.” 99 Adorno (1997) [1970], 405. 100 Ibid., 147. 101 Cf. Sander (2008), 17, 26. 102 Cf. Ibid., 50.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

communication and expression – was a limit that had to be accepted and could not be approached at all. The Kantian sublime “feeling bears witness to the fact that an ‘excess’ has ‘touched’ the mind, more than it is able to handle. This is why the sublime has no consideration for form, why it is ‘unform’.”103 In his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979),104 Lyotard sees the sublime as taking place “when the imagination fails to present an object.”105 He continues, “We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to ‘make visible’ this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are ideas of which no presentation is possible. […] They can be said to be unrepresentable.”106 The paradigm of the postmodern sublime, to his mind, accepts the impossibility of full representation, that is, it acknowledges the sublime as the evidence of the unrepresentable. Modern art, as opposed to postmodern art, is thus criticised by Lyotard as a form that makes “visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible: this is what is at stake in modern painting.” He asks “But how to make visible that there is something which cannot be seen?”107 He sees a solution in postmodern art, which would achieve a legitimisation of the sublime by concealing it entirely. Referring to Kazimir Malevich’s squares or to the “pointlessness” of Marcel Duchamp’s work, he argues that such art works would “remain inexplicable without the incommensurability of reality to concept which is implied in the Kantian philosophy of the sublime.”108 He believes that one can point towards the unrepresentable, but that it wouldn’t fit into an image. Therefore “[t]he postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself; […] that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable.”109 Postmodern image making, to his mind, is about the unrepresentable, and he considers this very impossibility to be an aesthetic value. In Heidegger et les ‘juifs’ (1988), Lyotard comments more directly on the representational limitations which he suspects the Holocaust to have, and on its precarious position in collective memory. He believes that “it cannot be represented without being missed, being forgotten anew, since it defies images and words. Rep-

103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Lyotard (1990), 32. Also in: Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1991). Lyotard (1986), 78. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 81.

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resenting Auschwitz in images and words, is a way of making us forget this.”110 For Lyotard, symbolic representation of suffering and barbarism, such as memorials, thus imply a sublimation, which requires an enhancement or an elevation of the real incident. In other words, he presumes that the suffering needs to be reduced to the degree that it can be presented through aesthetic formal language. “What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to this aporia of art and to its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but it says what it cannot say.”111 The only exception to this rule, for Lyotard, is the much-discussed anti-representational documentary movie Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann, which avoids showing any archival or staged camp material. Indicating the unrepresentability of destruction only by means of small and non-cinematic gestures, the emotional authenticity of the interviewed witnesses, affecting their voices or their facial expressions, for example, are the devices that afford the film’s exceptional quality in ‘representing’ the unrepresentable for Lyotard. Shoah is one of the most polemically discussed112 and most appraised works in trauma studies, and it has been influential for later cinematic productions113 and for philosophy. Over nine hours long, Lanzmann shows interview material with direct witnesses, victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust. These interviews are juxtaposed with new film material shot in Polish locations in former camps. Lanzmann decided not to show any archival footage, due to its suggested impossible narration. He argues, “I have precisely begun with the impossibility of telling this story. […] I have made this very impossibility my point of departure.” 114 In other essays, Lyotard also uses the discourse of representational strategies in modernity to show the failure of these strategies in representing the Shoah. Lyotard, as Joseph Tanke summarises, believes that art should not even attempt to represent the barbarism and suffering that occurred in the Nazi camps, but that it should instead strive to demonstrate and perhaps be some form of proof of the unbearable and thus unrepresentable nature of these events.115 For Lyotard, the coherence between the unrepresentable and Auschwitz also results from the public discussion and the question of proof in regard to Holocaust 110 111 112

113 114 115

Lyotard (1990), 26. Ibid., 47. Lanzmann himself was active in many discussions, criticising Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, for example, which was released shortly after Shoah. Lanzmann published an article called “Schindler’s List is an impossible story” in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, causing a polemic discussion in trauma studies. In the article, Lanzmann argues “Spielberg’s film is a melodrama, a kitschy melodrama. […] he has made an illustrated Shoah, he has given images where these are absent in Shoah, and images kill the imagination […] Fiction is a transgression, I am deeply convinced that there is a ban on depiction.” I.e. Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Ari Folman or Camp 14 – Total Control Zone (2012) by Marc Wiese. Lanzmann (1990), 295. Cf. Tanke (2010), 4.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

denial, which is partly the subject of his book Le Différend (1983). In this publication, Lyotard examines the difference of incompatible claims between victims and perpetrators and the legitimacy of both sides’ arguments, and introduces the unrepresentability of Auschwitz as an essential problem of language in situations of conflict.116 In short, his thesis is that all witnesses of Auschwitz are victims, and because all victims are dead, nobody is able to identify a space as a gas chamber.117 As Sabine Sander points out, Lyotard develops three arguments of Auschwitz as the unrepresentable in his philosophical analysis of the Holocaust in Le Différend: first, because of the heterogeneous language games between victims and perpetrators, second, because of the establishment of a monopoly of proof, and finally, because he evaluates Auschwitz as being unimaginable.118

3.6

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

As I hope to have underlined in this chapter thus far, there are three main reasons that together form the foundation of the logic of the unrepresentability of trauma. In a nutshell, these are the result of a ‘moral imperative’, emphasising the inappropriateness to represent trauma and in particular the Holocaust, the influence of psychoanalytical theory and its concept of belatedness and the influence of post-modernist theory, particularly Lyotard’s postmodern sublime and Adorno’s negative dialectic. The theory of trauma as the unrepresentable very often reflects helplessness in face of human tragedy, trying to prevent ethical violation of limits or an ‘illusionary closure’119 of the past through artistic means. This logic provides one aesthetically and socially important value. However, I would argue that this logic has been a misleading theoretical framework for recent and contemporary artistic approaches to trauma. The exclusive claim for an aesthetic translation of trauma as the unrepresentable suggests trauma as being, in Cathy Caruth’s words, an ‘unclaimed experience’; trauma as void and as always already absent. But what does this assertion imply for art and for its institutions, for curatorial strategies and for any kind of cultural dialogue about trauma and our culturally traumatic heritage? It creates barriers by suggesting a cultural inaccessibility to a traumatic event of the past. And this bears a false promise of moral accuracy in favour of historical correctness. Instead, I would argue that traumatic histories and events should be told, visualised, written down and represented in all feasible and respectful ways, so that the public may be or become aware of them. I believe that if we continue regarding trauma as the unrepresentable, we accept 116 117 118 119

Cf. Sander (2008), 108. Lyotard (1988), 5. Cf. Sander (2008), 119. Arnold-de Simine (2013), 39.

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its incomprehensibility and the possibly outdated claim for non-representation. In our current cultures, trauma is everything but absent — it has images, and these images surround us on a daily base. To ignore these images and their effects on our culture would be to ignore the barbarism they display. Not only do we need models of empathy or measures of indifference to protect ourselves, but tools to understand the humanitarian, political and social impact that these images and narratives of trauma have. We need to learn to decode these representations. This need has drastically increased in a time when digital image culture poses the question how we can learn to process and manage the constant flow of images of trauma, war and violence. Other scholars have also argued that the discourse around trauma’s representability may by now be obsolete, or that at the very least it should be critically re-evaluated. Relevant attempts have been made in different fields of research in an effort to do just that. Not mincing words, trauma scholars Kaplan and Wang refer to the danger of trauma’s mystification, warning against pushing “trauma into the mystified circle of the occult, something untouchable and unreachable.”120 Outlining a generalised aesthetic of absence and void in the trauma paradigm, Roger Luckhurst is concerned about the “indifference to cultural specificity” implied by this argument of a supposedly “generalizable aesthetic of trauma” within the realm of unrepresentable. He argues, “This seems remarkably unresponsive to the different demands of evidence, witness, testimony and memory, and the transformed technological and media environments in very different arenas of the contemporary world. Such arguments make me think that it could well be productive to move ‘beyond trauma’– if by this is meant a move beyond prescriptive aesthetic formalism for representing trauma.”121 Judith Butler uses her political pacifistic theory in Precarious Life (2004) to argue in favour of showing traumatic images that might fail to adequately represent, but nevertheless need to be told: “These stories [of 9/11] have to be told, and they are being told, despite the enormous trauma that undermines narrative capacity in these instances.”122 Like Sabine Sielke, who speaks of “a matrix in which trauma works as a model of identity that is ultimately exclusionary and closed-off,”123 Butler believes in a productive and necessarily paradox representation inherent to traumatic images, which she expresses along with her scepticism towards a notion of the ‘unrepresentable’.

120 121 122 123

Kaplan and Wang (2004), 8. Luckhurst (2010), 12-13. Butler (2004), 7. Sielke (2010), 404-5.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

From her point of view her, the paradox of the traumatic image is central to its nature and needs to be retained: “For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give. In this sense, the human is not identified with what is represented but neither is it identified with the unrepresentable; it is, rather, that which limits the success of any representational practice. The face is not “effaced” in this failure of representation, but is constituted in that very possibility.”124 The claims for showing those paradoxical images of trauma, for confronting spectators with different interpretations and documentations of traumatic events and collective traumata, and for understanding the mechanisms of trauma have thus become louder. Has the ‘moral imperative’ possibly been reversed, challenging the notion of whether it is ethically and morally maintainable not to speak, not to symbolise, not to represent trauma? This seems to be a crucial question that merits further exploration, particularly within a more recent aesthetic discourse led by the French philosophers Georges Didi-Huberman, who formulates scepticism in regard to relying on the unimaginable and unrepresentable nature of trauma in his book Images malgré tout (2004), and Jacques Rancière, who challenges the notion of the unrepresentable as countering present-day political and aesthetic debates located within a representational regime as opposed to an aesthetic regime in his book The Emancipated Spectator (2008) and in The Future of the Image (2009). Introducing their arguments at length, I intend to explore this line of thought further and to utilise it productively in an effort to put forward a new theory for contemporary art that explores trauma as representable and that attempts to find ways of communicating it.

3.7

Are Some Things Unrepresentable?

In “Are some things unrepresentable?”,125 the final chapter of Jacques Rancière’s book The Future of the Image, he outlines a critical notion of the ‘inflated’ concept of the unrepresentable, which brings him to the question of which circumstances are required to enable the construction of such a concept at all.126 Scrutinising not only the concept of the unrepresentable, but also the underlying ambivalence of the 124 Butler (2004), 144. 125 “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” by Jacques Rancière was first published in Genre Humain (No. 36, Autumn/ Winter 2001), edited by Jean Luc-Nancy, with the original title “L’art et la mémoire des camps.” 126 Cf. Rancière (2011) [2009], 109.

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debate in itself, Rancière sheds a light on how the discourse canalised an extreme polemic between the doubt in the image’s political capacity and, at the same time, the overestimation of its political and even carnal impact on the viewer. His analysis highlights how emotionally absorbed the discourse on the unrepresentable has become, and how much the definitions of the image and of representation have been customised to fit into an argument. The question “Are some things unrepresentable?” brings Rancière back to a more general inquiry of what representation is, and what it might imply when something is said not to be representable by artistic means. On the one hand, it means that art is said to have an inherent incapacity to “make the essential character of the thing in question present,” even through a representative symbol, and on the other it implies that “some things fall outside the competence of art. They cannot adapt to the surplus of presence and subtraction of existence peculiar to it, and which in Platonic terms define its character as simulacrum.”127 Some subjects would thus be appropriate and others would be inappropriate for representational means. However, according to Rancière, both of these implications or presumptions would transform “problems of the adjustment of representative distance into problems of the impossibility of representation. Proscription is then slipped into this impossibility, while being disclaimed, presented as a simple consequence of the properties of the object.”128 The central problem uncovered by Rancière in the concept of the unrepresentable is its underlying suggestion of an ethical requirement within an artistic regime. From this perspective, one might presume that, as we have previously seen in other arguments, the advocates of the ‘unrepresentable’ seek to mystify or sacralise its nature: “The argument of the ‘unrepresentable’ does not fit the experience of artistic practice. Rather, it fulfils the desire that there be something unrepresentable, something unavailable, in order to inscribe in the practice of art the necessity of the ethical detour.”129 Throughout his analysis, his key argument is geared around a clear distinction between a representative and an aesthetic regime of art, which he elaborates at length in his book Aesthetics and its Discontents (2009, in French 2004). According to him, in the representative and Aristotelian regime of art a concept of the unrepresentable is possible only because representation is understood as a question of mimesis — a duty to imitate reality and thus burden the image with the task of duplication. On

127 128 129

Rancière (2011) [2009], 109-110. Ibid., 112. Rancière (2002), 9.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

the other hand, the aesthetic regime, which Rancière advocates, evokes a revolution based on the descriptive style of novelistic realism130 of 19th century literature, in which a concept of the unrepresentable would generally be impossible. The aesthetic regime, Rancière argues, includes artistic practices from Minimalism, such as the paintings of Barnett Newman, or from Relational Art, such as the community practices by Rirkrit Tiravanaija. As opposed to mimetic approaches to motifs and contexts, he believes this type of work “does not draw its property of being an artwork from the conformity of the sculptor’s work to an adequate idea or to the canons of representation.”131 For that reason, the aesthetic regime uses a sense of ‘free play’ which does not require “technical perfection but is ascribed to a specific form of sensory apprehension […] which suspends the ordinary connections not only between appearance and reality, but also between form and matter, activity and passivity; understanding and sensibility.”132 Rancière breaks down three major problems that exist in the representative regime – that is, a triple constraint – namely “a model of visibility of speech that at the same time organizes a certain restraint of the visible;133 an adjustment of the relations between knowledge-effects and pathos-effects, governed by the primacy of the ‘action’, identifying the poem or painting with a story; and a regime of rationality peculiar to fiction, which exempts its speech acts from the normal criteria of authenticity and utility of words and images, subjecting them instead to intrinsic criteria of verisimilitude and appropriateness. This separation between the rationale of fictions and the rationale of empirical facts is one of the representative regime's main elements.”134 Rancière thus argues that the aesthetic revolution would counter-pose “the representative model, by subsuming artistic phenomena under the concept of aesthetics”135 instead of representation. Centrally, he believes hat “[e]verything is equal, 130 According to Rancière, novelistic realism has emancipated itself from “representative proportions and properties […] Everything is equal, equally representable. And this ‘equally representable’ spells the ruin of the representative system.” (2011) [2009], 120-121. 131 Rancière (2009), 29. 132 Ibid., 29-30. 133 Rancière explains that this representative constraint is not related to a distinction between figuration and abstraction, though it may often be interpreted to be. “The opposite of the representative regime in art is thus not a regime of non-representation, in the sense of non-figuration. A convenient tale identifies the anti-representative break as a transition from realism of representation to non-figuration: a form of painting that no longer offers resemblances, a literature that has wrested its intransitive character from the language of communication. […] This fable is convenient, but it is inconsistent. For the representative regime in art is not one in which art's task is to fashion resemblances.” Rancière (2011) [2009], 119-120. 134 Rancière (2011) [2009], 120. 135 Ibid., 119.

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equally representable. And this ‘equally representable’ spells the ruin of the representative regime.”136 Thus, abandoning and emancipating from the traditional concept of representation in this aesthetic regime, Rancière reconsiders the definitions of image and representation, not differentiating between subjects, processes or events that can or cannot be represented ‘adequately’: “exhibition and signification can be harmonised ad infinitum […]. It lies wherever an identity between meaning and non-meaning can be made to coincide with an identity between presence and absence.”137 In a regime that he imagines has emancipated itself from representational proportions and limitations, how does Rancière then envisage the examination and expression of trauma (to which he refers to more vaguely as the ‘inhuman’ or the ‘intolerable’) through artistic means within that very aesthetic regime? In the discussion regarding different approaches to represent the Nazi concentration camps artistically, Rancière recognises a paratactic, descriptive style (or a ‘paratactic syntax’) in Robert Antelme’s testimonial text The Human Race (1957), which reminds him of earlier literary styles, such as in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857): “Madame Bovary is supposed to be the perfect case of the substitution of imagination for life. But Flaubert said of his character that she was sentimental at the same time that she was matter-of-fact. Her imaginary life was also a way of changing her “real” life.” Critical of Claude Lanzmann’s anti-representational dogma, he describes Shoah as being able to represent only the measuring of the event’s inhuman incommensurability by means of “a trick of the camera […] in order to account for the reality of the extermination and the erasure of its traces.”138 At the same time, he concedes that the film’s strategy – staging the unrepresentable as the void – does not contradict the framework of the aesthetic regime. That is to say, Rancière does not include or exclude particular aesthetic styles or genres that are suitable for an expression of an inhuman experience through art, because the inhumanity of the experience automatically transforms the language of the narration that testifies to it. “Where testimony has to express the experience of the inhuman, it naturally finds an already constituted language of becoming-inhuman, of an identity between human sentiments and non-human movements. It is the very language whereby aesthetic fiction is opposed to representative fiction.”139

136 137 138 139

Ibid., 120-121. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 128-129. Ibid., 126.

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The reason for this opposition in fiction is due to the lack of a boundary between fictional narratives and real events within the aesthetic regime, so Rancière. As in the example of Madame Bovary, he believes that fiction has already become reality, and fiction is also a way to change reality. In an interview with Anne Marie Oliver he explains: “we should avoid drawing a clear-cut line between reality and representation. The so-called representations are realities.”140 Rethinking how representations can become and alter reality, while at the same time reality sometimes already is a representation, Rancière concludes in his book that, “[n]othing is unrepresentable as a property of the event.” He further adds that the inhuman event itself “does not impose any duty on art to represent or not to represent, in some particular way.”141 Rancière argues that there is not only one exclusive way of communicating the inhuman event; no right or wrong in the choice of language or style. In his vision, the aesthetic regime abolishes borders between appropriateness and inappropriateness, relations between exhibition and signification or sense and non-sense. In his book Aesthetics and its Discontents, Rancière further explains why the unrepresentable is a category that is utilised so as to justify the “anti-representative demand that becomes the norm of modern art as such.”142 The unrepresentable, to him, “is the central category of the ethical turn in aesthetic reflection” and its declaration “conceals a prohibition.”143 Criticising the concept of the unrepresentable and particularly the anti-representational aesthetics of absence declared as being wrong and/or paradox by the filmmaker Lanzmann, Rancière concludes, “The logic of the unrepresentable can only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it.”144 Anne Marie Oliver picks up on this use of ‘hyperbole’ and asks Rancière to elaborate, to which he responds, “The hyperbole is a conceptual one. In Kantian terms, we can understand it as the subreption that transforms a phenomenal difference into a noumenal one. This is exactly what happens in the case of Lanzmann and of his friends. At the beginning, it seemed that they only wanted to subtract from the event the representational logic of causes and motivations that would have made them explicable and therefore acceptable in a certain way. This is why Lanzmann could once say that if he had found visual documents of the extermination in the gas chambers he would have destroyed them. But it turned out more and more that they wanted something more; they wanted to turn the extreme atrocity of the Holocaust into a super sensible event that could no longer be compared with any other case of slaughter and genocide. This is why they came to deny the very possibility that there be images

140 141 142 143 144

Rancière in Oliver (2008), 183. Rancière (2011) [2009], 129-130. Rancière (2009), 124. Ibid., 123-124. Rancière (2011) [2009], 137.

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of it. Let us look at the polemic that they launched a propos a recent exhibition in Paris, Memories of the Camps, where some photographs of the cremation of the corpses taken from inside a gas chamber in Auschwitz were exhibited. They said that those images were not images of the genocide since there could not be any image of the genocide, because the genocide was, in Lacanian terms, the horror of the Real that dismisses all images. So it is not a question of making the inhuman unreal. It is a question of making a form of inhumanity incomparable to any other by giving it both an ontological status and a sensible texture that makes it entirely apart. It is always the same strategy of the asymmetric relation. It is not a gesture of defence; it is a gesture of appropriation. It dismisses the availability of the visual experience that can be shared in favour of the voice that commands and forbids.”145 Redefining anti-representative art in his own terms and in contrast to Lanzmann’s notion of the unrepresentable, Rancière states that it does not actually oppose the logic of representation: “An anti-representative art is not an art that no longer represents. It is an art whose choice of representable subjects and means of representation is no longer limited. This is the reason why the extermination of the Jews can be represented without having to deduce it from the motivation attributable to a character or the logic of a situation, without having to show gas chambers, scenes of extermination, henchmen or victims.”146

3.8

Intolerable Images

Rancière here refers to the paradigmatic post-Holocaust discussion of unrepresentability that I have previously mentioned. Going into this subject in the chapter “The Intolerable Image” in The Emancipated Spectator, Rancière questions whether it is acceptable to produce and exhibit provocative and ‘intolerable’ images,147 pointing to the dogmatic148 polemic of unrepresentability stirred by the exhibition Memories of the Camps in Paris and its accompanying catalogue text Image Malgré Tout

145 Rancière in Oliver (2008), 187. 146 Rancière (2009), 126. 147 While Rancière observes that the ‘intolerable’ image have been declared “unsuitable for criticising reality, because it pertains to the same regime of visibility as that reality,” he counters that there is no longer an “intolerable reality which the image could counter-pose to the prestige of appearances, but only a single flood of images, a single regime of universal exhibition; and this regime itself would constitute the intolerable today.” Rancière (2011) [2008], 83-84. 148 Ranciére writes: “The dogmatists of the unrepresentable have assimilated it to the religious controversy over idolatry.” Rancière (2011) [2008], 95.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

[Images in Spite of All] written by French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman. The central part of the exhibition consisted of a group of four shaky black and white photographs, secretly taken at Auschwitz in 1944 by members of the Sonderkommando of a selected group of prisoners who were forced to kill their fellow prisoners with gas infused with toxic Zyklon B and subsequently make the corpses disappear by cremating them. All photographs were taken inside the gas chambers — a massive risk for the photographers and the group of people who helped smuggle the film in and out of the camp. Two images show naked women approach what they believe to be a shower, while the other two images show dozens of stacked burning corpses, photographed from within the dark gas chamber. Didi-Huberman’s essay generated a number of strong responses, most prominently by Gérard Wajcman, a French psychoanalyst who called the images out for ‘lying’, for not representing the reality of the Shoah for three reasons. In his critique of Wajcman’s arguments, Rancière summarised these as “first of all, because they did not show the extermination of the Jews inside the gas chamber; next, because reality is never entirely soluble in the visible; and finally, because at the heart of the event of the Shoah there is something unrepresentable – something that cannot structurally be fixed in an image.”149 Rancière evaluates this argument as being invalid because it is primarily aimed against the intentionality of the witnessing image in favour of the involuntarily words of testimony.150 “Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent – something that speech does just as much a photography. The image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and the speech, the said and the unsaid. […] And the voice is not the manifestation of the invisible, opposed to the visible form of the image. It is itself caught up in a process of image construction.”151 According to Rancière, the problem is thus neither the image itself – that is, the question whether it is acceptable to produce and exhibit ‘intolerable’ images – but whether the system, which he refers to as the ‘dispositif ’ [mechanism] or the ‘given common sense’, within which it is produced and exhibited, and to which it refers, requires greater attention.152 Therefore, the relation between that given common sense and the fictional image that is being implanted in the situation is what must be reconstructed. “The treatment of the intolerable is thus a matter of dispositif of visibility. What is called an image is an element in a system that creates a certain sense of reality, a 149 150 151 152

Rancière (2011) [2008], 89. Cf. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 94. Cf. ibid., 100.

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certain common sense. […] The point is […] to construct different realities, different forms of common sense. […] This creation is the work of fiction, which consists not in telling stories but in establishing new relations between words and visible forms, speech and writing, a here and an elsewhere, a then and a now. […] The problem is not whether the reality of these genocides can be put into images and fiction. It is how it is and what kind of common sense is woven by some particular fiction, by the construction of some particular image. It is knowing what kind of human beings the image shows us and what kind human beings it is addressed to; what kind of gaze and consideration are created by this fiction.”153 Rancière’s ideas on so-called political art and its impact on real events are what feed the larger questioning behind these wide abstract thoughts. He comments on the general disbelief in art as being able to generate change or have an impact, arguing that the discourse of the unrepresentable is largely responsible for this mistrust as it fuelled “a general suspicion about the political capacity of any image.”154 By the end of his chapter on the ‘intolerable image’, it seems clear that Rancière’s intention is to attempt to justify the existence of politically charged practices and that both strategies, the obvious and the blurred – meaning the figurative and the abstract, the spectacular and the conceptual – aim for the same outcome and should be equally accepted and valued as appropriate. In this sense, he writes, “The images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible. But they do so on condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated.”155 In the framework of the present book, Rancière offers a valuable set of parameters in regard to the issue of trauma’s unrepresentability through aesthetic means. First, because he questions the traditional definitions of representation and image, challenging the mimetic capacity and historical accuracy of the image or narration. Second, because he constructs the notion of an aesthetic regime in which fiction, representation and reality are blurred, informing and influencing each other, creating a new common sense and establishing new relations to each other. Third, because he questions the claim of unrepresentability as a property to a certain (traumatic) event and emphasises not the question of if trauma can be represented, but instead the importance of exploring how it is being represented, to whom it is addressed and what kind of common sense this representation creates.

153 154 155

Ibid., 102. Ibid., 103. Ibid.

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Image 1 & 2: Anonymous members of the Sonderkommando. Auschwitz, August 1944.

3.9

“To Remember, One Must Imagine”156

Having discussed Rancière’s take on the polemic responses caused by the aforementioned four black and white photographs in the exhibition Memories of the Camps, I will return to the original text about the photographs that stirred this very debate. Georges Didi-Huberman’s concerns related to the ‘unrepresentable’ are specifically channelled so as to justify the existence of archival images from the Holocaust. His thesis is thus to be understood as a clear opposition to the nonrepresentational logic advocated by Claude Lanzmann. The catalogue text that was subsequently expanded and published separately as the book Images in Spite of All. Four Photographs from Auschwitz takes a radical position in the debate surrounding the unrepresentable: it is an unmistakable plea against the aesthetic politics of the ‘unrepresentable’ and a plea for the production of images, specifically but not exclusively the four archival images taken inside the concentration camp. As opposed to most other opponents of the ‘unrepresentable’, Didi-Huberman does not employ subtlety when it comes to formulating his opinion — his book opens with a strong stance against the unimaginable: “In order to know, we must imagine for ourselves. We must attempt to imagine the hell that Auschwitz was in the summer of 1944. Let us not invoke the unimag156

Didi-Huberman (2008), 30.

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inable. Let us not shelter ourselves by saying that we cannot, that we could not by any means, imagine it to the very end. We are obliged to that oppressive imaginable. […] Thus, images in spite of all: in spite of the hell of Auschwitz, in spite of the risks taken. In return, we must contemplate them, take them on, and try to comprehend them. Images in spite of all: in spite of our own inability to look at them as they deserve; in spite of our own world, full, almost choked, with imaginary commodities.”157 Didi-Huberman demands of the viewer of the historic photographs to look. More so, he believes that the viewer is obliged to look, to contemplate, to try to understand, and finally to render what is being labelled as ‘unimaginable’ into an ‘imaginable’. Knowing the event, for Didi-Huberman, requires imagining it. If not only for understanding the atrocity that occurred, he argues that we owe it to the images and to the makers of the images who literally risked their lives taking these pictures, to give them a place in memory. The chapter “Against all imaginable” in Images in Spite of All is dedicated to the ambiguity caused by the four images:158 “The four photographs snatched by the Sonderkommando of Crematorium V in Auschwitz address the unimaginable, and refute it, in the most harrowing way.”159 Precisely because the Nazis’ death camps were created in order to erase existences without traces, images or witnesses, aiming for the ‘disimagination’ of the atrocity, the making of the images, to Didi-Huberman, acts as “four refutations snatched from a world that the Nazis wanted to obfuscate, to leave wordless and imageless.”160 The documentary pictures offer an image from what is thought to be unimaginable. It is for these reasons that Didi-Huberman negates the concept of the ‘unrepresentable’ altogether. “To speak of Auschwitz in terms of the unsayable, is not to bring oneself closer to Auschwitz. On the contrary, it is to relegate Auschwitz to a region that Giorgio Agamben has very well defined in terms of mystical adoration, even of unknowing repetition of the Nazi arcanum itself. […] Furthermore, how could an image act of that kind be prescribed or even interpreted by any thought, however just, on the exercise of art?”161

157 158

Ibid., 3. In this chapter Didi-Huberman refers repeatedly to concepts formulated by Hannah Arendt, Giorgo Agamben, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. Cf. H. Arendt, “Das Bild der Hölle” in: Nach Auschwitz; and G. Agamben in “Qu’est-ce qu’un camp ?” (1995), in Moyens sans fins : Notes sur la politique (Paris: Rivages, 1995); G. Bataille, Sartre (1947); M. Blanchot, L'écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard), 1980. 159 Didi-Huberman (2008), 19. 160 Ibid., 20. 161 Ibid., 25, 26.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

Didi-Huberman references Giorgio Agamben’s radical scepticism of the ‘unrepresentable’ in which Agamben provocatively suggests a certain correlation between the claim for unrepresentability and the ‘Nazis’ gesture’ that attempted to prevent the Holocaust from becoming public knowledge: “Why confer on extermination the prestige of the mystical? […] To say that Auschwitz is “unsayable” or “incomprehensible” is equivalent to euphemein, to adoring in silence, as one does with a god. [...] That is why those who assert the unsayability of Auschwitz today should be more cautious in their statements. If they mean to say that Auschwitz was a unique event in the face of which the witness must in some way submit his every word to the test of an impossibility of speaking, they are right. But if, joining uniqueness to unsayability, they transform Auschwitz into a reality absolutely separate from language […], then unconsciously, they repeat the Nazis’ gesture; they are in secret solidarity with the arcanum imperii.’"162 Despite this somewhat polemic formulation, Agamben makes a valuable point by criticising the prestigious position of the Holocaust in the discourse on trauma’s representability and its mystification as the central problem of the discourse on unrepresentability. It becomes very clear that the claim for unrepresentability does not only entail a moral dogma that limits artists, writers etc. in their responses to traumatic events, but it also renders traumatic events to remain, to be or to become invisible, as Didi-Huberman critically remarks.163

3.10

“The Exercise Of Art”

Invisibility cannot give trauma a place in history — quite the opposite, as Ernst van Alphen points out: “the symbolic order of language and representation is a necessary precondition without which history or reality cannot be experienced at all” and “that contention […] is necessary if we want to give memory a place, now.”164 As I have tried to emphasise throughout this chapter, three main reasons can be outlined to explain why trauma has been labelled ‘unrepresentable’ since the beginning of the 20th century. First, due to an analogy between a cultural and a psychoanalytical discourse that was based on a psychological model of repressed or fragmented memories and emotions, the belatedness [Nachträglichkeit] of symptoms and amnesiac flashbacks. Second, due to the notions of the negative dialectic and postmodern sublime developed in aesthetic theory, which subordinated trauma in the un-

162 Agamben (2000), 32 -33, 157. Quoted in Didi-Huberman (2008). 163 Cf. Didi-Huberman (2008), 26. 164 Van Alphen (1997), 12, 15.

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representable sublime or demanded a representational meta-reflexive awareness of the unrepresentable and anticipated the presumed inevitable failure to represent trauma in or through art. And third, due to the derivation of trauma studies from Holocaust studies that have pushed a ‘moral imperative’ and employed the two previously mentioned conditions to legitimate the hypothesis that a representation of trauma – specifically of the Holocaust and historically traumatic events of a similarly large dimension – would never do justice to the real event, and would thus be inappropriate, inadequate or unethical. Both Adorno and Lyotard consider art’s task in communicating traumatic collective experiences, such as Auschwitz, as problematic but nonetheless as highly important. If, as Adorno remarked, the true language of art was mute and if, as Lytoard claimed, art ought to reflect its own incapacity of representing the unrepresentable, the implications for contemporary artists’ practices would be extremely limiting and exclusionary. In my attempt to challenge the logic of trauma’s unrepresentability, I have consulted critical publications by Didi-Huberman and Rancière to fortify my hypothesis. The archival images of the genocide’s horror, if we consider DidiHuberman’s perspective, oppose the concept of its ‘unrepresentability’. Knowing traumatic events, Didi-Huberman believes, requires images and imagination. In Rancière’s line of thought there simply isn’t such a thing as the ‘unrepresentable’, because nothing is unrepresentable “as a property of the event”165 and because there is no separation and thus no dichotomy between the fictional and the real in an aesthetic regime. They merge with one another and they inform one another, depending on the addressee to which they are directed, as well as on the setting (or common sense) in which they are implemented. There is, according to Rancière, no favourable way of dealing with a so-called ‘unrepresentable’ event such as a collective or personal trauma. While Didi-Huberman and Rancière provided a number of examples of fictional, documentary, narrative and visual expressions addressing trauma, I would like to continue this exploration and extend it to the realm of contemporary aesthetic practices and curatorial strategies. That is to say, I would like to put forward the question of how images and narrations created in contemporary artistic practices approach trauma, traumatic content, traumatic events. What reality of trauma do these practices generate and how do they evoke and identify trauma? What patterns, structures, symptoms are being referred to? How are issues such as the ethical dogma, the problem of trauma’s trivialisation and fetishisation being met? And what are the outcomes of these practices? Can traumatic narratives and traumatic spaces created within the realm of aesthetic practice help provide frameworks for looking at traumatic events or conditions, and to help detach them

165

Rancière (2011) [2009], 129.

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

from the need for historical accuracy in favour of creating a new perspective — a path beyond the master narrative? I would thus like to suggest a shift in the formulation of a current and future concept of trauma in the humanities, which must necessarily be thought about in wider and more global terms and not exclusively underpinned by anti-representational claims that originate from a discourse surrounding the aftermath of the Holocaust, or rooted in psychoanalytical discourse. The time has come for not yet another tool for bypassing trauma’s tautological dilemma of representation, but instead to develop a re-definition of trauma’s representation in the realm of contemporary aesthetics. This step also involves a reconsideration of what ‘representation’ means today, perhaps detached from a debate that has adopted traditional art historical norms regarding the representation of reality. What I would thus like to put forward here is the argument that the problem of trauma’s representational limitations might not primarily lie in the notion of trauma being difficult to represent, but instead in the (mimetic, historical, political etc.) expectations that artistic representations are subject to. On the contrary, I argue that it is rather crucial to realise that, as Rancière suggests, the so-called “representations may in fact be realities in themselves.”166 On the basis of Rancière’s and Didi-Huberman’s arguments, it becomes clear that fictional and documentary artistic practices – be they traditionally representative or performative or based on testimony or abstraction – are equally valid, and all of them necessary, complementary paths and comments that make indexing and creating a map of images of traumatic events possible, giving them a place in history. Both Rancière’s and Didi-Huberman’s notions on the non-existence of the ‘unrepresentable’ are thus key to understanding how an approach to trauma in aesthetic practices is in fact possible. The extreme diversity of global practices centred on traumata must also be considered as being equally important. The traumata that these practices introduce, abstract, contemplate or even take part in require legitimisation. The task for art theory is thus to make these various strategies accessible within a research context and through curatorial practices, and to situate them in a contemporary debate in which it is, indeed, possible to speak about trauma, to make it imaginable and to learn to understand the images it evokes. This does not necessarily require withdrawing or prohibiting images of trauma, but – as art critic Kolja Reichert proposes – perhaps quite the opposite: “If you want to ascribe an image with power, you show that you don’t show it […] If you instead want to

166 Rancière in Oliver (2008), 183.

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break the power of images, you need to look at them for some time, integrate and explain them.”167 Now, in a world beset with conflict and war zones, virtual warfare, systems of drastic punishment, victims of human and natural catastrophes, climate change and global corporate colonialism, how can we reformulate not yet again the limitations, but the representational possibilities for a reflection of trauma in contemporary art? We cannot deny the existence of traumatic images, be it in the mass media, in social media or in art — the question is rather: how can art represent trauma differently than the media or history books? How can it reflect both trauma and the effects that images of trauma have on us? How can it uncover or break the power of these images? The task is to create an awareness of the reflexivity regarding not only the traumatic image, but also the mechanisms of that image, and the long-term effects it has on spectators and on image culture. The task must be to demystify trauma, to unravel the theories of the 20th century and to look at trauma from a present-day perspective. Having introduced tendencies in academic research on the condition of trauma in our contemporary culture in the last two chapters, the desideratum for its counterpart in art theoretical research motivates the introduction of case studies in the following chapters. The second part of this book concerns itself with topical approaches to the subject and the imagery of trauma in contemporary art, aiming to fortify and flesh out my endeavour to challenge the notion of trauma as the unrepresentable by means of artistic strategies that I wish to analyse and contextualise with the previously discussed representational and ethically charged issues regarding the concept of trauma in art. The research in the exemplary case studies is divided into two major themes that may each be considered as being loose frameworks that help locate and categorise strategies employed in the artworks introduced here. In the first chapter, “Trauma Narratives”, we will look at the work of Israeli artist Omer Fast and the Canadian artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, while the second chapter, “Trauma Spaces”, will concern itself with the work of American artist Paul McCarthy and the international research collective Forensic Architecture. The artists often, but certainly not always, articulate these formal and contextual choices (narrative/spatial) as intentional ‘strategies’, nor are these categories intended to limit or reduce the interpretation opportunities of the works to only one perspective of reading them. I have chosen to focus on interdisciplinary practices that cannot and should not be assigned to a particular genre. My research focus on narrative and spatial approaches to trauma and the resulting selection of artworks should 167

Reichert (2016). My translation. Original: “Wer einem Bild Macht verleihen will, der zeigt, dass er es nicht zeigt […]. Wer dagegen die Macht von Bildern brechen will, der muss sie nur lang genug anschauen, einordnen und erklären.”

Challenging Trauma as the Unrepresentable

not be read as excluding other artistic strategies or genres, but rather as shining a light on practices that challenge the ethical dogma of trauma’s non-representability by offering unique and alternative ways of addressing trauma through and in contemporary art.

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Trauma Narratives

As PTSD is fundamentally a distortion of memory, narrative representations of trauma are inherently ambivalent: rooted in the conflict between the testimony as an access to truth on the one hand and the distorting effects that trauma may have on this memory on the other, a ‘story’ of trauma is never easily told. This is important to keep in mind — not because there is a suggested ‘prime’ way of how narratives of trauma should be told, but because it is this presumed dichotomy between fact and fiction – that is, reality and fantasy – that has evolved to be the key characteristic and definition of trauma in contemporary culture and discourse.1 As opposed to reports, testimonies and documentary techniques, fictional approaches functioning as modes via which to communicate trauma are often criticised for not doing justice to the humanitarian impact of trauma — of turning it into entertainment. As mentioned before, much of this critique comes along with the call for the ‘correct’ way of representing extremely traumatic events, such as the Holocaust. Fiction has, however, also been said to be the better, more commensurable and more accessible way of processing and presenting trauma. Elaine Scarry, for example, believes that fiction can “provide a much more compelling (because usable) form of reassurance – fictional analogues […] that can be borrowed when the real-life crisis of silence comes.”2 Fiction, as Goldsmith and Satterlee argue, brings the audience “closer to the story of trauma” because it grants an emotional understanding of it.3 They note that “[i]n fiction we can observe how we understand, represent, and recover from trauma because fictional representations attend to several elements of trauma, such as diverse emotions and cultural contexts […].”4 Susannah Radstone refers to historical trauma as a ‘cultural script’ and argues, “trauma and fantasy need not be sharply counterpoised. An event may prove

1

2 3 4

Mieke Bal, for example, argues that “[t]raumatic memories […] cannot become narratives, either because the traumatizing events are mechanically reenacted as drama rather than synthetically narrated by the memorizing agent who ‘masters’ them, or because they remain ‘outside’ the subject.” Bal (1999), 8. Scarry (1985), 10. Goldsmith and Satterlee (2004), 38, 43. Ibid., 55.

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traumatic, indeed, not because of its inherently shocking nature but due to the unbearable or forbidden fantasies that it prompts.”5 Fiction may thus not only provide a way of reflecting on trauma and its conception in our culture today, it is also – as is the case in many artistic approaches to post-colonial6 traumata, for example – a tool for coping with and transcending the difficulties of the past and of the present day for the affected societies. Richard Rechtman speaks of a culturally evolved ‘trauma narrative’ which, according to him, “creates a resonance between the ‘human condition’ and the ‘clinical condition’ of PTSD,”7 which helped improve the position of victims and their social legitimisation. As discussed previously, this indicates that the relationship between trauma and fiction is also historically burdened, as psychoanalytic theory has long advocated the belief that trauma tends to blur the borders between whatever is perceived as reality and what is perceived as fiction, thus making it impossible to differentiate between a ‘real’ testimony and traumatic fantasy or hallucination. This notion was originally coined in Freud’s studies on traumatic memories and later in Lacan’s interpretation, who noted, “[Freud] realises that trauma is an extremely ambiguous concept, since it would seem that, according to all clinical evidences, its fantasyaspect is infinitely more important than its event-aspect.”8 While this psychoanalytic account has been influential for later theories of trauma’s non-accessibility and unrepresentability, some cultural producers have since then productively addressed the complicated relation between fact and fiction, conveying the notion of trauma in a perceivable format and utilising the presumed dichotomy to find a metaphorical language for trauma’s emotional impact. Trauma is said to shatter language and disrupt linearity. But it is not only language that can tell a narrative: objects, sounds and images, embedded in both documentary and fictional aesthetic practices, may also serve as approaches to traumatic narratives. The central concern in this chapter is thus: how the co-existence of fact and fiction, or the usage of narrative structures and scenarios in contemporary art, can be regarded as methods to investigating trauma, to conveying trauma, its concept and its structures, and how this material, in turn, might stimulate a reconsideration and greater understanding of the complexity of our notion, and particularly of our perception of trauma and its images. Giving the dichotomy a considerable emphasis, ‘Trauma Narratives’ explores two case studies of contemporary artistic practices that address the junction of fact and fiction. In looking at selected works by the artists Omer Fast and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, I analyse how their practices challenge the cultural canon 5 6 7 8

Radstone (2002), 120. Cf. for example: Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel: Essays, Ewald Mengel and Michela Borzaga, eds., 2012. Fassin and Rechtman (2009), 7n18. Lacan (1988) [1975], 34, 35.

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of the traumatic narrative by providing an access to unexpected perspectives on traumatic memories and traumatic events, by creating access to visual and sensual experiences of traumatic narratives, and thereby also probing the logic of trauma as the unrepresentable.

4.1

Omer Fast

Throughout his work with video and video-installations, the 1972-born IsraeliAmerican artist Omer Fast is committed to investigating the blurring of fiction and documentation in order to convey stories of individual experiences, often traumata, and to probe how these uncertain narratives change once they are recorded, edited and translated into the medium of film. Fast’s work reflects on the question of how trauma, its stories and its images are being formalised. These processes are explored with a strong reference to current information and communication technologies, in which Television and the Internet are the prime sources of information, and in which content is always already altered by means of representation. Fast scrutinises the basic act of representation by manipulating the value of what is perceived as real. In order to accentuate the confusion between real and non-real, he works with both real-life testimonies and actors, without necessarily indicating their role throughout a film. Often beginning with an interview format, he goes on to turning individual or presumably individual stories into scripted plays, thus making it impossible for the audience to separate between the constructed layers of documentation and fiction. His films tell stories of conflict: they portray individuals who have, or who claim to have, experienced situations of war, loss, terror and trauma. The artist then positions or re-stages these individuals between the space where they have experienced the atrocity and the space where they reflect on it. At the same time, these spaces are inherently self-reflexive of the medium of television itself, housing testimonies and actors in uncomfortable situations such as interviews, talk shows or castings, and using montage techniques to purposefully dissect any linear coherence. In regard to this study, his artistic practice sheds a light not only on the usage of narratives and images that inherently relate to trauma, but also the conditions under which these trauma narratives are conveyed, represented and perceived as information. Revealing and unpacking processes of traumatic information derived from experience, to testimony, to representation, to perception and, again, re-interpretation, re-enactment, re-telling through his work, I bring Fast’s practice into context with my own research, discussing the notion of trauma’s representability in parallel to the interpretation of his film 5,000 Feet is the Best as well as other related projects produced by Fast.

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4.1.1

5,000 Feet is the Best (2011)

One of Fast’s most complex and multi-layered works regarding the conveyance of trauma narratives is his 30-minute, single-channel video loop 5,000 Feet is the Best from 2011, which was originally shown at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Set up as an interview format, the film plot portrays and extends the war testimony of a former predator drone pilot who served in the battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan when he was in his mid-twenties. The pilot seeks to legitimise his PTSD condition against the judgement of others, who, according to him, downplay his suffering because of his physical absence in the battlefield — he operated a machine from a safe location (Las Vegas, Nevada). Two cinematic layers that are frequently collapsed into one looped narrative form the film: one shows the shortened, original interview situation of Omer Fast with a drone pilot named Brandon. There is daylight; the camera is steady, directed towards the blurred image of the pilot. Fast recorded the interview in a hotel room in Las Vegas in 2010. While these original footage sequences are relatively short, longer stretches of the original interview’s audio layer accompany aerial perspectives in the form of a voice-over, showing hovering drone images of Las Vegas’ desert, its suburbs, other neat suburbs in a Northeastern town in the US and of Las Vegas’ cityscape at night. Meanwhile, the pilot speaks of the time when he served, about technical details of operating a drone and about the first time he killed someone. The other layer of the film is the re-enacted version of an interviewer and a former drone pilot, doubling the interview Omer Fast had with the drone pilot, but with a different narrative. It shows a presumably fictional interview situation played by the actors Denis O’Hare (pilot) and Gabriel Gutierrez (interviewer). Set in the night-time, in the dark interior of a Las Vegas hotel room, the actor sits on top of the hotel bed and is being asked questions by an interviewer, who sits in a chair opposite the bed, made almost unrecognisable and secretive by shadows that cover his face. The situation, as Liz Kotz remarks, is so manufactured that it is reminiscent not only of a psychoanalytic session, but also of “narrative cinema or television drama. […] The scene is anything but realistic.”9 The pilot actor’s play is exaggerated, melodramatic, and often dismissive. As he tells stories, which seem entirely unrelated to his work as a drone pilot at first, these same stories are reenacted by other actors, accompanied by O’Hare’s storytelling voice-over. Embedded in a continuous alteration of these two layers, between original and fictional interview footage, between testimony and storytelling, the film is separated into three approximately 10-minute sequences. They follow the same linear

9

Kotz (2012), 49.

Trauma Narratives

and compositional succession, while the stories and images change with each sequence. Every sequence begins with the pilot standing in the hotel’s hallway, followed by him entering the room where he meets the interviewer and his barely visible camera team. The conversation always begins with the same lines of dialogue, and throughout the course of the interview the pilot is frequently disturbed by a high-pitched tinnitus sound that makes him cringe and take a pill from a little brown bottle. “THE INTERVIEWER Everything okay?   THE PILOT Yeah. I’m okay. So what should we talk about?   THE INTERVIEWER That’s what I was going to ask you...   THE PILOT Man, I don’t want to talk about anything! You’re the one paying, remember?   THE INTERVIEWER I’m not paying that much.   THE PILOT You want to pay me more?   THE INTERVIEWER You okay?   THE PILOT Just junk food. Do these guys have to be here? I didn’t realise you’d be filming.   THE INTERVIEWER We can always stop if you’re uncomfortable.   THE PILOT Yeah, right... Well let’s hurry up. I got a doctor’s appointment in one hour.   THE INTERVIEWER Okay. What is the difference between you and someone who sits in an airplane?  

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THE PILOT There’s no difference between us. We do the same job.   THE INTERVIEWER But you’re not a real pilot.   THE PILOT So what? You’re not a real journalist.   THE INTERVIEWER No, I mean...   THE PILOT I know what you mean. You’re thinking about....”10 In each of the three 10-minute sequences, the pilot finishes his sentence by listing different words that relate to war clichés (“bodies and places […] Mustard gas. World War One. […] Top Gun. The Red Baron”) that he suspects the journalist is thinking of, and then begins to tell a different story after this part of the conversation. In the first alteration, he speaks about a ‘Train Freak’ — a man obsessed with trains since his childhood and who ends up sneaking into and driving a commuter train without a licence, eventually getting caught by the police not for his crime but because he had forgotten his house keys and was seen climbing through his own home’s window. The scenes flip between the hotel room and the re-enactment of the story. “And what does this have to do with being a drone pilot?”, the interviewer asks. The pilot prompts: “The moral’s the same: Keep your work and domestic life separate.”11 After telling the story, the drone pilot walks into the hotel’s hallway, smoking a cigarette and looking up to the ceiling. The scenery changes abruptly from fictional to original footage: filmed from the perspective of a drone camera, a lonely boy cycles through a desert landscape into an American suburb. A male voice, the one belonging to the ‘real’ drone pilot Brandon, accompanies the calm image: “Five thousand feet is the best. […] I could tell you what type of shoes you’re wearing.”12 Brandon speaks about what he could see as he watched the drone’s monitor, and how he would discover, choose, clear and eventually fire targets. Short sequences of the original interview with a blurred image of Brandon are cut into the aerial views. Cut to the next shot; we are back in the hotel corridor where the pilot finishes his cigarette and knocks on the wrong door, trying to get back into the hotel 10 11 12

Film script 5,000 Feet is the Best (2012), 9, 10. Ibid., 14. Ibid.

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room. Somebody briefly opens another door and hangs trousers on the locker to   cleaned. The interviewer finds the confused pilot in the hallway and guides him be back into the right room.

 

Image 3 & 4: Omer Fast. 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011). Film still.

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Image 5 & 6: Omer Fast. 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011). Film still.

When the pilot sits on the hotel bed, the second alteration begins with the same conversation as the first. (“Everything okay?”) This time, the pilot tells him about the ‘Trouser Scam’, a story about a couple who were “caught at the Luxor”. They would bring a selection of trousers to a casino hotel room in Las Vegas; the woman

Trauma Narratives

would seduce a man and bring him up to the room; she would secretly replace his trousers with a similar pair, which the couple had brought along and exchange it. Her boyfriend would then suddenly come into the room, play the jealous husband and kick the other man out of the room — wearing the wrong trousers, or no trousers at all. “Alright,” the interviewer prompts, “And what does this have to do with being a drone pilot?” “Nothing,” the pilot responds, “I work in casino security now. These stories make our lives a little less boring.” The pilot leaves the room again and, visibly tired, wanders along the hallway. He peeks through an open door into another hotel room and the scene switches to an aerial perspective above a green, North-eastern town in the US, with a white church at the centre. The voice-over is Brandon, the real pilot, beginning to talk about his daily routines. He would play video games after operating the drone for many hours: “I guess a predator is similar to playing a video game — but playing the same video game, four years straight, every single day, on the same level?”13 He also relates his personal trauma of being confronted with death, and bearing the responsibility for so many erased lives. “A lot of people are like, ‘how can you have PTSD […] if you weren't actively in a war zone?’ Well, technically speaking, every single day I was in a war zone. I mean, I may not have been personally at harm, but I was directly affecting people’s lives over there, every single day. There’s stress that comes with that. […] Having anxiety […] Bad dreams, loss of sleep. You know, it’s not like a video game. I can’t switch it off. It’s always there. There was a lot of stress with that and they kind of call it virtual stress.”14 The third alteration begins: the pilot is still in the hallway, surprised by a hotel maid who asks him if she should clean his room. After telling her that he is only a guest, she passes him a little brown bottle, smiles and says, “I’ll come back later”. The pilot returns to the hotel room and the third interview alteration begins. This time he tells the story of a ‘Suburban Family’ who is leaving their home for good. After packing up and driving off in their station wagon, they pass checkpoints along the road and pull over for controls. Afterwards, they reach a bumpy mountain road, apparently getting lost – “Insha’Allah we’ll get there” – and encounter three men with Kalashnikovs and a shovel to dig in the soil, dressed in “traditional clothes, typical to tribes from further south,” standing next to a white pick-up truck; the situation is tense and the men are an apparent danger to the family, but the family is able to pass by them. Right after they do so, “the Hellfire missile hits the ground before anyone can react, nearly vaporising the three men on impact. The pickup truck takes most of

13 14

Ibid., 24. Ibid., 26.

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the damage, but the station wagon isn’t spared. […] Time passes. Time is on my side. Seeing the world from above doesn’t just flatten things. It sharpens them. It makes relationships clearer. The family continues their journey. Their bodies will never be buried.”15 As opposed to the other two stories, in this narrative the image and the spoken text by the actor pilot do not fit the expectations: the story, referencing a situation that supposedly took place in Afghanistan or Pakistan, told from a drone pilot’s perspective – who incidentally killed an innocent family – is visualised with images of an American family, taking a weekend trip, driving through California. The checkpoint soldiers they encounter look Chinese; the three men with the Kalashnikovs are stereotyped south-state American men in “traditional clothes”; the launch of the missile is visualised through the monitor of a black and white aerial drone perspective with Chinese signs filling the screen. The fictional and highly ambiguous aspect of this scenario is deepened even further when the dead family, covered in their own blood, suddenly unfastens their seatbelts and steps out of the car, as if nothing had happened. A ringing phone interrupts the pilot in his story; he steps out of the room and shuts down his phone, looking out of a hallway window. Brandon’s third monologue begins. For the first time, the monologue is directly related to the previous story of the ‘Suburban Family’: accompanied by aerial images of Las Vegas’ cityscape by night, he tells the story of the first time he killed someone as a drone pilot, releasing a Hellfire missile on potential terrorists. During this mission, he observed a couple of men digging up a metallic object from under the soil in a road. “And this wannabe terrorist is just sitting there […] waiting for a Humvee or a military vehicle to show up to detonate. […] You can tell they’re up to no good. That there is an ambush.”16 Although the killing didn’t have a direct impact on him, he argues, “it was later on, through a couple more missions, that the dreams started.”17 The film ends, again, with the pilot standing in the hallway, walking towards the door of the interview room. Then the loop starts from the beginning.

4.1.2

Expectations

5,000 Feet is the Best has many layers and interrelations between fiction and reality, while the film’s plot is at its core based on individuals’ testimonies of their experiences of war and the trauma it caused them. The main narrative evolved from conversations the artist had with the original drone pilot Brandon, as Fast explains:

15 16 17

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 40.

Trauma Narratives

“5,000 Feet started out as a series of meetings with different people, some of whom were working or have worked in a drone programme. Out of all these meetings, I began focussing on one person’s narrative, transcribing it, and then creating pieces of texts in blocks, with pieces of audio and with the accompanying picture, the blurred face. Thinking about that already has such a huge presence. It’s not just a word—it’s an image, it’s a sound. The work’s appearance is already determined. Everything I do after that is reactive to it.”18 The interview Fast conducted with the former US American drone pilot Brandon transmitted “a feel for how a person speaks, the time and the physical quality of a person’s speech”19 and is thus the starting point to his artistic investigation in the many complex layers of stories of war trauma by creating a portrait of Brandon. Collapsed into one narrative that is sometimes moving very far away from the original testimony, 5,000 Feet is the Best tells different stories, both staged and nonstaged, but always reactive to each other. Within this frequent exchange, as Fast argues, “The documentary protagonist of the work is repeatedly anticipated and echoed by his fictional double. And since both subjects appear to be stuck in a crisis, the narrative structure I chose deliberately mirrors their state of mind. It is one that is unresolved and ongoing. Hence the loop.”20   In doing so, the work doesn’t only create new and sometimes awkward relations of information between fiction and reality, bringing them, according to Fast, “into some kind of co-existence, or into some kind of dance with each other,” but the film particularly highlights “the conditions under which we get that information and think about it. […].”21 This strategy, he says, allows him” to highlight things that [he is] interested in, such as characterisation. […] That there is a contrivance, an element of staging going on.”22 Thus, as Hoegsberg and O’Brian point out, the film “probes how we absorb and produce stories,”23 that is: it reveals complex and individual expectations of perceiving a traumatic war testimony and the basic conditions required for that perception. 5,000 Feet is the Best is an effort to give an image to Brandon’s lived traumatic experience, and to the complex field of virtual drone warfare. It aims neither at documentary adequacy and neutrality nor at melodramatic immersion of fictional formats, but instead, it reveals and problematizes the balance between them, addressing the difficulties of that approach openly and

18 19 20 21 22 23

Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin Ibid. Fast in Albes (2015). Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin. Ibid. Hoegsberg and O'Brian (2012), 46.

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thereby elevating these difficulties into the main narrative of the film. The film does not claim a moral right regarding the truth content of testimonies, but it encourages reflection on the representation and perception of traumatic narratives in general. “The way I do it very often is to take a particular story – it could be the eye witness story, the person interviewing or the person I am speaking with – conveying the information and then creating an inventory or a map with coordinates, for somebody to read or to get. And I begin to loosen up whatever that chain of words might be, of descriptions or signifiers – whatever you want to call it – put those things in some kind of play vis-à-vis what their references are, vis-à-vis who is speaking and vis-à-vis who is listening.”24 Several narrative and formal elements of the film suggest this strategy very clearly: for example, its installation in exhibitions, which is usually the presentation in a cinematic one-channel screening, seducing the spectator with an immersive dark space. This setting, and also the film’s colours, its vocal tone in the re-enacted scenes and its general high-quality, mislead the viewer into thinking that this is a coherent Hollywood drama. At the same time, however, the film’s looping sequences and its lack of a classic dramaturgy with a beginning, a climax and a resolving end, is reactive to the brief and unplanned encounters that exhibition visitors often have with art works. In other exhibitions, the immersive instalment of 5,000 Feet is the Best is instead disrupted, thus mirroring the exhibition visitors’ fast movement and their limited attention span. This was highlighted in Omer Fast’s Reden ist nicht immer die Lösung (2016)25 at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, where the film was shown simultaneously on two small TV screens installed on the ceiling of an exhibition architecture by Heike Schuppelius and Studio Miessen, imitating an airport’s waiting hall. Due to its similarity to an info-screen for travellers, the film’s content reflected the ‘fakeness’ of the drone pilot’s flight occupation and translated this within the exhibition space, where visitors would discover themselves as being staged extras and ‘fake’ travellers. Disrupted expectations are also highlighted through the layering of narratives, purposefully collapsing the content, its linearity and the truth it conveys. Immersive and emotional stretches of storytelling are interwoven with Brecht’ian techniques, interrupting the illusion and reminding viewers that they are watching something scripted, withdrawing pathos from the narrative and then re-introducing it as suggestively real. Forcing the spectator to question how much truth a told or visualised story can actually ever bear compared to the real events from which 24 25

Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin. Omer Fast, Talking is not always the solution, Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, 18/11/2016–12.03.2017, Curated by Gereon Sievernich.

Trauma Narratives

it evolves, 5,000 Feet incorporates several sequences in which this sabotaged expectation is addressed. An interruptive moment occurs during each alteration in the hotel, when the actor doubles of the journalist and of the pilot both remind each other that they are actually not a ‘real pilot’ and a ‘real journalist’, but rather fakes in their respective profession. This fakeness refers not only to the fact that they are actors re-enacting a scene, but also echoes the pilot’s activity that only simulates an actual flight, and Omer Fast’s role not as a journalist, but as a researching artist with his own agenda. This conversation is followed by the pilot actor’s assumption that the journalist would expect stories about war clichés, such as World War One or Top Gun, rather than the seemingly unrelated story that he is about to tell. However, as unrelated as the three stories told by the pilot actor may seem, they each play with these exact expectations and confront the spectators with their own bias: this is suggested in the story of the ‘Train Freak’, who is first played by the same Afro-American actor who had previously passed by the pilot in the hotel corridor. When the journalist asks the pilot why the ‘Train Freak’ had to be black, he answers: “Did I say he was black? Who said anything about colour? The guy took a public train for a joy ride and got busted climbing in through his own window. I didn’t say anything about race.”26 While his words serve as the voice-over of the visual continuation of the story, the actor is replaced with a much younger white man, who climbs into his house and is confronted by the police. A similar confusion occurs in regard to the location where the pilot served as an active drone pilot — whether it was Afghanistan, or, as the pilot corrects, Pakistan. Likewise, the last short story told by the pilot actor purposefully tempts the spectator into believing that he is talking about a story in one of the war zones, when in fact the images accompanying his story show a fictional white American middle class family in a Volkswagen station wagon. By continuously blending and replacing audio and image fragments, and with the insertion of small hints and details that guide or misguide the reading of the, the film reveals the spectators’ need to make sense of images, words and sounds that come together to form one narrative, intentionally not satisfying this need by rendering linear comprehension virtually impossible. And yet, despite aforementioned techniques of confusion and misleading information, Brandon’s experience of war is not being trivialised27 or downplayed. Instead, it is visually expanded and unpacked of its entire circulation from experience, representation and perception. Brandon’s traumatised state of mind and his uncomfortable memories are being

26 27

Film script 5,000 Feet is the Best (2012), 14. “The ethical scruples that I have become part of the content that is transmitted through the work. I let my double relate that, or I let my double be the one taking somebody’s life and stories and changing them.” Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin.

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translated into a narrative structure that formally adopts the complexity of processing traumatic events. Meanwhile, the film makes no attempt at adequacy in the representation of traumatic content — it questions what the representation of a narration entails and reveals what the viewer might and might not expect from this representation.

4.1.3

“Trauma-Turned-Drama”

When dealing with traumatic narratives and images, Fast employs a dramaturgic method that he references as presenting “the arc of an event, the trauma-turneddrama”28 , in which he uses the story of an original individual experience and then begins to open it up into a matter of public and collective concern. Answering a question posed by Joanna Fiduccia regarding the traumatic quality of his films’ scripts, Fast argues that it is this very transformation from the individual to the public sphere that makes the representation of trauma so relevant: “Immediately after the tragic event, its survivors, its witnesses and even its perpetrators start mutating into dramatic personae, into authors and actors, tasked with making sense of their own experience for themselves and others. Given this transformation, the problem of representation gains urgency, both ethically and aesthetically.”29 Unpacking the representational capacities alongside the representational difficulties of trauma, Omer Fast says that he uses his practice to “make visible some things, which, for me, are difficult to comprehend; things that are contradictory,”30 and he refers to what he calls “a desire to see” experiences, especially those of conflict, translated into dramatic storytelling for others to perceive. “What I am motivated by is usually a desire to see. […] I usually put myself in contact with persons who have experienced something, who then act as Vermittler, as agents, for me. Because of this proximity, I am able to do a couple of different things: One is to report back from what it is these people may or may not have experienced. The other thing is to immediately describe it, to talk about things related to narratives. This is extremely interesting for me: to put myself into the

28 29

30

Fast in Fiduccia (2008), 158. Ibid. He continues: “What was once individual and private becomes public. And what’s part of the public domain can be mystified. It can be denied. It can be instrumentalised. Needless to say, the problem of traumatic events and their representation is an old one, running the gamut from Aristotle to Brecht and beyond. […]” Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin.

Trauma Narratives

story, as a character, as a doppelgänger, as an interviewer, as an agency, in order to describe and to talk about what it is that underlines this desire to see.”31 In 5,000 Feet is the Best the desire to see experiences being translated into a narrative evolves, as is the case in many of Fast’s other works, around the blurred lines of personal and collective experiences of traumatic events and war, and of their respective media perceptions.32 Articulating the intention to give form to trauma and the ‘loss of signification’ or the ‘rupture’33 that Lacan originally diagnosed it to cause, Fast uses many of his works to pose questions related to trauma’s representability in various narrative formats, be it television, the media or film (i.e. documentary, talk show, news broadcasting, drama and fiction). In this sense, 5,000 Feet is the Best probes the representability of traumatic events and of the psychological trauma triggered by those very events, by deconstructing Brandon’s narrative into the fragments of its symbolic language, both on a structural and a narrative level. This reformatting of memory thus reflects Bennetts apprehension of practical aesthetics in which “[t]he subject of art is […] not an actual event but its apprehension: aesthetic perception itself.”34 The storyline of 5,000 Feet is the Best provides many hints that point towards popular tropes of trauma, such as in the re-enacted scenes, in which the pilot’s recurring tinnitus and cringing, the pills he swallows to ease his pain, or his obvious confusion in the hotel’s hallway, not knowing which door to enter, are seemingly indicative of his PTSD condition. He sits more or less comfortably on the hotel’s bed, while the interviewer sits in a chair opposite the bed — a scene that suggests a psychoanalytical session rather than an actual interview scenario. The space of the hotel room reads, as Liz Kotz remarks, “as a purely psychological space, a series of nightmares.”35 The three stories told by the pilot thus act as presumed traumatic flashbacks: they are hybrids of urban myths, tales and nightmares, merging into a memory, which he then relates. At the same time, the scenes featuring the real pilot Brandon show him discussing his PTSD condition, which he feels he must justify in the society he lives in, evoking the traumatic dreams he began having after having hit his first target, as well as the flight simulator video games he played after work, to forget the “horror sides to working with the predator”36 . Blending narratives of presumed re-enactment and documentary testimony of the pilot thus mirrors Brandon’s comparison of playing video games after his work as a drone operator, 31 32 33

34 35 36

Ibid. Cf. Hoegsberg and O’Brian (2012), 43. Fast in Vinyes Albes (2015). The full statement: “Lacan defines trauma as an experience that cannot be processed, a rupture in the chain of signification. Both works [5,000 Feet is the Best and Continuity] try to give this rupture a form.” Bennett (2012), 44. Kotz (2012), 53. Film script 5,000 Feet is the Best (2012), 26.

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and how he sometimes cannot make the difference whether he is currently at war or simply playing a simulator game. While these narrative strategies alone point towards many links to an overall concept of trauma, the film also embeds its concept on a structural level. Most ostensibly, both the film’s dramaturgic non-linearity and its repetitive timeliness looped in exhibition situations refer to patterns inherent to symptoms of PTSD. Cinematic tools such as the montage between the different realities of Brandon and his re-enacted, fictional double blur not only the notion of authenticity, but also that of the pilot’s overall identity. He is, quite literally, ‘outside of himself’ — again, a pattern inherent to trauma. As Hoegsberg and O’Brian summarise, “Repetitions and montage disrupts the relationship between narrative strands and their interpretation in order to address the surreal and complex terrain of drone warfare.”37 The blended narratives and edited structure of the film thus contribute to the creation of an image of trauma, an image which re-addresses its own difficult circulation with self-reflexive tactics, thereby revealing its paradoxical nature. This ‘making visible’ is a core concern of the artist’s, as he explains, “If we take as the basic premise the notion that trauma is understandable as a linguistic and a symbolic phenomenon, then the work that I try to do is centred around attempts to interrogate that whole notion, to unpack it, to see what that means. […] I do this in order to unleash something that goes against notions of trauma and this unrepresentability of a traumatic event; what it means when we try to put words or images to it. There is a paradox inherent to that. […]”38

4.1.4

A Desire to See

In 5,000 Feet is the Best, the shifted and interwoven structure between spoken words and their (non-)corresponding images form a representation of trauma as a narrative theme, but also as an aesthetic strategy within the cinematic and dramaturgic tools that appear continuously. Trauma is not only the motif, but also a distinctive pattern in the language used by the artist. Other works by Omer Fast also employ this device, as well as alternative cinematic methods, always sabotaging expectations, corrupting the notion of authenticity by means of re-enacting original and fictional footage, and thus posing the question of how and when the representation of an experience, of a historical event and, ultimately, of trauma alters the notion of their presumed truth. In doing so, he probes the phenomenological differences in language and its symbolic system in general — a system that Fast questions, as he argues,

37 38

Hoegsberg and O’Brian (2012), 44. Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin.

Trauma Narratives

“There is a desire to see, to describe, to know, to talk — and that desire is always thwarted by something which is beyond liminal, beyond the visible. It’s not necessarily about trauma, it goes into a much more basic phenomenological difference, where we use a symbolic system like language in order to convey ideas between ourselves, when in fact I cannot be in your body, I cannot see the world as you see it, I cannot feel whatever it is that you are feeling and I certainly cannot have experienced the experiences that have made you who you are.”39 Fast’s approach of exploring and sabotaging these phenomenological differences can, in part, be compared to observations John Berger made about our Ways of Seeing (1972), and to the attention Berger paid to the man-made image in its function as an imaginative testimony of the world. He noted, “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” meaning that what we experience with our eyes can never be fully transcribed into a verbal explanation, because there is an “always-present gap between words and seeing.”40 Assuming that Fast’s practice can be read as an attempt to emphasise aforementioned gap through the complex intertwining of visual and literal storytelling, his work brings language and image into dialogic friction, using images “to conjure up the appearance of something that was absent.”41 Fast explains, “We are constantly using a symbolic interaction to get something, which is inherently untransmittable. This is essentially what language does. My intention is just to go about dealing with that. In some works this notion of the traumatic is just the very horizon, the end to what representation and what language can achieve vis-à-vis a lived experience.”42 Although Omer Fast does not consider his “preoccupation being ‘war’, per se,” his interest revolves around “a vaguer notion of conflict. And conflict is of course essential for any dramatic storytelling.”43 The approach of finding a language for that experience of conflict – and for trauma and war in particular – which is addressed in 5,000 Feet is the Best, builds on the extensive research the artist has done and continues to do throughout his practice. The video project The Casting (2007), for example – which conveys real combat stories of military personnel, performed in staged casting scenes that have a making-of character – employs a similar production strategy between testimonial and fictive elements, merging the two layers by means of montage and re-enactment. In like manner, Nostalgia (2009), a three-

39 40 41 42 43

Ibid. Berger (1972), 7. Ibid., 10. Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin. Ibid.

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channel video, is adapted from the real story of a West African man seeking asylum in Britain and is merged with the story of an artist. Other productions of Fast’s also observe the personal implication of warfare, but they do so from an entirely fictional approach, without being based on any original footage.

4.1.5

Continuity (2012)

A more recent example of this purely fictional approach is the 40-minute film project Continuity (2012) 44 , which features a middle-aged couple living in a German suburb. The plot begins with a drive to a train station, on their way to pick up their son returning from his mission in Afghanistan. From very early on, the encounter with their son and his return to his home appear awkward and out of place; behaviour between the three of them seems staged. This initial presumption proves to be correct when their act is uncovered and it becomes clear that the supposed son is not their child, but a boy hired to participate in this tightly scripted staging of the homecoming of their real son who is, in fact, deceased. Edited as a loop in three alterations, and featuring three different boys, the film addresses the trauma of the parents’ loss in a manner that is not entirely empathetical, but adding an ambiguity to their behaviour as their desperation is also revealed through a perverse lust for young flesh driven by the boredom of being stuck in a dull marriage routine. Fast summarises, “There is trauma, but it is not the trauma that you think it is. It is the trauma of emptiness. It is a suburban desert, and this kind of middle-aged Angst that these people have. They try to fill it with something and that thing is young flesh. There is this empty hole in their life that they fill with a choreography. They try to revisit this homecoming, the return of the son, which never took place. They pay these young men, who are male prostitutes, some money and they perform. These men who offer their flesh to the parents are, in a sense, also the young men whose flesh is used in order to do the state’s bidding. Who do we ship off to do our bidding in Afghanistan?”45 The bodies of the three young men in Fast’s film are political, but the expectations of their role in the plot are, again, undermined: their bodies do represent the ‘material’ of warfare and the painfully physical incarnation of the trauma of mourning a child lost to war. On the other hand, however, these men are clearly not soldiers, but 44

45

In 2016 Omer Fast extended the first version of the film to feature length, presenting it at the 2016 Berlinale. He added newly filmed footage and changed the structure of the film. The exhibition Reden ist nicht immer die Lösung (2016) at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin showed the original short version from 2012 and the new footage from 2016 on two different onechannel installations. In this text I will only refer to the 2012 version of Continuity. Fast in Forster (2016), video interview.

Trauma Narratives

prostitutes carrying out their own individual conflicts and being instrumentalised as boy toys – as objects of desire – by a middle-class couple. This twofold ambiguity of their characters’ representations is highlighted when each of the three boys sits at the dinner table with the parents, inventing stories  

 

Image 7 & 8: Omer Fast. Continuity (2012). Film still.

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about the experiences they had in combat, putting on an act, when suddenly they panic due to hallucination, experiencing flashbacks and seeing maggots or cutoff fingers on their plate. They begin to merge with the role they are supposed to be playing, but lose control of their act. The bias of the viewers’ perception of the parents as the victims of warfare due to having lost a child, is also sabotaged in a scene in which the mother looks to comfort a boy as he is lying in bed. Instead of calming him down, she puts her hand on the part of the blanket covering his genitals. It is thus made difficult for the viewer to differentiate between the couple’s parental desire to finally hold their son in their arms again, and their sexual desire for a welcome change in their seemingly empty lives. The excitement surrounding that desperately desired change is further underlined in a brutally fairy-tale-like scene, in which the couple’s ambiguous trauma is replaced by a misplaced phantom: driving along a typical German country road, they encounter a camel on their way to the train station. The camel disappears in the forest and the couple follows it, reaching a small, dry valley. What they see lying on the muddy ground are young, dead soldiers and one Afghan man collecting their weapons. Reminiscent of the composition of Jeff Wall’s light-box photograph Dead Troops Talk (1992)46 that re-enacts the macabre scenario of ambushed Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan in 1986 and their reanimation as zombies in the battlefield, Continuity uses the image’s grotesqueness to present a hallucinatory displacement of war coming home. This scene also refers to a deeply dismal version of the original idea of the tableaux vivant — a set-up that reappears in many of Omer Fast’s works.47 In the tableaux vivant tradition, actors usually freeze in a certain role and position in order to restage the composition of an image, such as a painting, for example. The only difference here is that the ‘frozen’ actors play dead bodies, and the commentating harlequin, whose historical role is to disturb such scenes, is replaced by the Afghan man who steals the fallen soldiers’ arms. In Fast’s work, as René Zechlin points out, the tableaux vivant’s function is less to “animate the ‘frozen time’, but instead he considers them as ‘envisioned images come alive’.”48 Not based on original footage accumulated by the artist beforehand, Continuity evolves entirely through a fictive narrative. It thus drafts a portrait of a trauma whilst simultaneously challenging the possibility of conveying such information in a fictive TV drama format. This strategy is particularly productive when recalling it through the lens of the aesthetic theory of performativity, which I will briefly outline: the question whether an entirely fictive utterance can have validity and 46 47

48

Cf. Scrimgeour (2015). Note: Another tableaux vivant reappears during one of the family dinner scenes in Continuity, in which one of the boys vividly tells a story about his time in Afghanistan. His story comes to life through the figures appearing behind him, standing frozen in the shadows, while the spot is directed at him. Zechlin (2009), 19.

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‘real’ consequences, whether it can act or do something beyond its fictional framework, has been discussed at large throughout the history of performative speech act theory. After two of its foundational texts – namely John L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words (1962) and Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) – questioned or even excluded fictional utterances from their theories,49 alternative viewpoints and countering opinions have been proposed by academics, including Jacques Derrida,50 Wolfang Iser,51 José Esteban Muñoz52 or Erika-Fischer Lichte.53 The latter have all shed new light on the notion that fictional quotes cannot be excluded from the theory of performativity and thus that they can, in fact, do something with the language they use: they can create experiences which spectators can be a part of, experiences that constitute new realities. These counter theories also afford a new reading of art as an event rather than an object — a turn that has been described at length in Dorothea von Hantelmann’s book How To Do Things With Art (2007). According to her, this turn “involves outlining a specific level of meaning production that basically exists in every artwork, although it is not always consciously shaped or dealt with—namely its reality-producing dimension.”54 The model of performativity can thus be regarded as a counter position to the semiotic model of representation, seeing as it substitutes the difference between the sign

49

50

51

52 53 54

Judith Butler formulates her exclusion by distancing her notion of performativity from the realm of performance: “[…] performance as a bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in this sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’ […]. (1992), 234. An even more explicit take is proposed by John L. Austin, who emphasises the exclusion of fictional utterances in the following paragraph, calling them 'parasitic': “A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. […] Language in such circumstances is […] not used seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of etiolations of language." (1975), 22. Jacques Derrida argues, “Isn’t it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, ‘nonserious’, citation (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality – or rather, a general iterability – without which there would not even be a ‘successful’ performative? So that – a paradoxical but unavoidable conclusion – a successful performative is necessarily an ‘impure’ performative, to adopt the word advanced later on by Austin when he acknowledges that there is no ‘pure’ performative.” Derrida (1988), 17. Wolfgang Iser argues that Austin’s use of the term ‘parasitic’ must elevate it to be capable of performative features, and that Austin simply did not choose to consider them in the correct context. Cf. Iser: 2002. Cf. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999). Cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte: Aesthetics of Performativity (2004). Von Hantelmann (2007), 18.

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and what it signifies, between word and act, by merging and intertwining their layers.55 Von Hantelmann considers a performative reading of art useful because “the perception of the meaning of an utterance or text [lies] not only, or not even primarily, in what it says, represents or depicts, but above all in what it does […].”56 Reading Omer Fast’s film through this performative lens, the work is liberated from functioning according to representative, historiographical or mimetic standards. The film creates a traumatic narrative, which – despite being fictional – evokes an accessible traumatic reality through the act of perception.57 In Continuity, techniques of merging multiple layers of meaning, collapsing and corrupting the roles of sign and signified act upon the spectator without offering any closure or comforting end. Their endless repetition – both narrative and formal – is misleading, bringing the spectator back to the linearity of one’s own anticipation. The infinity of the film plays a key role in this process: through its looping narrative, as Fast argues, “repetition turns into simulacra, into a radical repetition where the real is substituted by the signs of the real, a thing without referent.”58 It suggests itself to compare Omer Fast’s artistic use of repetition and simulacra to Jean Baudrilliard’s theory of the ‘hyperreal’ — a category that goes beyond the real or fictional, coined in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). The ‘hyperreal’, according to Baudrillard, “is a universe of simulation” towards which we are headed and in which we will “reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life.”59 He observes: “Concurrently with this effort toward an absolutely correspondence with the real, cinema also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself – and this is not contradictory: it is the very definition of the hyperreal.”60 Baudrillard’s analysis of the future interrelation of real and imaginary, and the cinematic medium’s role in this shift in meaning, affords another reading of Continuity: a new reality is created by means of fiction in which seemingly familiar patterns of real trauma are referenced, thereby evoking a narrative of trauma that is hyperreal, a trauma embedded in a fiction that refers to itself. The film, however, goes a step further still, as it also casts a general doubt — regarding the medium, the narrative and, ultimately, the notion of reality itself. Reality, it seems, is suggested here as an elusive concept, a notion that is symbolically exposed in the form of the camel that appears in the middle of a German forest.

55 56 57 58 59 60

Cf.Ibid., 47. Ibid., 47. Cf. Fischer-Lichte, Erika: 2004, 244-49. Fast in Albes (2015). Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), 152, 124. Ibid., 47.

Trauma Narratives

4.1.6

Spielberg’s List (2003)

Addressing traumatic narratives and making visible the complex conditions of representing warfare, both 5,000 Feet is the Best and Continuity employ fictional narratives and role-playing to expand, sabotage or replace the authentic presentation of traumatic experiences. As opposed to these films, Omer Fast’s two-channel video installation Spielberg’s List (2003) begins with the act of role-play as the initial experience. This film challenges the notion of authenticity by employing the format of the testimony and, once again, bringing to light and subverting the complex and inseparable relation between the factual and the fictional. The 65-minute film is built exclusively on documentary footage shot by Fast in Krakow, featuring interviews with local people who served as extras in the production of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), participating in scenes of deportation and life in Nazi concentration camps. Without clarifying whether the related memories go back to the time when the Nazis occupied Krakow, or whether they are recalling being part of Spielberg’s Hollywood movie, the testimonies only describe brief moments as they were witnessed and experienced. Furthermore, the film shows present-day footage of the ruins of Krakow’s concentration camp Plaszów, blending these shots with images of the remains of the movie’s restaged concentration camp set, which has never been dismantled and has become a tourist attraction. Fast filmed all footage during guided tours. This juxtaposition also raises an issue of education: which place and which narrative gives a stronger, more accessible insight into the history of the Holocaust? Is there a hierarchy, an obligation to prioritise between the copy and the real version?61 Due to the corruption of authenticity in the construct of the testimony – i.e. presenting eyewitnesses recounting ‘inauthentic’ events that are nonetheless similar to authentic experiences – the film thus explores the meaning(s) and value(s) of the representation of past events in general. Fast argues, “[You] have the problem of an authentic account told by an eyewitness to a re-enactment. Even more problematically, some of the persons who appeared in Spielberg’s film actually witnessed the events on which it was based. […] It’s not that you can’t tell the difference between history and its representation. It’s that once an event moves into the past all you have are representations.”62 In Fast’s video installation, these parallel realities and histories are joined together in one narrative, which is then displayed on two screens, placed side by side. Although a separation via this formal choice of presentation is suggested, both screens alternate between the source of the memories and the site that is depicted, 61 62

Cf. Modlinger (2015), 165. Fast in Heck (2011).

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Image 9: Omer Fast. Spielberg’s List (2003). Film still: Photo taken by extras during the production of the film Schindler’s List, 1993.

making it virtually impossible to detect the difference between individual memories of the camp and memories of the film set. Moreover, the two screens each show subtitles of the Polish-language interviews made by different translators, thus further corrupting the representation of history. For Omer Fast, splitting the image in two highlights the importance of these differences: “The work plays this kind of game, this sort of tennis between meaning, where meaning is a ball that bounces from one screen to another and you have to compile the differences in your head, perceiving both of them at the same time. […] I think of my work as pulling the coordinates together. Very often, the work presents itself literally as a terrain. Sometimes it makes sense to split it, to put up a couple of different screens with different information, and that information can allude to the same source.”63 Building around the history of the Holocaust and the history of its representation in fiction, Spielberg’s List uses self-reflexive techniques to uncover the experiences made by people in the scripted reality, all the while making that fictive representa-

63

Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin.

Trauma Narratives

 

Image 10: Omer Fast. Spielberg’s List (2003). Film still: Photo taken by extras during the production of the film Schindler’s List, 1993.

tion possible or as real. Omer Fast thus considers the film’s content to be twofold – about the event and about the representation of the event: “Spielberg’s List deals very much with cinematic and filmic representations of historical events, and of course the notion of trauma is very much inherent to that story. I think that, in order to make sense of the work, you obviously need to understand what the work is referring to. In a sense it’s referring to at least two things at the same time: one is the historical event and one is the representation of that historical event in the mainstream media — in this case, in a Hollywood film. This is how I often go about things. It’s not just about making contact with the so-called eyewitness, or first-hand-witness or a person who has experienced something, but also to talk about the conditions of making a narrative out of that experience.”64 Inherent to the film’s narrative is also a reference to, if not a critique of, the previously mentioned polemic surrounding the Holocaust’s representation in Steven

64

Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin.

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Spielberg’s fictional production Schindler’s List and its anti-representational counterpart in Claude Lanzmann’s documentary production Shoah (1985). Omer Fast’s Spielberg’s List, in turn, employs the rational documentary aesthetics of testimonial interviews, as well as the images of present-day locations used in Shoah, while at the same time referring to the production of the fictional narrative Schindler’s List. Addressing the issue of the Holocaust’s representation by replacing the event with its re-enactment and by presenting its respective actors as relators of testimonies in a documentary manner, Fast reverses the circulation from experience to representation. Hence, the testimonies relate the experience of producing a representation. In Spielberg’s List, the central traumatic event of the Holocaust is thus utilised as a junction to make visible the layers of various productions of meaning by means of representations of collective and individual histories and memories. It opens up the process of truth-finding, while at the same time reminding us of the conditions that are required to arrive at that truth, and under which conditions this truth is being perceived.

4.2

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

The Canadian artist duo Cardiff and Miller, born 1957 and 1960, respectively, have collaboratively produced installations since 1995, after meeting in art school in 1980. With few exceptions, their theatrical and immersive installations always incorporate sound as the primary medium. Shown as either pure sound sculptures or sound spaces (Forty Part Motet (2001), Murder of Crows (2008), Forest (for a thousand years...) (2012)), or accessible sound environments (Storm Room (2009), Paradise Institute (2001), The Dark Pool (1995)), the artists also interweave binaural sounds, music and recorded voices with installations that are enclosed and often have a kinetic structure. Their participatory sound walks (The City of Forking Paths (2014), Alter Bahnhof Video Walk, (2012)), in which they often employ binaural sound recordings and headphones for participants, produce acoustics so real that the voices and sounds from the recording can hardly be distinguished from the actual surrounding sounds beyond the headphones. The notion of reality within the realm of sound is thus blurred and questioned in its very philosophical concept. Cardiff and Miller emphasise the use of sound because of its immersive and time-collapsing qualities, as Cardiff explains, “Sound is invisible and fluid and you can deal with emotions in a more complex way than with purely visuals. It also uses time in a unique way. You can mix sounds from various decades and transport people through time seamlessly.”65

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Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal email interview, 13/05/2016.

Trauma Narratives

The potential to create a subconscious affection within spectators leads the artists to employing music that represents a feeling or an atmosphere, in an effort to move people. The use of sound, and particularly that of music, facilitates an access to the audience’s emotions, allowing them to become immersed in a more intense way. Cardiff believes: “[p]eople need to have this emotional release. They need to have the ability to be in the moment and to feel the senses, the presence and the spirituality that music […] brings to them.”66 A recurring formal decision in their practice is the cube, which appears as a stage for theatrical compositions and, as Cardiff explains, creates a “room within the room. A transportation device like the TARDIS67 .”68 Describing their own practice as a hybrid between visual art, theatre, dance, opera and musical,69 their use of sound unites all of these disciplines and aims to bypass the spectators’ intellect in order to emotionally affect their memories or stimulate narrative fantasies created without a concrete or linear story that is defined by the artists. Having many parallels to techniques of illusion and spectacle typically associated with the cinema or the theatre, they “use theatrical motifs and methods to create an atmosphere”70 in which spectators are often invited to interact, become immersed or even get lost within. Janet Cardiff “We always imagine our audience as people who are open-minded, who want to get into the play, who will let their sense of logic, science and reality just go.”   George Bures Miller “We want them to be explorers or detectives.”71 Testing the potential of audio-visual material72 in order to involve spectators in soundscapes and sound installations, the practice of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller shares a key aspect with the previously introduced work of Omer Fast. Not only do all three artists see the spectators as ‘detectives’ who have been challenged to decipher incomplete or complex narrative structures that involve language, objects, images and sound, they also all employ immersive techniques so as

66 67

68 69 70 71 72

Cardiff, quoted on wall text next to the sound installation Forty-Part Motet (2001) at NelsonAtkins Museum in Kansas City, USA in 2017. The TARDIS, or ‘Time And Relative Dimension In Space’, is an object shaped like a cube that functions as a time machine and spacecraft in the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. Cardiff, Janet and Miller, George Bures: Personal interview, 13/05/2016. Cardiff and Miller in Blegvad (2014). Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/2016. Cardiff and Miller in Blegvad (2014). Cf. Lehmann (2008), 19.

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to involve exhibition visitors emotionally and to confuse the notion of reality, altering how it is habitually perceived. Cardiff relates these practices to their doubts related to the stability of reality: “I am interested in philosophical issues about what is reality and how we can only perceive it through our senses. And that our senses fool us all the time, so of course what we think of reality is unstable. Perhaps that’s why we work with illusion so much…it makes the viewer think about these issues too.”73 While their works directly reference fictional or musical plots, as well as employ tropes from the film and entertainment industry, Cardiff and Miller’s practice relocates the perception of socio-political and historical processes on an intuitive level to an “emotional environment that viewers can enter into”74 and experience. Their work aims at an affective and less cognitive perception. In this sense, the artists’ practice rarely addresses specific issues of trauma, but it does very much address an overall synaesthetic sensation of traumatic events and traumatic scenes, which is a “blend of truth, emotional resonance and physical structure or virtual theatricality.”75 Intending to transport different kinds of realities, they aim to “bring spectators into a different world metaphorically.”76

4.2.1

The Killing Machine (2007)

Within the context of the present investigation of how trauma is represented in contemporary aesthetic practices, one of the artist duo’s works is particularly relevant to the discussion, as it offers an unexpected perspective that reflects the different social behaviours that might arise when witnessing images of trauma. The Killing Machine challenges the perception of traumatic imagery as ambiguously pleasurable and terrifying at the same time; it explores the social and ethical implications of watching traumatic events and another person’s physical sensation of pain through the media. Finalised in 2007, The Killing Machine is a 5-minute multi-media installation that involves robotics, light and sound, and was first exhibited in the centre of a large, white room at MACBA in Barcelona.77 It is a square construction – a room without walls – positioned in the middle of the exhibition space. Four vertical poles hold five horizontal poles that form a ceiling, framing the outlines of a cuboid

73 74 75 76 77

Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/016. Ibid. Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/2016. Cardiff and Miller in Blegvad (2014). I experienced the work at MACBA in Barcelona in 2007. It is now part of the permanent MoMA collection , NYC.

Trauma Narratives

space.78 In the centre of that cube is an electric dental chair covered in fake pink fur, leather straps and spikes. Above the chair is a tripod holding a large speaker in the shape of a megaphone on the one side, a disco ball in the middle and the other side holds a counter weight. Next to the chair are two robotic arms, and there are also lamps and spotlights, wooden shelves, speakers, a white projector screen, mirrors, a drum, an electric guitar, cables, machines or computers and various control systems. Everything about the arrangement gives the impression of being on standby mode. Several old TVs, placed in and outside of the cube, are turned off. Only one small lamp, placed on top of a desk with a chair right outside the cuboid, is switched on and illuminates the top of a plywood box, which houses technical equipment such as amplifiers and has a large red button on its upper surface. The visitor, it appears, is invited to press that button and to sit down at the desk, facing the inside of the cuboid. Once the red button has been pressed, the light on the desk goes off and another lamp goes on, illuminating the empty dental chair. The tripod above the chair begins to rotate slowly until the speaker is behind the headpiece of the chair. A high-pitched tone, originating from a string instrument, sets in and turns into a tensely fierce melody — the composition is “Heartstrings” by Freida Abtan, with two or more strings. One robotic arm with a small lamp at its tips begins to move, stretching out to its full length and hovering over the dental chair as if it were a predator, approaching the invisible patient or victim like a snake or a dinosaur might approach their prey. A spotlight aimed at the robotic arm augments this frightful resemblance by casting the robot’s shadow onto the projector screen and, larger yet, onto the walls of the exhibition space. The second robotic arm is raised and uses its pneumonic pistons to push out a needle with a loud sound. It bends over the chair, which, in turn, is now being lifted and then stretched out into a bed. A drumstick hammers on violin strings. The light of the installation turns red and blue, the old TVs play white noise while the second robotic arm now moves hectically over the outstretched chair and pushes its long needle into or onto several places of the invisible patient or victim. The light of the installation turns blue, while the speaker and the two robotic arms seem to hesitate or rest for a moment, facing each other and hovering over the headpiece of the outstretched chair. A spotlight is switched on, illuminating the disco ball installed on the cuboid’s ceiling, thus casting small dots of light across the entire exhibition space. The arms continue to attack the invisible victim on the empty chair, while the tripod, speaker and disco ball begin to rotate once again. The tense music transitions into a less dramatic melody and the arms now slide forward and backward along the chair, without pushing the needle. The chair rises back up into its original sitting position and the blue light disappears. A peeping tone coincides with all light shutting down. The 78

It measures 118 x 157 x 98 cm.

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room is in complete darkness for a second, until the small desk lamp illuminates nothing save for the red button once again. After the set time window of 5 minutes, the machine ends abruptly, lights shut down, movements freeze and the spectacle of killing mutes. Everything is back to how it was.

Image 11: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine (2007). Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez.

4.2.2

Violence and Thrill

By re-establishing a sense of confidence in the safe space of the museum’s institutional framework as the machine shuts back down into stand-by mode, The Killing Machine leaves spectators overwhelmed and confused not only in regard to what they have just witnessed, but also to what they were the ones to start in the first place: a dystopian torture machine? A theatre piece? A dance or a ballet? The Killing Machine is not only a horrifying representation of a traumatic event, complete with an auto-generated immersive atmosphere, but a grotesque hybrid of spectacle and atrocity, or as Cardiff describes, “beauty and death together”79 . Its carefully carried 79

Cardiff and Miller in Blegvad (2014).

Trauma Narratives

 

Image 12 & 13: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine (2007). Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez.

out choreography and composition are put into stark contrast with the upsetting images of torture the machine evokes within the viewers. The first drafts for The Killing Machine date back to 2005, when Cardiff and Miller lived in Berlin and reacted through their practice to current political events and to the media images of war to which they felt exposed to. The work thus encompasses several influences from a time the artists have labelled the ‘Bush decade’ for themselves, a decade which they describe as being ‘bleak’: “After 9/11 everything changed so radically in a way, and maybe it really didn’t, but it did in the mind or in the media.”80 Reflecting on the social and political aftermath of 9/11 in particular – i.e. torture procedures and high numbers of death penalty sentences – they explain: “[w]e made this work during the early years of the Iraq War and the issues of torture that came out around prisoners at Abu Ghraib.”81 The images that were leaked in 2004 (originally by CBS News) from the prison of Abu Ghraib in Iraq showed US-Army and CIA personnel abusing prisoners and posing happily with violated inmates for photos. The sadistic torture the prisoners were subjected to was made visible in many publicly accessible visuals, and these images had an important emotional impact on society, causing public outrage and resulting in a demand for changes in 80 81

Cardiff in Young (2012). Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/2016.

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political personnel and strategy (The Economist’s headline read “Resign, Rumsfeld” and was but one of many reactions to the scandal). The photos were barely bearable to behold and, as Roger Luckhurst82 argues, “have insistently raised questions of the representation of torture and our traumatic reactions to it.”83 But despite the extreme violence shown in the images, their content did not reveal one traumatic incident in the history of the Iraq War, but instead their appearance was crucial to uncovering the “coherent and conscious policy, backed by legal commentary and detailed operational parameters clearly stated along the chain of command.”84 The scandal of Abu Graibh was not an exception or one singular traumatic event; it made visible standard procedures legalised trough the US government at the time. The installation The Killing Machine is thus quite direct regarding the political issue it engages with. Its agenda, however, remains purposefully ambiguous: addressing the strategic cruelty and the emotional impact inherent to these images of torture through an artistic vocabulary of drama and tropes of entertainment, the installation has a meta-reflexive notion of the pleasure of cruelty and control at its core. The borders between trauma and entertainment become uncomfortably fluid. Together, these two aspects form a sense of participatory ‘traumatainment’ or ‘torture-porn’ – terminology used to describe horror and splatter movies – of which the spectator unavoidably becomes a consumer, having to endure it visually and aurally when gathered around the machine. The only respite to be had is by leaving the exhibition space. In this sense, the work raises awareness of the consuming and voyeuristic public gaze that is inherent to the ‘wound culture’ that we live in, as Mark Seltzer has coined it. Seltzer believes that since “the understanding of the modern subject has become inseparable from the categories of shock and trauma, modernity has come to be understood under the sign of the wound.”85 He considers public space as pathological space:

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Luckhurst follows the question of whether torture can be seen as an example of the trauma paradigm and the aesthetic debate inherent to its concept, and he rightly comes to the conclusion that – like trauma – “torture is defined by a linguistic limit, by an experience of ineffability.” It would be important to realise the “crucial significance of what Abu Ghraib represented. This was not necessarily a state of exception, a breach, a stepping beyond the limit, something that might be aligned to how we have come to think about trauma.” Therefore “[t]hese images needed to be made visible and disseminated, and their wide-scale appropriation and refunctioning in the press, in graffiti, in activist art and in film served as a testamentary political function. The images were not diluted or disrespected; that their meanings were continually de- and re-contextualized was part of their explosive power. In this phase, at least, an aesthetic of unspeakability or unrepresentability would fail to register how cultural forms have actually responded to our torturous times.” Luckhurst (2010), 14-15. Luckhurst (2010), 13-14. Ibid., 14. Seltzer (1997), 18.

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“The notion of the public sphere has become inseparable from the collective gathering around sites of wounding, trauma, and pathology: sociality and the wound have become inseparable. To the extent that trauma serves as another name for the subject in wound culture, it holds the place of a sociality premised on the wound: a sociality that gathers, and a public that meets, in the spectacle of the untoward accident and in an identification with the world insofar as it is a hostile place – the pathological public sphere.”86 The Killing Machine, too, represents a spectacular pathological space that is being examined by an audience: the machine, an automatized weapon used as a bodily extension to fulfil the act of torture and execution, is presented as a stage of atrocity to be observed. In doing so, it reflects on the qualities of that very observation. As Susan Sontag wrote in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), it is in the nature of public violence and atrocities to challenge their ‘audience’ to adopt uncomfortable positions. She observes: “the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look.”87 The spectacular representation of violence and trauma in the installation thus emphasises the “distinction between the thrill and the terror felt before so-called artificial forms of violence,”88 as Tobin Siebers argues. That is to say that the spectator’s own experience may not only be one of feeling repelled by the torture, but, as Cardiff points out, may also entail a certain notion of pleasure: “It was pretty obvious to us that people enjoy seeing images of torture. We don’t just enjoy seeing them as media consumers, but several studies have shown that most of us have it in us to be torturers ourselves, if we feel we have absolute control. This has been echoed in so many situations, from domestic violence to Nazi concentration camps. That’s why the pressing of the button was so important.”89 The artists confront viewers with a ‘Killing Machine’ that simulates a sadistic scene of torture for which the spectator is partly responsible and can thus not choose to respond with an indifferent response or behaviour. Yet it is certainly not only the ‘indifferent’ spectator who is challenged to act — the responsibility of the imagetaker (or maker) becomes a matter of concern and is put into question as well, particularly by referring to the photographs of Abu Graibh as a source of inspiration. Although it is an artwork, The Killing Machine is not innocent, for ‘images’, as Alfredo Jaar90 has summarised so well, “are not innocent. Every single image out

86 87 88 89 90

Ibid., 24. Sontag (2003) 37-38. Siebers, (2003), 14. Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/2016. Images would become compositions that inherently imply a subjective perspective, and this, as the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar has observed, can also imply an ideological notion. His The

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there in the world represents a conception of the world.”91 The image of brutality inevitably leads back to its creator. This perspective is essential in the sense of what John Berger described as a conscious way of seeing and taking decisions through the act of looking. He has stated that “[e]very image embodies a way of seeing.”92 The participatory element of the button is equally seductive and brutal, questioning the agenda of the confrontation, which the artists envisage for the exhibition visitors. While the scenic staging of the Killing Machine can be considered a premise for the performative situation it generates,93 the button immediately involves the spectators’ bodies and it generates the experience of a fictional trauma: not in the role of the victim, but from multiple perspectives: the witness, the voyeur, the participant and, eventually, the perpetrator. The precarious and shifting position between being a consumer and prosumer of ‘traumatainment’ is central to The Killing Machine and refers to society’s response and our conscious decision of looking at and acting upon public violence and trauma. The installation thus encourages viewers to reflect on the dilemma of being witnesses to violent images, and on the difficult ethical handling between both the desire to behave accurately when confronted with the traumatic scene unfolding before them, as well as to become aware of the seductive process of being entertained by violence.

4.2.3

Participation

By means of its participatory elements, viewers of the The Killing Machine experience the installation as a situation that they are involved in, rather than a traditional work of art that is to be looked at. The ‘work of art’, as Dorothea Hantelmann understands the performative reading of visual art, is thus produced inside of the viewers — through their physical presence, their sensation and their conscious experience of the installation’s atmosphere.94 According to Annette Jael Lehmann, this participatory role of the spectators has constitutive features, which allows them to change their passive presence into participatory activity. From this position, they influence the event-character of art, as much as the process of aesthetic experience.95 Performatively, the installation puts spectators in a crisis, forcing them to actively react to and become part of the piece and the violence it entails, creating

91 92 93 94 95

Rwanda Project (1994-2000) consists of a series of works and installations through which he questioned how the Rwandan genocide had been represented in Western media and that the lack of media coverage – essentially the lack of images – implied a political ignorance (or disinterest). Jaar in Lund (2013), documentary video. Berger (1972), 10. Cf. Lehmann and Kolesch (2002), 363. Cf. Hantelmann (2007), 65. Cf. Lehmann (2008), 11.

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a sense of theatrical co-presence between the machine and the audience.96 Within this dynamic co-presence between the object and the subjects, the spectators’ reactions thus manifest in unforeseeable ways, allowing for their subjective response to influence the evolvement of the work drastically. In a violent context such as is suggested in The Killing Machine, this participation cannot, however, be read as a mere uncritical tool of participatory art whose purpose it is simply to activate spectators and provide a good time in the form of entertainment. Quite the contrary: it criticises the type of unthoughtful involvement and rash participation such as the button invites like a forbidden fruit. It thus emphasises the ambiguousness of the concept of participation as such, which, as Markus Miessen elaborates at length in his book The Nightmare of Participation (2010), always carries a conflict within it.97 By offering a red button for the audience to push, The Killing Machine employs an aesthetic element that is referential to traditional methods of science-exhibition presentations that became popular in the 19th century and often called for hands-on involvement in the interest of activating visitors and creating illusions before their very eyes. Regarding the concept of interactivity, Alison Griffith – a researcher in the history of interactive museum display formats – argues, the “‘interactive push-button’ […] extends an invitation to the spectator to insert their bodies and minds into the activity and affect an outcome via the interactive experiences.”98 However, the interactivity envisaged within The Killing Machine aims not only at the withdrawal of the spectators’ critical distance to the traumatic scene, it turns them into accomplices burdened with the perverted guilt of having started the torture instrument. Their social behaviour in regard to scenes of torture within and beyond the exhibition space becomes key to the five-minute duration of the installation. The invitation to press the button thus raises an ethical problem that Cardiff and Miller’s work shares with previous ‘interactive’ installations in the recent history of art, such as Felix Gonzales-Torres’ Candy Spills, a mound of candy from which visitors are encouraged to help themselves from as much as they please. Gonzales-Torres’ work reflects what curator Nicolas Bourriaud sees as “our relationship to authority and the way museum guards use their power; our sense of moderation and the nature of our relationship to the work of art.”99 The Killing Machine invites its spectators to engage in a personal and emotional relation with the machine, and to adopt an inter-subjective position towards the artwork. The button thus comes with a sense of risk that is typical to participatory 96 97

98 99

See also: Fischer-Lichte (2004), 80. See also Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York, London: Verso Books, 2012; and Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Claire Bishop. Whitechapel Gallery/The MIT Press, 2006. Griffith (2008), 3. Bourriaud (2002), 56-57.

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art forms such as the installation, seeing as it engenders leaving the anonymous space which spectators are accustomed to inhabiting. This type of risk in participatory installations can, according to Barbara Gronau, multiply the work’s character of an event100 and thus performatively generate an experience. In this ‘relational realm’, as Bourriaud has coined it, spectators are urged to give up their distanced criticality and neutrality in order to become engaged in a social situation. The spectators’ behaviour, be it ignorant, pleased or displeased or even participatory, is thus revealed as consequential. Moreover, beyond the activation of the button, The Killing Machine challenges the spectators’ passiveness by means of its spatial qualities as an installation, granting them a more constitutive role and mobilising them to meander through it, to engage with the space and make conscious decisions regarding what to look at and which way to go. This may be because installations, as Juliane Rebentisch argues, are not only seen by the viewer, they reflect the aesthetic practice of viewing.101 In this sense, The Killing Machine acts meta-reflectively and critically on the spectators’ participatory engagement and their behaviour towards the traumatic scene.

4.2.4

Pained Bodies

The missing body of the imaginary victim, subjected to the The Killing Machine’s torture, has a strong presence despite its physical absence: the invisibility of the pained body, as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev notes, could be interpreted as the work’s central aspect: she suggests reading the installation through the lens of Judith Butler’s notion of lives and bodies that are not felt as being precarious in an era in which the abundance of representational images of war and terror disrupts the perception of the body’s value. Therefore, as Christov-Barkargiev argues, “if lives are not felt as precarious, then a great amount of pain can be perpetrated.”102 Butler’s political theory referred to here reads as follows: “We have been turned away from the face, sometimes through the very image of the face, one that is meant to convey the inhuman, the already dead, that which is not precariousness and cannot, therefore, be killed; this is the face that we are nevertheless asked to kill, as if ridding the world of this face would return us to the human rather than consummate our own inhumanity. One would need to hear the face as it speaks in something other than language to know the precariousness of life that is at stake. But what media will let us know and feel that frailty, know and feel at the limits of representation as it is currently cultivated and maintained?”103 100 101 102 103

Cf. Gronau (2010), 25, 26. Cf. Rebentisch (2003), 16. Christov-Barkargiev, in Cardiff and Miller, interviewed by Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev (2007). Butler (2004), 151.

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Image 14: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine (2007). Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez.

With this discussion regarding the necessity of being aware of the precarious human bodies that are involved, tortured and killed in the wars and global conflict zones, Butler has dedicated part of her research to the question of what role media images might play in this process of making-aware and moving viewers to taking an ethical position. Not without considerable scepticism towards the endless showing of violence of war in the public visual repertoire, and towards generally difficult “contemporary conditions of representation”, she nonetheless believes that images have the power to convey the bodies’ precariousness to their viewers. She explains this theory by citing the outrage caused by the photographs of the Vietnam War within the American society: “In the Vietnam War, it was the pictures of the children burning and dying from napalm that brought the US public to a sense of shock, outrage, remorse, and grief. These were precisely pictures we were not supposed to see, and they disrupted the visual field and the entire sense of public identity that was built upon that field. The images furnished a reality, but they also showed a reality that disrupted the

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hegemonic field of representation itself. Despite their graphic effectivity, the images pointed somewhere else, beyond themselves, to a life and to a precariousness that they could not show. It was from that apprehension of the precariousness of those lives we destroyed that many US citizens came to develop an important and vital consensus against the war. But if we continue to discount the words that deliver that message to us, and if the media will not run those pictures, and if those lives remain unnameable and ungrievable, if they do not appear in their precariousness and their destruction, we will not be moved. We will not return to a sense of ethical outrage that is, distinctively, for an Other, in the name of an Other.”104 In line of this study’s central argument, Butler’s theory of the present condition in which a sense of human life’s precariousness has been lost, raises a question regarding the representational strategies employed by Cardiff and Miller in their work: what does the work represent? Although it stages an invisible traumatised body of a victim, it does not employ anti-representational aesthetics of absence. Instead, it may be said that it represents both the perpetrator and the gaze of the witness embodied in the activated and conflicted body of the spectator. According to Butler, viewers of gruesome images usually have an executive but nonetheless unrepresented position: “And if we are to understand ourselves as interpellated anywhere in these images, it is precisely as the unrepresented viewer, the one who looks on, the one who is captured by no image at all, but whose charge it is to capture and subdue, if not eviscerate, the image at hand.”105 In Cardiff and Miller’s installation the commonly unrepresented spectators of violent images are identified, as the representational focus shifts from the missing victim to the present viewer who is confronted with the fictional scenario of trauma. While The Killing Machine does not actually blame singular spectators for the role they have played within the framework of the piece, it does raise the question of blame in regard to the social reaction to watching traumatic imagery in general. Confronting spectators with the repressed ‘fear’ of – as David Freedberg suggests – “the strength of the effects of images on ourselves,”106 this is brought about by putting viewers in charge of the situation, making their position as active consumers of images more visible and thus revealing their anonymity by means of immersion and affect. If it is the spectator who is represented by The Killing Machine, how are the performative modes of affection related to the representation of trauma? “Representation,” Cardiff and Miller believe, “can definitely confront and reflect trauma. Art just goes about it in a way that’s metaphorical.”107 The traumatic event 104 105 106 107

Ibid., 143. Ibid. Freedberg (1991), 429. Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/2016.

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in The Killing Machine – the threat of pain and of execution – is purely imaginary, but it creates affection. Addressing the viewers’ empathetic perception modes by conjuring up the notion of pain and torture, it creates an emotional and even physical access to an experience of trauma within the secure setting of the exhibition’s fictional and institutional framework. This notion is also key to the empathy-driven theory of the ‘emphatic view’ on trauma art, coined by art historian Jill Bennett. In her theory, the metaphorical “conveyance of suffering through imagery” calls for an affective response. This is because she believes that the representation of pain “is possible only insofar as images have the capacity to address the spectator’s own bodily memory.”108 Evoking a physical sensation, she ascribes art that uses “the grammar of an expression of pain, [which] touches us viscerally” with the capacity to “challenge […] the notion that trauma exists in the realm of the unspeakable.”109 In The Killing Machine this ‘expression of pain’ is however not represented by means of an actual or fictional body, but rather via the device that is intended to hurt this body. Stretched out to its full length, the empty dental chair shares certain formal aesthetics with those of the cross, so that with its procession of torture and killing it is inevitably referential to a crucifixion. Indeed, this formal similarity and the subject of pain align the installation’s visual appearance with a tradition of motifs that have profound roots in Christian iconography, particularly the brutal representations of Jesus’ suffering during his crucifixion in devotional images. In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry refers to the pain represented in these images as being driven by an agency to act as a religious ‘vehicle of verification’; according to her, most of the bible’s scenes of pain can be contextualised within issues of doubt and disbelief, which are counteracted or even eliminated by the images of Christ’s pain and the visual awareness of his body. As opposed to God, who lacks body and voice, Scarry suggests that it is the image of the suffering Christ that is meant to facilitate human accessibility, providing an intimate contact mediated by his corporeality. 110 She argues, “the invisible […] divine power has a visible substantiation in the alterations in body tissue it is able to bring about. […] wounding re-enacts the creation because it re-enacts the power of alteration that has its first profound occurrence in creation.”111 Bennett also ascribes the ability to convey “the essence of Christ’s sacrifice, the meaning of suffering, by promoting and facilitating an empathetic imitation of Christ”112 to devotional images. By not providing a body one could relate to and thus also denying a higher purpose that would legitimise the pain and torture, The Killing Machine appears to shatter faithful devotion. It would seem that there is no higher meaning to the act of killing that 108 109 110 111 112

Bennett (2005), 36. Ibid., 49. Cf. Scarry (1985), 202, 213. Scarry (1985), 183. Bennett (2005), 36.

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is suggested, nor is there a narrative that spectators would be able to follow. The ‘vehicle of verification’ instead shifts towards the perception of the self — towards the act of witnessing, the awareness of one’s own gaze.

4.2.5

Three-Dimensional Writing

“Storytelling has always intrigued us. We’ve found various ways to make it function so that the listener, participant and viewer can take part in it. We never think of using narrative in art-making as a strategy. We just use it. That’s sounds facile, but we just use what comes naturally to us, and we don’t intentionally or intellectually decide what will work as it usually doesn’t when we overthink the process. We like to create meaning in the periphery, so we have to do this by intuition and response to our own work.”113 The narrative of The Killing Machine follows a classic dramatic curve in three acts: the scene begins with an exposition, the rising action then reaches the climax, which is followed by the falling action that ends in an abrupt resolution. This structure is suggested by the use of movement, light and particularly by the music, in which tension increases latently and resolves into softer and slower tones towards the end of the piece. But even with the torture theme inspired by the accounts of Abu Graibh and a strong reference to the US punishment system, an architectural framework, a musical soundtrack, a choreography of movements and the linear framework of a plot, The Killing Machine lacks a story and characters — a void that is underlined by the empty dental chair over which the robotic arms hover. It is thus not only the interactive and physical presence of the spectators that fills the gap in the narrative — the leading actor is missing because the absence of this very character facilitates the completion of the traumatic narrative in the spectators’ minds. Janet Cardiff refers to this strategy as three-dimensional writing: “I think the form we end up working in requires some writing. It’s a kind of threedimensional writing, triggering people’s ideas and memories rather than creating full scenes, and we’re able to complement the writing with sound effects, and in the case of the video walks with visuals.”114 Despite the absence of a completed narrative, the installation has references not only to events that took place at the time of its creation, but also to Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie”), published in 1919. The story is set in an unnamed penal colony and focuses on a sadistic execution machine that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner onto his skin until he bleeds out

113 114

Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/2016. Cardiff and Miller in Young (2012).

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and dies within the course of the machine’s 12-hour torture process. A European explorer comes to visit the colony and the officer in charge excitedly and proudly shows him the device, presently in stand-by mode, explaining all of its technical details in depth. Believing in the machine’s juridical justice and praising the mystical, religious epiphany it would generate within the tortured prisoner, the officer tries to convince the explorer to speak out in favour of the machine and its continued usage to the leading commander. Meanwhile, the sentenced prisoner and a guard stand next to the machine and listen to the detailed description of its process as well. Unable to convince the explorer, the officer is driven mad and programmes the words ‘be just’ into the machine, intending to kill himself via the machine. The machine, however, malfunctions and stabs him to death less slowly and less ‘elegantly’ than when it had been programmed to execute condemned prisoners in the past, eventually breaking due to its own technical disorder. Going against the reader’s expectations, the explorer does not turn out to be the hero, but leaves the colony without helping the prisoners, apparently indifferent to their situation, or perhaps even convinced of the colony’s social function. “The Killing Machine,” as Cardiff argues, “was directly inspired by the bureaucratic torture in the Kafka story.”115 Requiring the officer’s knowledge regarding deciphering and programming, Kafka’s machine was as brutal as it was old-fashioned and complicated in its handling. Formally, the installation reflects these antiquated mechanic aesthetics, although they only appear old-fashioned. Also, its details and features, such as the harrow that carves the sentence into the prisoner’s pained body, reappears in the robotic arm’s pikes. Most importantly, both versions introduce the empty machine and its technical functions in the place of a leading role by a human figure. In both cases, the machine is personified and questioned as a device of justice and punishment. While Kafka’s story remains neutral and strangely detached from any emotional tone or bias, however, the installation adds an emotional component through its immersive use of light, movement and music. Inspired by real events and fictional narratives, The Killing Machine thus acts as a metaphorical symbol, making an emotional commentary on juridical punishment and conditions of confinement. This is further underlined by another reference the artists name as an inspirational source for their work: Errol Morris’s film Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999), a documentary portrait of a man who inspected and designed modifications on electric chairs and other execution facilities for capital punishment in US prisons. The documentary gives insight into his former activity as an advisor and his determined positive view of the execution machines. The notion of viciousness ascribed to the purpose of these devices is emphasised, because Leuchter is concerned primarily with their functional efficiency 115

Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/2016.

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and apparently enjoys demonstrating their operational readiness. By addressing the act of capital execution in which the technical functions are highlighted by means of performing ’test runs’ without the presence of an actual human being or human emotions, simply for the pleasure of watching a machine in action, Cardiff and Miller’s work also raises a political question alongside the dystopian symbolic value of the brutal artefact itself. Cardiff: “The original idea of the Killing Machine was to create a museum of torture. We had in our minds this old warehouse where […] you come across this machine, this thing, sitting there, hasn't been used for twenty years. But the button still has got a light on it.”116 “The Killing Machine,” as Cardiff and Miller explain, “came out of research we had done for Pandemonium at the Eastern State Penitentiary Museum in Philadelphia, where we did a very large audio work.”117 Pandemonium, a site-specific sound installation created by Cardiff and Miller in 2005, revived what was once the world’s most famous and costly prison, which had been closed but not cleaned up since 1971 and was abandoned and derelict when the artist duo chose to utilise the space. Installing hidden percussion instruments drumming against found objects and pieces of furniture in each of the 120 isolation cells of the entire prison cellblock, the composition began with only two percussions that seemed to imitate a form of communication by knocking on the walls between two prison cells. Referring to the brutal imprisonment conditions of the building’s history, the knocking sound created noise where there was once only silence:“[T]he concept of the cells was that they were torturing people through silence. They couldn’t even hear tapping from the next person. They had everybody isolated so they would turn to god, but instead they turned to insanity.”118 During its running time, the knocking composition was diffused throughout the entire building, creating an all-encompassing, cacophony-like tapping sound — the soundscape of a prison riot. The sound installation thus created an acoustic and spatial atmosphere visitors could walk through and experience within the architecture of the old gothic building, putting the loftiness and beauty of the high arches into stark contrast with the small, dark isolation cells. “We started to read a lot of prisoners’ writing and how horrific the death penalty that still exists in the United States is. So that research really fed into the next piece that followed.”119

116 117 118 119

Cardiff and Miller interviewed by Maria Kappel Blegvad (2014). Cardiff, Janet and Bures Miller, George: Personal interview, 13/05/2016. Cardiff in artist talk with Christov-Barkargiev (2012). Ibid.

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4.2.6

Transparent Space

Addressing both the current punishment conditions and the emotional state of detainees, there is an analogy in the formal evolvement from The Killing Machine to Pandemonium. As spectators could walk and wander freely through the architectural setting of Pandemonium, the cruelty inherent to the building became clear within the former isolation cells, with walls so thick they would mute all outside noise. In comparison, the cuboid space of The Killing Machine is stripped of its walls, but the cube retains its shape, providing a stage for the act of killing. The cube does not suggest any form of freedom, but instead uses leather straps similar to those in execution cells to tie the invisible victim to the chair, affording spectators a voyeuristic gaze onto the torture procedure from all sides. Alluding to structures of power and surveillance, Christov-Bakargiev relates this spatial decision of The Killing Machine to Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘all-seeing’ power’ or ‘total visibility’120 which he outlines in his conversation on “The Eye of Power” with Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot. Foucault developed this theory derived from Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century publication Panopticon, which introduces the architectural design of a perimeter prison building in which guards can watch prisoners at all times in their isolated cells. “In short,” Foucault summarises Bentham’s technique of power execution, “the principle of the dungeon is reversed; daylight and the overseer’s gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness, which afforded after all a sort of protection. […] He [Bentham] invented a technology of power designed to solve the problems of surveillance. […] There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze.”121 With an optical system that would facilitate the exercise of power and control, and would literally illuminate dark and hidden spaces, the sketch of the ‘Panopticon’ (although it was never actually built) was influential in later constructions that were part of the penal system, hospitals and school buildings. Addressing the ‘all-seeing’ power as a symptom of our modern times’ mechanisms of dominance, Foucault argues, “[t]he tendency of Bentham’s thought is archaic in the importance it gives to the gaze; but it is very modern in the general importance it assigns to techniques of power.”122 Emerging as an architectural pattern in The Killing Machine, the transparency of space, too, functions as a technique of control and thus assigns power to the gaze of the viewer who is confronted with the traumatic scene. The notion of control and

120 Ibid. 121 Focault in Barou and Perrot (1980), 147, 148, 155. 122 Ibid. 160.

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Image 15 and 16: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Pandemonium (2005-7).

surveillance, perhaps partly inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, is emphasised by the TV screens playing only white noise, but nevertheless suggestive of being part of the equipment of a control room with live-broadcast. While affording a transparent and full view from all perspectives, the installation’s architectural structure cannot be physically entered but rather only walked around. This formal decision of inaccessibility was felt to be necessary by the artists as a means to making spectators “enter the piece with their imagination.”123 Paradoxically, however, The Killing Machine does engender another kind of physically accessible space: a transparent space of sound, which is all encompassing within the space the installation is placed in. The sound and its corresponding images create an atmosphere, which, as Gernot Böhme relates to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘Aura’, is a sphere of presence of something; it has its own reality in space.124 The dramatic “Heartstring” score that underlines the 4-minute killing procedure furnishes the space with sound and collapses the fictive border of the staged scenario. The artists compare this strategy to the limits of theatre and the theatrical 123 Cardiff and Miller in Blegvad (2014). 124 Cf. Böhme (1995), 33.

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fourth wall: “With sound, when the viewers close their eyes, they can be in a different world than they can be in the theater.”125 This intense use of sound also appears in other architecturally non-accessible installations by the artist duo, such as Opera for a Small Room (2005), which is a closed cuboid space that contains almost two thousand records, record players and twenty-four antique loudspeakers, or The Carnie (2010), a rotating child’s carousel with synchronised music and light. Despite not involving the spectators’ bodies in their architectural structure, these works generate strong effects and atmospheres through their use of, as Ralf Beil puts it, ‘hyperreal’126 sound.

4.3

An Infinite Story

Exploring and researching the narrative strategies employed in the artistic practices of Omer Fast and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller – notably when looking at these two positions in direct comparison with one another – shows that both standpoints challenge definite readings of concepts such as fiction and fact, particularly in regard to the representation of trauma, traumatic memories and violence. The works do not provide comfort, nor do they offer answers to the conflicts they address or evoke. Both utilise open-ended, infinite or looping narratives as strategies of confusion, withdrawing linearity and all forms of familiar dramatic structures, distorting the rhythm and the sense for what is right and wrong, scripted and non-scripted, real or acted gestures. Beginnings and endings merge, all sense of safety seems to be lost and spectators cannot be sure of anything, as the story repeats endlessly. This complexity is further enhanced as it is embedded in immersive settings, thus challenging spectators to distance themselves mentally so as to be able to unfold what they are experiencing, to reconsider their presuppositions regarding the further development of the narrative and to allow their own imagination to complete incomplete narratives so that they can ultimately reflect on what their own fantasies imply or reveal. The works indicate that violence has taken place or is taking place at the very moment, but also simultaneously afford an abstract take on the brutality of that violence by means of various artistic tools. In both positions, trauma does not remain in the realm of the unrepresentable — its progress in society and its mechanisms are explicitly represented and simultaneously questioned by means of narrative distortions, poetic gestures, through cinematic imagery and in immersive installations and sounds. Developing a vocabulary of the traumatic that always remains ambiguous, Omer Fast’s video works 5,000 Feet is the Best, Continuity and Spielberg’s List all 125 126

Cardiff and Miller in Young (2012). Beil (2007) 79.

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address themes of personal, cultural or historical trauma by breaking down the linearity of the processes of experience, to the representation and to the perception thereof. Experience and its representation are probed by means of techniques such as video editing and scripting: they are reversed, re-staged, re-scripted, simulated. In analogy to structures of psychological trauma, the films’ narratives defy closed endings; they are non-linear, looped and on endless repeat, without indicating a recognisable time structure. Employing cinematic tools manifesting symptomatic patterns inherent to PTSD, flashbacks, repetition compulsion and the extreme layering or fiction and fact appear both on a narrative and a formal level in the films’ montages. The works employ both fictional and documentary techniques of storytelling, often merging the two into an inseparable unity and thus questioning values, such as truth, and the inherent mechanisms of representation in stories of trauma. The format of the testimony and the interview serve his practice as a means to challenge a notion of authenticity, which, in turn, is blurred via performative acts, convictions and eventually by role-playing, simulating and doubling. Spectators are immersed in a language that shares similarities with Hollywood’s aesthetics (i.e. TV dramas or documentary formats), but their expectations of the narratives are undermined by Brecht’ian interruptions, grotesquely brutal images, poetic moments or unfamiliar sequences. Omer Fast considers every form of information transmission regarding an event that lies in the past as being representational, and his works probe the mechanisms of representing and consuming experiences along ‘hyperreal’ narratives of trauma and conflict. The representation of trauma in his works thus always points back towards itself, leaving spectators in charge of processing and ‘making sense of’ the level of truth conveyed in the information of experiences. Spectators are required to consider their own emotions towards the trauma on display, and Fast imagines them to “come in some capacity as detectives, trying to figure out what has happened.”127 Evoking an imaginary, brutal scenario of torture, The Killing Machine by Cardiff and Miller employs dramatic sound, music and visual tropes frequently used in the entertainment industry, creating an emotional environment for exhibition visitors to enter. It thereby suggests uncomfortably fluid borders between trauma and entertainment, a perverse hybridity between spectacle and atrocity. The active participation of the spectators, which is encouraged by means of a push-button that starts the machine, is the central element of the installation, but it is used metareflexively in order to emphasise the power structures of society responding (or not responding) to images of trauma, the pleasure of control and general human behaviour when witnessing violence perpetrated on others. Viewers thus shift between a consumer’s and prosumer’s position, taking the role of the witness, the voyeur, the participant or even the perpetrator. The participatory element is thus 127

Fast, Omer: Personal interview, 10/12/2015, Berlin

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presented as ambivalent: while its immersive atmosphere creates an affective access to what is shown, it also reveals participation as a consequential concept that asks for a responsible and critical reconsideration regarding the aesthetic practice of viewing and ‘responding’ to images of trauma. Referring to multiple themes that include the political aftermath of 9/11, torture images taken at Abu Graibh, Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony”, capital punishment and confinement strategies, the installation The Killing Machine has an open narrative: the scenario is placed in the realm of the fictional fantasy suggested by the machine, and the real emotion that is evoked within the spectators. Although the work seems to address the precariousness of bodies, it purposefully withdraws the physical presence of the victim and thus represents the pained body as arbitrary and suffering as a symptom of our time. Drawing on all of this, I make the argument that the works of both artistic positions demonstrate how fiction facilitates a representation of trauma, while simultaneously using the aesthetic framework to reflect on this strategy critically and meta-reflexively. In other words: the fictional narratives explicitly refer to real events and conditions only on an abstract level, enabling the artists to express trauma outspokenly, and enabling spectators to empathetically relate to the drama that the traumatic fictions entail. This fictional level thus allows the artists to convey trauma within the aesthetic framework, without forcing works to remain historically accurate, but instead emphasising the social and humanitarian impact of traumata. As fact and fiction transform into one narrative that provides a portrait of an individual’s history, these singular histories form symbolical bridges that transform into histories of the public sphere and arc to the ‘real’ world beyond the exhibition space through the moving spectator. The looping and open-ended narratives thus introduce individual trauma as an indication for larger conflicts in social conditions and governmental systems that will continue to affect individuals if they are not changed. Without acting as political activists, the artists nonetheless partake or even initiate debates on global crises and conditions that have caused or are causing traumatic effects, thereby creating a framework in which it is possible to show, speak about and represent trauma. As mentioned previously, both positions’ aesthetic strategies may be consolidated as, but surely not reduced to, what I have subsumed under the term of ‘Trauma Narratives’. Cardiff and Miller’s spatial designs and soundscapes, alluding to political conceptions such as power structures inherent to transparent or inaccessible architectures, may thus be seen as a transition to the next chapter that will focus on the artistic strategies of Paul McCarthy and Forensic Architecture who employ space, architectural research and particular exhibition settings in order to convey trauma in and through their aesthetic practice.

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Spaces can be homes and shelters; cells and dungeons; halls and hallways; rooms and caves; labyrinths and holes; stages and basements. They can be virtual or physical; transparent or closed off; moving or static; minimalist or messy; claustrophobic or wide open; a cube or a tunnel. Spaces can be disorienting or clearly structured, they may enhance self-reflection or complete immersion. Spaces fulfil various functions for those who inhabit them, but they also live a life of their own, affected by their surroundings, by time and the events that happen in and outside of them. For these reasons, spaces always store history and memories; they always contain something, even if it is invisible — an atmosphere, a trace or a connotation that is intrinsic to the space’s architecture. For spaces are never entirely neutral — even a white cube is inscribed with an agenda and brings a certain aesthetic expectation or a perceptive frame with it. Spaces can suggest protected intimacy or tense threat; they can house childhood memories of happiness or trigger memories of trauma; they can be clinical and axenic or filthy. Spaces are always heavy with history – even if only from the day before – and, as Gaston Bachelard writes in Poetics of Space, they inscribe memories into solid and concrete form. “Memory – what a strange thing it is! – does not record concrete duration […]. We are unable to relieve duration that has been destroyed. […] The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of sojourn, are to be found in and through space. […] Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.”1 As they bring about this unique phenomenon of turning memories into solid form, spaces play a crucial role in the manifestation of traumatic histories and in encapsulating memories. In this chapter I thus propose to look at how artists make use of space both physically and virtually so as to convey their notion of trauma, focusing on how spatial archives are being explored, reactivated, manipulated and inflated in exhibitions and other aesthetic forms of display. In light of the power that architectures yield, the intersection of spaces and trauma brings about risks

1

Bachelard (1994) [1958], 9.

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and complexities. Spaces evoke strong emotions, immersing the person who finds themselves within them. The resulting effect on spectators who are in some form of interaction with the work may thus be intense when confronted with trauma. Historically, this immersive potential has often been experimented with in installation art.2 Typically, spatial constructions used in installation art automatically involve, and even require, the physical bodies of spectators during the process and for completion of the work. The arrangement of an installation usually asks the subject to engage with it so that its production and reception take place at the same time.3 According to Gronau, installations moreover break with both the tradition of a neutral white cube and with the fictional and separated stage, because they elevate the exhibition room itself from its position in the background to the centre stage.4 This often involves a meta-reflexive institutional critique of the exhibition space and its traditional parameters of neutrality and emptiness, which Gronau identifies as installation art’s major characteristic.5 Spaces in art are not exclusively constructed by means of their solid or virtual architecture, but, as Fischer-Lichte points out, also through the performative constitution of atmospheres through the work itself. Spaces can therefore be explored by ways of both their geometrical and their performative aspects.6 The performative effect of spaces also includes their manifestation of dominance and power — an aspect that Foucault investigates in his theory of spaces of control (cf. the discussion of transparent space in The Killing Machine by Cardiff and Miller in the previous chapter). Other art works, e.g. the claustrophobic surveillance installation Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) by Bruce Nauman in which visitors are helplessly exposed to their surroundings,7 activate an imbalance of power between space and spectator. And some spatial works literally swallow the spectator up, such as Mike Nelson’s dark labyrinth installation I, Impostor in the British Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennial, or the theatrical many-room-installations coined as the genre ‘Total Installation’ by the artist Ilya Kabakov — a succession of fictive spaces through which visitors must make their way. Foucault draws a direct line between spaces and power when he argues, “A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural) – from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture 2

3 4 5 6 7

See for example: Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (2005); Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art (2012) [2003]; Julie Reiss, From Margin to Center (1999); Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (1998). Cf. Rebentisch (2003), 21-22. Cf. Gronau (2010), 16-17. Ibid., 31. Cf. Fischer-Lichte (2004), 187. Cf. Ursprung (2010), 32.

Trauma Spaces

from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political installations.”8 The utilisation of the potential power structure of spaces, as well as the violence used against the spectator, can be observed as a recurring strategy in art installations from the last decades, and more recently in virtual spaces and architectures of artistic virtual realities. This includes, for example, sterile rooms as seen in the work of Gregor Schneider who re-stages spaces from his childhood home within exhibition spaces in a series titled House u r or dissembles historically charged architectures, such as Joseph Goebbels’ birth house, and tours Europe with a truck filled with the demolition waste in Unsubscribe #2 Geburtshaus (2014). Violent spaces are also typical to the theatrical arrangements of John Bock who presents the sets, props and remnants from his splatter film sets as accessible environments, challenging spectators to climb, crouch and walk straight through repulsive massacre remnants. We also encounter dystopian, post-human violence in the digital spaces created by Ed Atkins, who removes all familiar comfort from the scenes, trapping lifeless characters in old templates that seem to have lost their original function. Or the spatial violence caused by infinite masses of humans inhabiting a concert hall as is digitally envisioned in the video Critical Mass: Pure Immanence (2015) by Anne de Vries. The central questions explored throughout this chapter revolve around how these set ups may affect spectators when the containment of the space is not only of a violent but also of a traumatic nature. How can space be a productive artistic tool to convey and represent trauma? In order to analyse and respond to these questions, this chapter will focus on contemporary aesthetic practices that address trauma through the use of space. By discussing two case studies – a selection of video installations by the artist Paul McCarthy and multi-media work by the research collective Forensic Architecture – this chapter will investigate how exhibition architectures, physical and virtual spaces, and the use of architecture as an investigative practice relate to the audience, the media and the material they house. We will also look into how they become performative, even theatrical, and how these strategies influence the way in which trauma is perceived by an audience. Again, following the argument that trauma can be represented and that the paradigm of the unrepresentable may be an unsuitable umbrella category for all artistic approaches to trauma, these exemplary spatial practices explicitly attempt to visualise trauma — to make traumatic events and conditions intelligible, sometimes even experienceable for the audience, within the safe surroundings of the art institution.

8

Foucault (1980), 149.

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5.1

Paul McCarthy9

Hyper-real scenarios, repelling images, taboo subjects, physical excesses, endless repetitions and a post-massacre splatter of liquids, excrements and visceral objects — the art of Paul McCarthy, born 1945 in Utah, USA, is transgressive and aims to surpass limits of endurance. The artist’s studio is located in Pasadena, California, Hollywood’s rehab and plastic surgery hideaway and McCarthy’s direct source of inspiration. As opposed to the luxuries and fairy tales of Hollywood, there are no happy endings in the narratives featured in his art, nor are they clean. His work, comprising sculptures, paintings, performances, videos and video installations, addresses the impact of Western culture and mass media on individuals, their sexuality and their perception of reality, while simultaneously laying bare cultural, familial and social traumata that sometimes burst out from interior, hidden places. A frequent performer in his own works, the artist confronts his audience with brutal simulations of child abuse (Family Tyranny, (Modeling and Molding), 1987), castration, rape, incest or hyperbolic acts of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms as a direct effect of conditioning and repressed memories. As is the case in the works of the previously discussed artists Fast, Cardiff and Miller, McCarthy’s works repetitively address the uncertain relation between fiction and reality as a central issue of trauma, utilising modes of mediatisation to question culture as a constructed frame that we live within: “You are looking for a cultural trauma, but it is individuals who have trauma. It is a mistrust of authority. You can be betrayed by an authority, and if the betrayal is deep enough, the trauma sets in. I think my work is about trauma. It is about conditioning. It is about not believing anymore. […] It is about trauma causing a mistrust in what is real.”10 McCarthy uses elements of pop culture to reveal processes of cultural and gender conditioning and the uncertainty of reality, embodying themes such as isolation, obsessive-compulsive disorders, repression or regression through characters that are hollow shells and clichés of mainstream heroes, and that represent hybrid figures in between the consumers and the producers. These tragically clownish Hollywood and Disney creatures are placeholders; they represent inherently traumatised individuals: the autistic Pinocchio (Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma, 1994); the incestuously abused Heidi from the Alps (Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone, in collaboration with Mike Kelley 1992);

9

10

I have previously published fragments of this chapter in an essay titled “Architecture as Frame for Trauma – Video installations by Paul McCarthy.” Performance Research vol. 16, no. 1 (2011): 153-163. McCarthy, Q&A, 07/09/2015, Berlin.

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the frozen-smiling chef Alfred E. Neumann (Bossy Burger, 1991). A similar fate awaits broken heroes of Western, splatter and porn movies, often laced with art historical references, who find their way into his works, such as in Rebel Dabble Babble Berlin (2015), WGG – Wild Gone Girls (2003), Saloon Theater (1996) or Fresh Acconci (1994). Representing symptoms of severe psychic traumata, McCarthy exposes his figures to crippling neuroses, which limit their behaviour and mental capacity, throwing them back to toddler stage. In his work McCarthy combines performances, environments and videos with architectural structures and installations, often inviting his audience to enter restrictive and claustrophobic spaces, reflecting the imprisoned situations of the trapped protagonists. Architecture, in this sense, is used not only to afford spectators with a more immersive experience of his videos, but also to increase awareness of the traumatic potential therein, underlining architecture’s performativity. “I think of architecture as a frame and/or stage for trauma. As a frame and/or stage, architecture contextualizes and effects trauma,”11 the artist explains. In this chapter I will focus on a selection of installation-based works produced by the artist, in which he utilises architecture to either reinforce a notion of trauma, or in which he translates trauma into an architectural concept.

5.1.1

Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994)

Produced in 1994, the single-channel video Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma, which runs for 44 minutes, shows the artist donning the 1940s garb of Disney’s Pinocchio. He is wearing a mask with a long red nose that looks like a tube, white gloves and socks, red clown shoes, a yellow shirt, red shorts and a blue bowtie. The artist’s hairy legs are visible beneath his shorts. Pinocchio’s stage is the interior of a wooden cube with an inaccessible trap door — a loophole one-room house without an entrance or exit. The house, which isn’t much taller than Pinocchio himself, is furnished with a table, one shelf with a lamp and one with jars, a stool. A few kitchen utensils and some other props appear in different scenes. The house is made of plywood, the exterior painted black, the interior painted beige. Consisting of twelve different sequences, Pinocchio’s routine inside his home is presented as a succession of seemingly nonsensical interactions with his props, resembling the way a toddler would play with kitchen furniture if he were home alone. His mood changes rapidly from happy and calm to restless and furious. The position of the camera changes, too: the character is filmed through holes in the house, through doors, inside the house and in full total. The image speed continually switches between slow-motion, rapid and real time, while a repetitive midi sound, reminiscent

11

McCarthy in Weissmann (2003).

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of 1990s computer game music, sets in every once in a while. Occasionally the camera, Pinocchio’s outfit and the house tip to the side or upside down, making it tricky to work out whether the character walks on the floor or on the walls of the house. The first scene shows the character painting a lamp with wood stain. In the second scene Pinocchio opens two cans of chocolate pudding, walks around the room seemingly not knowing exactly what to do, and then begins to babble and murmur to himself. Taking a pair of scissors, he cuts a little hole in his red shorts and tests if a white fluffy trunk would fit over his fly. Grunting, he then squeezes the trunk forcefully in the pudding, while simultaneously dipping his nose in the other open can. He then stuffs the dirty side of the trunk through the hole in his shorts so that the white side now adorns him like a giant, fluffy penis. With his new equipment, he pushes his nose into a hole in the wall. In the third scene Pinocchio pours Ketchup into a red strainer, covering the table in red stains. He moves cans from one side of the table to the other and then blows into the ketchup. He dips the fluffy trunk in ketchup and then stuffs it into a hole in the wall, which we get to see from the outside. In the fourth scene Pinocchio bends down and picks out two plastic milk bottles from under a trap door in the floor. Continually repositioning the bottles and four plastic pitchers on the table, he creates a loud, rhythmic noise that mirrors his autistic behaviour in his attempt to achieve a symmetrical order. Scene five shows his hand pouring ketchup from a teapot into a cup. Pinocchio pushed his nose in and out of a mayonnaise jar that is installed by the wall. The camera shows him to be doing press-ups, mumbling military commands: “One, two, three, four […] Everybody keep up! Good! Twenty-four […]” The camera zooms out and reveals the house to now be tipped onto its side, because Pinocchio no longer need his arms to do the press-ups. He sits on the face of a doll that looks exactly like him. Pinocchio’s mask is reversed, turned to the back of his head, while he presses his head between the legs and into the crotch of his double, pushing it backwards and forward, making grunting sounds as though a fight between two animals were underway. He appears angry and roughhouses the doll against the wall until it is squeezed out to the other side through one of the house’s holes. Filmed from inside the trapdoor, Pinocchio crawls on the floor into the wooden tunnel and, in an autistic manner, noisily and angrily begins repositioning various household items such as milk, cocoa powder and mayonnaise from one corner to the other. In the sixth scene Pinocchio dips another fluffy, white trunk into a bowl of ketchup, subsequently squeezing it into the trap door, which he then violently slams against the trunk. He repeats the slamming action, causing the ketchup to splash against the wood. In scene seven Pinocchio sits beside his stuffed double at the table, serving him cocoa from a small plastic cup. He pours the liquid into the dolls tube-nose, excitedly mumbling “There we go. Drink it all up! Want some more? Yeah, of course!

Trauma Spaces

Little boy wants some more.” He then mixes mayonnaise and chocolate in a red container and begins feeding his friend and himself with a spoon. He places the doll on the table and inserts the liquid in its nose through a funnel, gently forcefeeding him cocoa and mayonnaise. The act becomes increasingly violent as Pinocchio stands up and squeezes the doll between his legs, using his body strength to hold it down and pushing his own tube-nose into the top of the funnel, blowing bubbles into the chocolate. He then lets go and drags the lifeless, chocolate covered doll back onto his lap, sitting at the table. Scene eight: a short episode shows a scene edit in reverse, in which Pinocchio un-cleans the table with a large sponge. In another short episode – scene nine – edited to play in rapid speed, he mixes fluids in a red cup while spinning and rotating repeatedly and clumsily, staggering, thus splashing little bits of the fluid from the cup onto the house’s wall. In the tenth scene Pinocchio is on all fours, the costume and the mask are reversed so that the head looks up towards the ceiling — a Janus face. He performs several repetitive movements, pushing himself up and down, dirtying the floor with a chocolate-soaked sponge, mumbling and eventually crawling through the trapdoor’s narrow tunnel. The eleventh scene shows Pinocchio and a new, clean doll seated by the table. He speaks to the doll, friendly and excitedly, though his actual sentences are incomprehensible, ending their one-way conversation with a hug. The twelfth and final scene shows Pinocchio sleeping in his bed, snoring, but the eyes of his mask remain open, and the smile on his face remains frozen. He shifts restlessly in his sleep, grunting as though he were in pain, forcefully hitting his nose against the table above him.

5.1.2

Replica

Contingent on the respective exhibition architecture, the conditions for viewing the videotaped performance are amongst the most restrictive in McCarthy’s oeuvre, as the audience is required to physically identify with the lead role. The video’s instruction reads “This tape should be played in private situations to viewers wearing the PINOCCHIO costume suit delivered with the tape.”12 Spectators are either asked to enter the video cabin alone, or – as was the case for the work’s premiere – in small groups. Wherever possible, the video is presented together with the set.13 By dressing viewers as Disney’s Pinocchio, an equation consisting of viewer and performer is posed within the four walls of the video cabin or the screening space. A group of Pinocchio replicas, sitting or standing in front of a screen, watch their visual double trapped inside a house. Having participated during the premiere exhibition in 1994, Johannes Lothar Schröder describes the experience of watching 12 13

Instructions quoted in Di Pietrantonio (1996), 90. Cf. Schmidt in Dziewior (2003), 138.

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Image 17 & 18: Paul McCarthy. Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994). Photo: Paul McCarthy/Karen McCarthy.

and listening to the Pinocchio working and acting out the nonsensical scenes as perceived through the layer of his own mask, and how this changed his perception of the video: “From under the mask, one not only watches Pinocchio as Pinocchio, but one also watches a performance by McCarthy dressed as Pinocchio through a series of different holes. At first it’s the […] camera observing Pinocchio through different holes in the house. Watching the video, one looks through the ‘mask’ of the TVScreen […] and finally, one sits before this screen, watching through the holes of the mask. You can hear your own breath and the air streaming through the eye holes, the long pipe nose and the throat.”14 14

Schröder (1995), 190. My translation. Original: “Unter der Maske schaut man nicht nur als Pinocchio einem Pinocchio zu, sondern sieht die aufgezeichnete Performance McCarthys als Pinocchio durch eine Folge unterschiedlicher Löcher. Zunächst war es das Objektiv und die Blende der Kamera, die Pinocchio durch verschiedene Löcher im Häuschen beobachtete. Beim Betrachten des Videos blickt man durch die "Maske"des TV-Gerätes vor der Mattscheibe, die den Bildschirm verkleidet und zum Möbel macht. Davor sitzt man schließlich selbst und schaut durch die Augenlöcher der Maske auf die Mattscheibe. Laut hört man seinen ei-

Trauma Spaces

 

Image 19 & 20: Paul McCarthy. Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994). Photo: Paul McCarthy/Karen McCarthy.

The sound, too, changes when heard from behind the mask: not only does the video feature squeaking and hollow sounds due to recording in a small wooden cabin, but, according to Schröder, this effect is amplified from under the mask, creating sounds that seem unreal, dreamlike and distant.15 At the same time, however, the physical situation suggests an elimination of distance and affords an entrance into Pinocchio’s spatial nightmare. By providing the obligatory mask, McCarthy simultaneously enforces a perceptual alienation between observing self and world, a failure of identification between perception and representation of self. Viewers are confronted with an ambivalent situation: they visually and spatially identify with their double on the screen, but are all the while alienated by its childish and obscene behaviour. Pinocchio’s actions are innocent – in principle – but their symbolism isn’t: he has an interpersonal relationship with another replica – his playmate, the doll – but his actions and

15

genen Atem und das Zischen der Luft, die durch die Augenlöcher, die lange, rohrartige, hohle Nase und den Hals in die Maske strömt.” Cf. Schröder (1995), 190.

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behaviour – manhandling, squeezing, crushing and forcing – trigger associations with sexual relationships, even rape, abuse, torture and force-feeding. Yet the violence here, such as the blood one might see in the ketchup, or the faeces one might see in chocolate pudding he smears on his fluffy trunk, is thoroughly symbolic and hence ambivalent. This ambivalence – between the familiar and the alienating, violence and innocence, reality and fiction – is a strategy that runs through all aspects of this work. Recorded and performed exclusively for the camera, and subsequently screened alongside the set and re-staged via the visual equation of the spectators, the Pinocchio work introduces a new category to the discourse of ‘liveness’ — a debate on reproductive technologies in performance art, which is mainly known due to the controversy between Peggy Phelan’s emphasis on the immediacy of the unrecordable event16 and Philip Auslander’s counterargument of live events already being mediatised. His argument reads, “[...] whatever distinction we may have supposed […] to be between live and mediatised events is collapsing because live events are becoming more and more identical with the mediatised ones […] Ironically, intimacy and immediacy are precisely the qualities attributed to television that enabled it to displace live performance.”17 Pinocchio, so goes the tale, is a liar — a child that won’t grow up, that won’t conform to rules. The Pinocchio in McCarthy’s spatial frame could be seen as a traumatised victim, a Disney character, a traumatised Disney character, a rebellious child etc. — but first and foremost he is fictional, an empty shell, one which spectators are required to slip into. It is not the tale itself or the original Pinocchio character that is being unravelled here, but rather the archetype of the family and society for which the figure provides a stage.18 McCarthy thus demonstrates his view of our (supposedly media-indoctrinated) reality by instantiating an artificial identificatory process: the viewers’ uniform as a constraining shell of artificial identity, their individual bodies becoming fictionalised and ludicrous. And yet at the same time, he coerces his audience into observing voyeuristically, as though watching a mad reality TV show, a dysfunctional and traumatic domesticity seen through the holes of an inaccessible house.

16 17 18

Cf. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993). Auslander (1999), 32. “If I make a piece about Disney, it is not fucking about Disney. It is about the existential questions. It is about the question of reality.” McCarthy, Q&A, 07/09/2015, Berlin.

Trauma Spaces

5.1.3

Architecture as the Body – the Body as Architecture

The use of architecture in the Pinocchio work creates a frame, a stage on which the character moves around and performs a number of actions. On first glance, this stage serves a very basic purpose in order to limit movement and create a playing field: “I seem to have a strong interest in placing the action in architecture and in using furniture: rooms connected to rooms, doors, windows and hallways. […] I think it has to do with the search for a very basic kind of activity.”19 The space, however, also fulfils a symbolic purpose: Pinocchio suffers from a dilemma, and his dilemma is embodied spatially. McCarthy presents him as being hopelessly stuck inside minimalist, claustrophobic sitcom-architecture, where he numbly regresses and becomes increasingly aggressive. The character is presented as “trapped: trapped in his surroundings,”20 because he is doomed to remain imprisoned not only in his troubled and traumatised mind, but also in his own habitat: “Pinocchio never leaves the house. The house is the dilemma; the dilemma of our inability to understand. The dilemma is so alien that it smells of insanity. Paranoia and psychosis breed in this sort of pool of milk, a pool of milk as a metaphor for this existential dilemma. It becomes very much associated with the reality within a house as absurdity. [...] within the architecture of our surroundings exists the dilemma.”21 The cube, which functions both as a prison and shelter for Pinocchio, is covered in holes of various sizes through which the character does not only shove items out from inside his house, but also through which the camera moves in to film him close-up, observing him in his exposed shelter. Whenever the set is presented alongside the video screening, as was the case for Pinocchio’s premiere exhibition at the gallery Air de Paris, this movement is transferred to the spectators in the spatial confrontation with the cube: when they peer through the holes they get to see the messy leftovers from Pinocchio’s repetitive actions, presented as a crime scene. Central to the incorporation of holes is the voyeuristic gaze — a notion for which McCarthy originally drew inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture Étant donnés (1946–66). This work is a small loophole box containing the picture of a naked, spread-legged woman, which spectators would only get to see if they were looking through one of the holes. Based on this particular movement of peeking through holes, McCarthy notes, “I started [...] constructing pieces around the eye, the idea of a hole, looking through something. This was both a cultural metaphor and a per-

19 20 21

McCarthy in Stiles (1996), 14. Ibid., 21. Ibid.,19, 21.

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sonal or private metaphor. And that was one of the things that was interesting to me about Duchamp’s Étant donnés.”22 Peering through the holes of both the house and the mask, McCarthy transforms viewers into unwilling observers of an individual suffering from trauma, phobias or mental disorders, possibly brought on by the space he finds himself locked into. While there are certainly aspects of Foucault’s notion of total visibility and power structures inherent to McCarthy’s Pinocchio installation (as in Cardiff and Miller’s work), the presence and constant observance of the camera filming Pinocchio adds another level of ‘spatial violence’23 as Anthony Vidler has called it. Tracing the history of the intersection between architecture and film, Vidler (a frequent contributor to McCarthy’s catalogue texts) refers to Herman G. Scheffhauer’s 1920 description of cinematic space as a “sixth sense of man, his feeling for space and room — his Raumgefühl” and to Elie Faure’s 1922 coinage of the term ‘cineplastics’ that would unite the two dimensions within cinematic architectures. ‘Cineplastics’, as suggested by Faure, would be an architectural space comparable to the imaginary space “within the walls of the brain.”24 Referring to them as ‘PsychoSpaces’, Vidler underpins this notion by quoting Hugo Münsterberg’s 1916 text Film: A Psychological Study in which he equated film with psychological form and the “inner movements of the mind”.25 Following this line of thought in regard to the Pinocchio film, the cinematic architecture may be considered as being a symbolic representation of traumatic structures in his brain, but it is also traumatic in and of itself: Pinocchio’s house embodies his dilemma, and thereby embodies his troubled and trapped mind which becomes visible only when peeking through a hole. The architecture of the cube is thus anthropomorphised — the figure’s body merges with and transforms into an architectural object. McCarthy states, “The architecture of the body – or the body as architecture – is one thing that had struck me about Minimalism and late 1960s sculpture.”26 In his early works, such as in the minimalist sculptures Dead H (1968 and 1975) and A Skull with a Tail (1978), McCarthy already explored empty space as a metaphor for the body. Similar to a dead body with four outstretched limbs, Dead H has the three-dimensional shape of a flat lying ‘H’, enabling spectators to crawl into its interior. A Skull with a Tail, on the other hand, cannot be entered, not only because it is too small but also because only the entrance is inaccessible. Like a miniature precedent of the Pinocchio house (minus the holes), the black cube evokes the skull, enclosing and hiding the inner workings, and featuring a jutting pipe, a tail, or a 22 23 24 25 26

Ibid., 17. Cf. Vidler (1993). Scheffhauer and Faure quoted in Vidler (1993), 46, 47. Münsterberg quoted in Vidler (1993), 48. McCarthy in Stiles (1996), 24-25.

Trauma Spaces

leg: “There was a reference in the title to the body... A Skull with a Tail suggests that there’s something inaccessible, something that we can’t know. […] Then I made Pinocchio — a house, a cube with a leg, a crooked leg just like A Skull with a Tail.”27

 

Image 21: Paul McCarthy. A Skull with a Tail (1978).

Through its metaphoric symbolisation of Pinocchio’s mind, the inaccessibility of the space also replicates the difficulty of integrating traumatic memories into the conscious mind (“something that we can’t know”), which, it would seem, troubles the character throughout his daily routine. The organic architecture of Pinocchio’s house evokes a map of his psyche, with its own structurally latent, architectural secret the repressed memories that drive him mad. Another earlier work, the spinning wooden cube installation Mad House (1999 and 2008), is connected to similar associations, although the cubic work would be accessible if it weren’t in constant rotation. Here, the traumatic potential lies within the infected ‘madness’ of architecture itself.

27

Ibid., 25.

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Locked in a form-fitted functionalist architecture, Pinocchio reacts with awkward, sexually regressive behaviour, seeking to evade function with surreal longing. Against these attempts, the space takes on the role of an all-embracing antagonist who dominates the figure. Trapped inside this hybrid architectural space, the protagonist starts to fight desperately against the restrictions — against his spatial antagonist. He unsuccessfully battles against the house’s walls and exhaustedly fails. Architecture restricts his escape route out of the spatial or repressed dilemma he finds himself in. The consequence of Pinocchio’s combat with the architecture is that he literally penetrates its elements: inevitably his libidinous testing, pushing and peeking through the house’s holes have similarities with a helpless act of copulation and are suggestive of the house’s role as substitute body, as sexualised architecture.28 But the house, simultaneously antagonist and symbol of Pinocchio’s mind, also appears to be exhausted, lying down on its side while Pinocchio goes to sleep. The scenes taking place inside the house may also give the impression that Pinocchio – surrounded by food fluids – could be inside a body, or as Johannes Lothar Schröder suggests, inside a uterus.29 The props also have visceral attributes: Pinocchio’s doll, for instance, plays the part of a friend; a jar of mayonnaise equals an orifice; chocolate is faecal matter; ketchup is blood, and so on. Paul McCarthy theatricalises architecture and objects in order to transgressively expose the human body and mind, opening up the visceral and chaotic insides. At the centre of this notion lies the psychological and cultural mechanism of traumatic repression: a dramatisation of providing insight into the dark human interior, to the otherwise inaccessible traumatic memories, through the performative use of architecture. “We search for what can’t be gotten at the interior of the body, cutting open to peer inside. In my work there is a kind of theatre of that, and by theatre I mean the use of representation.”30 This visceral notion of architecture as the body also appears reversed, represented through the usage of costumes and masks (the costume in Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma, but also in other pieces, such as unhandy gloves in the video Painter (1995) or the huge, red clown shoes worn by the artist in Bossy Burger) suggesting they are an artificial, “almost architectural environment”.31 The costumes prosthetically transform the protagonists into a fictive character, constraining it in its mobility and ability to perceive. The human body is thus allegorised as a prison, as social architecture alienated from the individual body itself and, again, a space

28 29 30 31

Cf. McCarthy in Weissmann (2003). Cf. Schröder (2003), 30. McCarthy in Stiles (1996), 14. Ibid., 16.

Trauma Spaces

of repression. Beneath the happy, childish mask lie the latent hypocrisies of everyday life. Performed identities imprison figures. Faces are literally trapped under masks. The anthropomorphic body becomes instrumentalised and objectified. McCarthy also employs masks to highlight uncanny doublings in his characters. As Iwona Blazwick suggests, he thus enables them – or rather himself – to act as hybrid monsters who lose hold of their conscious selves, block human empathy and hide behind the anonymity of the mask.32 Constrained under layers of margarine and raw minced meat like in Meat Cake #5 (1974), fleshy or plastic masks as in the Pinocchio work, the characters performed and performing in McCarthy’s works utilise the layers to become random placeholders for individuals within society.

5.1.4

“Reality is Force-Fed: Eat This.”

While unconscious suppression of experiences and the uncontrolled and violent outbursts thereof are themes and actions that reoccur frequently, McCarthy’s work drafts an image of trauma that cannot be identified as either an individual or a cultural trauma. It might be best understood in terms of being ‘trauma theatre’,33 as suggested by the artist, which plays with hyperbolic representations and symbolisms of trauma. But this symbolism generally questions the relationship between the sign and the signified, blurring the borders between fiction and reality. “We become representations. We become what we see in the media, and it becomes real.”34 McCarthy’s theatrical staging of narratives in installations and his art’s origin in performance art and happenings, as Juliane Rebentisch remarks, have a theatrical character that are visible in elements of the installation, pointing to fictive or real events that lie in the past.35 In the Pinocchio work as well as in many other performative productions, McCarthy copiously plays with tropes of trauma, but often leaves the audience unenlightened regarding whether there is truth to the symbolism as well as to whom this trauma belongs, what it is influenced by and who the protagonists of his videos represent. Viewers are not explicitly encouraged to reflect on the psyche of the artist, but rather on the ‘psyche of culture’36 as Mike Kelley emphasised in regard to his joint practice with McCarthy. As Sabine Flach notes, the body of the artist thus fulfils a double function: it is the source of experience and at the same time it serves as a representation of psychological issues.37 The traumatic fictiveness and suggested brutality inherent to McCarthy’s work thus al-

32 33 34 35 36 37

Cf. Blazwick (2006), 25. McCarthy in Grau (2014). McCarthy in Rugoff (1996), 53. Cf. Rebentisch (2003), 177, 178. Mike Kelley in Kellein (1994), 32. See Flach (2003), 367.

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Image 22: Paul McCarthy. Meat Cake #3 (1974). Performance/video tape. Newspace Gallery, Los Angeles.

low it to be self-referential and non-conformable to specific historic or personal traumatic events. “I think that in part my work does refer to my own private, forgotten or repressed memories and that I seem to play them out unconsciously in my actions. It is from those that I recognize them as existing, but I am not sure how they relate to me.

Trauma Spaces

Are they specifically my traumas or someone else’s that I’ve witnessed either directly or through the media?”38 Despite underlining this indeterminacy in several interviews, McCarthy notes that at the time of making videos such as Heidi: Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Release Zone (created in 1992 in collaboration with Mike Kelley) he “was sensitive and aware of institutional abuse” and interested “in the reality of conditioning and abuse.”39 In one of the video’s scenes, the characters Heidi and her grandfather hold the naked behind of Peter – a life-sized doll – over a pot and jointly squeeze brownish fluids and sausages out of his orifices. The calm voice of a man accompanies these images, telling the doll tales about masturbation, mental hospitals and children with disabilities. This scene, though nothing extreme is actually happening, is difficult to watch because it evokes images of excrement, but more so because of the images of abuse and violation that are conjured up in the viewer’s mind’s eye. As in the symbolic scenes of force-feeding seen in Family Tyranny (1987) and the Pinocchio video, liquids that remind us of excrements and filth play a central role in McCarthy’s ‘trauma theatre’, highlighting the dichotomy between their reality (ketchup) and their representation (blood). “I think my work deals with trauma, my experience of trauma, physical/mental trauma/abuse. I act as a clown stuffing and feeding orifices, enacting body hallucinations – size change, weight changes. Reality is force-fed: eat this. My actions are visceral; I want it to be visceral. The props of ketchup and mayonnaise are the right consistency for the actions to be visceral. They cover the body in a kind of lubricant. They are force fed into the mouth, the eye, the asshole. These images play themselves out in my work.”40 Forcible feeding, evisceration, rape of dolls and of one’s self — the representation of violence viscerally linked to excrements and bowels also plays with clichés of splatter and horror movies. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Paul McCarthy’s live performances usually offered closed-circuit situations focussing on his body interacting with liquids and food. In these early works, such as Ma Bell (1971), Tubbing (1973) or Sailor’s Meat (1973), he employed real body liquids, such as sperm, blood, shit, urine, vomit or spit. Towards the mid-1970s, he changed his props, moving on to ketchup, mayonnaise and similar ambiguous food icons of popular culture, just as he shifts the focus from the performer’s own body towards emblematic costumes and masks, and eventually towards actors and performers. During this period of work, representation and fiction as well as clownish symbolisms of violence and trauma take centre stage. Although McCarthy’s work has 38 39 40

McCarthy in Stiles (1996), 14. McCarthy in Jung and Jung (2002), TV Documentary. McCarthy in Stiles (1996), 26.

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frequently been related to Julia Kristeva’s theoretical framework41 the ‘abject’ (and thus to ‘Abject Art’) – and while this categorisation may very well be legitimate in regard to his early practice42 when he employed real excrements and bodily fluids – I question whether the category of the abject is the most convenient context for his later practice, such as the Pinocchio work. By employing solely the symbolic representation of excrement and fluid, the artist voices his doubts regarding conditioned reality and constructed culture in the form of the liquids that serve as his props. The orgies of violence against dolls and objects, against other actors and scenes of self-mutilation captured in claustrophobic architectures, are layered with a foolish quality that aesthetically reinforces the distressing symbolic. Violence is presented as a destruction of the body, a destruction of architecture and its cleanliness, and is as such a performative action that is suggested as the characters’ occupation and productivity.43 Society’s handling of trauma and the inflated discourse revolving around notions of trauma underpin parts of McCarthy’s work. After all, the (victim-) figures are not persons with identities per se, but shells of identity – empty Disney and Hollywood caricatures – onto which trauma is grafted. Due to the repeated superabundance, trauma becomes superficially banal. Unavoidably, McCarthy challenges viewers to consider trauma as a condition or a category defined by tropes and realities. Playing this aesthetic game between foolishness and severity, the uncertain reactions of the audience – amused or utterly shocked, never knowing which is the more appropriate reaction – are part of the game, of this hyperbolic trauma theatre of abuse and violence that is on display. In the same manner, McCarthy’s own physical involvement always fulfils both the role of a tragic character and a clown. Set in this permanent state of ambivalence – between fact and fiction, sincere and ludicrous, ketchup and blood, real and hyperreal – making pieces about trauma is, for McCarthy, an instinctive reflection on the culture and conditioning he lives in, and something “[that] you try to do or […] [that] you cannot help but do.”44 Questions regarding the accuracy of the representation of the traumata addressed in his work are less of a concern to him, as he explains:

41 42

43 44

Kristeva, Julia: Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, 1982. “The body’s inside, in that case, shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside. It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents. Urine, blood, sperm, excrement the show up in order to treasure a subject that is lacking its ‘own and clean self.’ The abjection of those flows from within suddenly become the sole ‘object’ of sexual desire – a true ‘ab-ject’ […]” Kristeva (1982), 53. Cf. Fischer-Lichte (2012), 94. McCarthy, Q&A, 07/09/2015, Berlin.

Trauma Spaces

“I don’t know if it is a matter of whether it is an accurate representation of trauma or whether I get to it. It is what I do and what I try to do. It is forming. It is making it into a form of some kind. And actually I think a form is made through the objects around me. And the form relates. Is it successful? I don’t know. Although you can talk about it as trauma, I am not trying to be specific. It is not a specific trauma. I am not trying to represent a specific trauma. I do not even know where they come from. I can only assume. It is not a matter of trying to represent a trauma correctly, or trying to be specific. It is just what it is. It is what happens.”45 In the sinister narrative of his works, trauma is thus not presented as one specific experience, but instead trauma is suggested as being embedded in and repressed beyond the construction of culture. McCarthy explains: “The private and the public is twisted. I think the audience is very aware of when something speaks to them, and they find themselves like ‘This is not Paul McCarthy, this is me. This is who we are. This image of self-destruction is, actually, not Paul McCarthy.’ […] All of a sudden, you carry the burden. You realise the trauma that’s being represented.”46 Trauma, in McCarthy’s work, is ubiquitous, practically infectious and symbolically represented as glued to the architectures the artist builds, driving everyone inside them mad. An extreme example of this staged trauma theatre embodiment as a mad house is McCarthy’s video installation Saloon Theater (1999), to which I will give a brief introduction.

5.1.5

Saloon Theater (1999)

The video Saloon (113 min.) is a twisted Hollywood satire: an appropriation of a hybrid between cliché Western and amateur porn. Saloon acknowledges its imitation of the genre and a certain delusive lack of high quality that is apparent in costumes, chiaroscuro lighting, and camera movement. At the same time, it works with its hollow stereotypes in the form of slow expressionist outbursts, rather than as elements of a plot. Not performing himself, McCarthy lets four protagonists perform: sisters Ginger and Marianne, a cowboy and a barkeeper. Ginger acts as a saloon-prostitute; the cowboy orders whiskey and talks about horses and Indians; the barkeeper laconically repeats sentences, such as “Right away, Cowboy!” Marianne, the little sister, continuously moans incoherent lamentations, behaving differently from moment to moment, ranging from rage to vulnerability: “I never get fucked. I always get fucked. Everybody loves me. Nobody loves me. The kid on the street fucked me... The dog fucked me. The dog – everybody loves me... Ginger loves me. 45 46

Ibid. McCarthy in Rappolt (2015), 131.

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Mommy loves me. Daddy loves me.”47 Only Ginger reacts, harshly reminding Marianne that their father is dead and that neither he nor she herself ever loved the little sister. Meanwhile, Marianne lifts her dress, violently rubs her pelvis against the saloon’s wall and continues her lamentations. “Take me to the church, Ginger,” she pleads with her sister. Demonstrably exposing her naked behind, she crawls on the floor past the cowboy who has begun tap dancing and masturbating. Some scenes are repeated, played in extreme slow motion and from different angles. The actions and movements of Ginger, Marianne, the cowboy and the bartender are shown in detail. Presented within the aesthetic norms of two popular TV and Hollywood genres, Saloon appropriates these genres while addressing subjects of incestuous abuse and domestic violence embodied in Marianne’s character, as well as in the relation the four roles have with each other. McCarthy elaborates: “These four individuals make up something like a family […] my Western got steered towards family matters […] While the family isn’t naturally tyrannical, it can often become so or be experienced as such. My work interrogates the nature of this conditioning.”48 Marianne’s condition is exposed via her contradictory behaviour that reveals her wounded, pained mind, surfacing as repetitive, almost autistic expressions. Her actions mirror the family drama, which McCarthy subsumes in bullet points in the Saloon notes. An excerpt of these read: “The father abuses the mother. The father abuses the daughters. The mother abuses the daughter. The daughter abuses the daughter. […] Marianne twirls in conditioned excitement and recites. Trauma creates autistic action. Twirling, an action from a trauma.”49 Marianne’s presumed familial trauma and explicit behaviour are glossed over with primitive porn and Western genre codes, the protagonists’ empty clichés framing a family drama that is invoked but frozen in nothingness. Instead of fluids, McCarthy employs language and spatial restrictions to give life to the repetitively repressive elements of trauma and violence. Saloon represents a spatial prison, as McCarthy remarks in the movie’s notes: “Architecture is the body trap. You can go in but you can’t leave.”50 Anthropomorphic allegories can again be found in the Saloon’s architecture, serving as Marianne’s sexual playmate: “Architecture is fornicated. Architecture is humped.”51 By 1999, McCarthy cut the single-channel video into five different clips and showed them using rear-projection screens on wooden walls inside the walk-in in-

47 48 49 50 51

Video transcript in McCarthy (2004), 548. McCarthy in Angus and Demir (2004), 547. McCarthy (1996), 142. Ibid. Ibid.

Trauma Spaces

 

Image 23 & 24: Paul McCarthy. Saloon Film (1995). 16mm film. Photographic series.

stallation Saloon Theatre.52 The large, cross-shaped installation architecture offers four saloon-like entrances, including typical swinging doors. Each of them lets visitors enter a dark corridor, which, apart from one blind alley, all lead to the ‘centre’ of the installation. Once they find themselves inside, it resembles the parcours of a circus or funhouse: five oversized moving images that are partly mirror inverted, partly screened on the ceiling. The visitors’ shadows merge with the projections, while sounds from the video are played over ten speakers. The architecture has varyingly tilted floors and ceilings, spatial parameters that contribute to the confusion of space and time. As Vidler remarks, by unifying the video’s content and its terms of perception McCarthy’s ‘spatial nightmare’ simulates both the imposed loss and impossibility of loss of the visitors’ distanced objectivity. According to Vidler, the architecture of Saloon Theater “presented us with a kind of actual mental space; drunken and tottering we occupy the space of our own unconscious, experiencing the movie, not objectively projected on a screen, but from its own inside, which is of course, our own interiority, as in our brain and body we walk through a spatial equivalent of a nightmare.”53

52

53

I experienced the installation in 2006 in the group exhibition “Von Carl Andre bis Bruce Nauman. Werke aus der Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, den Sammlungen der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin und der Sammlung Marzona” at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. Vidler (2001), 217.

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Just like inside Pinocchio’s cabin, the visitors of Saloon Theater find themselves forcefed with uncomfortable content, ambivalent in their attempts to maintain a distance (or to not do so). Upon entering the installation and being confronted with Marianne’s despair, their dispassion and irony may turn to fear or even to embarrassment. In the same manner as to how the video setting imprisons the characters, Saloon Theater’s architecture swallows the observer, even as it invites the viewer’s penetration: the four long corridors are organic pharynges leading to the core space where porn-like video images are shown — an erotic hideaway to be entered by visitors.

5.1.6

“Don’t worry. They’ll remember it.”

A link to porn, eroticism or sexuality in general, as well as its relation to androgyny, authority structures and violence, can be found in most of Paul McCarthy’s works. A recurring symbol for these issues is the penis or its phallic representation through objects, a pipe or sausage, for example. McCarthy began making his so-called Penispaintings in 1974, for which he used his penis as a paint brush. The 1970s also gave rise to several live-performances such as Sailor’s Meat in 1975, a many-hour performance in which McCarthy wears a female slip, make-up and a woman’s wig while simulating scenes of rape and of masturbation with a heap of raw mincemeat. In Tubbing (1975) he wears nothing but the wig and make-up, sitting naked in a bathtub and smearing, swallowing and splashing different kinds of liquids and food on himself and into his mouth. The filmed performance Experimental Dancer (1975) shows McCarthy standing on a stage in the spotlight, wearing nothing but a monkey mask while he hides his penis between his legs and dances. In the 1990s McCarthy’s works still emphasised the penis, but it had become a manipulated prop rather than a private part, adorning both men and women. Inflated penises as public sculptures, dolls with penises, such as PROPO, Girl with penis (1992), or life-sized plastic rabbits with nude coloured Spaghetti-penises in Spaghetti Man (1993) and dolls in Tomato Heads (1994) with kids’ toys replacing their penises. “McCarthy’s fixation on penises signals that his impulse towards desublimation and un-repression is directed towards the paternal function in particular,” Amelia Jones suggests.54 She regards McCarthy’s interest in the patriarch figure and its ownership of authority as rooted in the artist’s interest in Freud’s oedipal model of castration and thus in the disembodiment of the masculinity. Jones sees his works as running a ‘castration narrative’, desublimating masculinity and “producing the very horror […] Western culture labours to repress: the castrated and boundariless male body.”55 54 55

Jones (2000), 129. Ibid.

Trauma Spaces

This focus on patriarchy, child abuse and authoritarian conditioning by the male subject is explicitly addressed in McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s collaborative 8-minute video Family Tyranny (Modeling and Molding) from 1987. At the beginning of the video, the tape screens the text “the father begat the son; the son begat the father” followed by showing McCarthy as the ‘father’, brutally filling white liquid through a funnel into a head made out of Styrofoam. He repeatedly mumbles “You’ve been a very bad boy. My daddy did this to me. You can do this to your son, too. When your children are very bad. My daddy did this, too. Once you teach this to your son, he can pass it on to his son.” Kelley, who plays the ‘son’, sits on a couch and cries exaggeratedly, afraid of the punishment that looms and trying to escape the wooden architecture of his home through a window in the walls. The father holds him back and the son pleads “Not from behind!” and then sticks his head into a paper bag. Switching back to the initial scene with the Styrofoam head, McCarthy sings “Daddy come home from work today, daddy come home from work,” and then “Do it slowly. Let them feel it. Let them get used to it. They’ll remember it. Don’t worry. Let them get it into their memory. They’ll use it.” The fatherson drama continues as the son hides under a blanket under a table and the father pounds a bowl onto the table. Both utter “uh,uh,uh”, keeping the same rhythm, as though they were copulating. Preceding Pinocchio and Saloon, one might assume that Family Tyranny gave way to the basic concept of locking characters in an architectural structure that represents their trauma as a spatial concept. Here, as Jones emphasises, the son’s home has become “the container of the oedipal drama […] a nightmarish cage”56 and the only way he can escape that prison is by announcing that it is “time to go to school, Dad.” But while the son can escape, and while he might be able to avoid the conditioning of one generation to the next, the father is already locked in the infinity loop of traumatic repression. The video ends with a scene in which the father plays with dolls resembling Hummel figurines, drowning them in liquids and viciously destroying their bodies. It becomes apparent that he, in fact, is the one who suffers from infantile regression, unable to leave his house. In the same way the stage settings can be seen to appropriate mental conditions as in Pinocchio and Saloon, Jones emphasises “[t]he father is forever trapped in the architecture of his own psyche, itself – in patriarchy – predetermined in its structure by the anatomical destiny of his penis-wielding body.”57

56 57

Ibid., 130. Ibid.

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5.2

Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research group that analyses and visualises multiple layers of architectural and witness-based evidence, delivering crucial information about state crimes, ecocides, collective traumata and global human rights violations. Based at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London since its launch in 2011, FA consists of a smaller core team of members and several freelance participants. Founded and directed by architect and professor for Visual and Spatial Culture Eyal Weizman and coordinated by architect and researcher Christina Varvia, FA is an interdisciplinary team consisting of archaeologists, architects, artist, filmmakers, investigative journalist, lawyers, scientists, software developers and sound specialists. As such, their approach to crime scenes is archaeological, transforming complex layers of data into accessible evidence by creating films, navigable animations, interactive cartographies, graphic visualisations, books and digital and large-scale models of sites of conflict. FA is an independent research agency undertaking investigations for and in collaboration with human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, Al Mezan and Migeurop, environmental justice groups or other prosecutors such as UN Special Rapporteur for Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights. As an emerging academic field of study with an educational function, the research group also develop strategies to produce and present architectural evidence in various forums, such as exhibitions. Amidst the steady flow of digitally-stored data and the rising individual mediatisation and state surveillance of conflict, FA utilises the potential of this accessible data, combining it and using it for what they call ‘counterforensics’. This practice relies on an ethical notion of human rights, on science, maps and images and is usually directed against human rights violations committed by states. The term counterforensics “seeks to understand the logic of surveillance – investigate the means of state investigations – in order to be able to interfere with, camouflage itself from it, or render it inoperative.”58 Thus, using methods of the state in order to bring to light crimes committed by states, the group prioritises a forensic sensitivity to images and matter in a human rights context. In practice, this might mean presenting evidence of US drone strikes against civil victims in Pakistan, Palestine or Syria, showcasing EU policies of non-assistance to refugees in the Mediterranean or shining a light on extermination and torture camps in Cameroon, Syria or Yugoslavia. FA’s work asks exhibition spectators to reconsider their expectations of art, its political potential and its representative means. By expanding the boundaries of visual culture, it challenges its own definite categorisation seeing as it holds a unique position beyond a specific genre: the group is not an art collective, nor do 58

Weizman (2017), 68.

Trauma Spaces

they declare their work as art. At the same time, however, they are based at the Department of Visual Cultures, their work is part of institutional art collections and, most relevantly, they frequently exhibit their evidence in group and solo shows in well-established contemporary art museums, such as the MACBA in Barcelona, the HKW in Berlin or the MUAC in Mexico. They are also invited to participate in large exhibitions, such as the documenta 14 or the Venice Biennale, and were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018. Instead of contextualising their aesthetic practice as art, Weizman subsumes it as ‘Forensic Aesthetics’, which, according to him, is a relevant part of their forum work: “Forensics thus includes both fieldwork and forum work. It is not only about science as a tool of investigation – the field – but about science as a means of persuasion — the forum. It is crucially about conviction — not that of other scientists (as in a regulated process of peer review) but that of judges, juries, or publics. Forensic Aesthetics is the mode of appearance of things in forums — the gestures, techniques, and technologies of demonstration; methods of theatricality, narrative, and dramatization; image enhancement and technologies of projection; the creation and demolition of reputation, credibility, and competence.”59 By looking at the collective’s work through the lens of this twofold aesthetic practice – between field work (investigation, production, artistic interpretation) and forum work (presentation, publication, exhibition, contribution) – this chapter will concern itself with a FA investigation of the traumatic conditions of detainees kept in the Syrian detention centre Saydnaya. I will analyse the content, formal realisation and subsequent display of the work within the context of visual art and with a focus on the conveyance of trauma, all the while and bearing in mind where the collective is situated: in between political, legal, civil rights, media and cultural forums. Emphasising the relevance and new possibilities for the visual representation of trauma in an aesthetic context, I will examine two specific strategies inherent to the work of FA. First, the intersection of architecture and violence, and second, the spatial and acoustic approach to memory, specifically the utilisation of space as a tool to make accessible and visualise traumatic memories within an ‘Architecture of Memory’ that demystifies traumatic experiences reported by individual testimonies and correlates them with the spatial evidence of multiple complex data structures.

5.2.1

Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture Prison (2016)

From the aerial perspective of a grey-scaled satellite image, a 3D model of a 1970s East German-designed building is inserted digitally into a desert landscape. Occa59

Ibid., 83.

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Image 25: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). Saydnaya prison, as reconstructed by Forensic Architecture using architectural and acoustic modelling.

sional shouts and small explosions make up the distant sounds that can be heard around the three-armed structure. This is an interactive map of the Syrian prison Saydnaya — an open-source software accessible via the Internet.60 The cursor allows viewers to explore the building, to move around the architecture, zoom in and out, click on locations on different parts of the map and thus access chapters showing digitally rendered simulations, interview scenes with witnesses or edited films about incidents that occurred in these locations. There is an ‘Arrival’ scene that begins outside the building: it takes places inside a white truck that has just transported new inmates to the massive prison. The image is calm and steady but punctuated by various sounds: a door opens harshly; beating and screaming; the flogging sound of plastic cables hitting flesh; somebody falls down; a man begging and crying; more beating and shouting in Arabic; a metal cable falls to the ground. The sounds are somewhat hollow and visuals are limited. There are no windows inside the truck, only a small hatch giving towards the driver’s cabin. Dark silhouettes of a dozen or more people who don’t utter a word sit down and quietly stare at the ground. Clicking on one of these people starts off a short film: former prisoner Salam reports back about his experience of arriving at Saydnaya, explaining, “As soon as they opened the doors, each guard grabbed a detainee and started beating him.” His face is obscured in the interview

60

URL: https://saydnaya.amnesty.org

Trauma Spaces

scene, for a moment his hands are visible, revealing his scarred fingers. An animation begins and sounds become louder: it simulates his experience of having limited sight from under a cotton bag through which he had to endure the so-called ‘Welcome Party’ at the detention centre. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, thousands of people suspected of opposing the Assad regime have been systematically imprisoned, tortured and killed in various detention centres across the country. According to Amnesty International and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, approximately 17,723 people were killed in Syrian custody between March 2011 and December 2015.61 The military prison Saydnaya is said to be one of the deadliest places in this regime, located in a desert landscape circa 25 kilometres north of Syria’s capital Damascus. Amnesty International assumes that the prison has capacities for between 10,000–20,000 people, assessing that: “[…] the murder, torture, enforced disappearances and extermination carried out at Saydnaya since 2011 have been perpetrated as part of an attack against the civilian population that has been widespread, as well as systematic, and carried out in furtherance of state policy.”62 Having conducted interviews with over 80 people, Amnesty International subsequently commissioned FA in 2016 to reconstruct the architecture of the Saydnaya prison based on the testimonies of five survivors. Diab was imprisoned before 2011 after which point in time the security regulations were changed dramatically and prisoners could no longer leave their cells; Samer, Jamal, Salam and Anas63 were imprisoned after 2011. In April 2016, FA met with these five witnesses in Turkey, where they live as refugees, in order to interview them and use their testimonies to create an interactive architectural map of the prison, including animations, sound and edited film to visualise the incidents that occurred within its walls. Although the digital platform was published conjointly with the Amnesty International report, it was not produced as a visualisation of the report. Christina Varvia explains, “For us, it was not about redoing the Amnesty report. We did not have to prove that there is violence. We had to explain what life is like under these conditions — continuous torturing, starvation, cold, diseases, boredom. It is a complex reality, more than just the piece of information that there is violence and human rights

61 62 63

Cf. Amnesty International (2016), 5. Ibid., 6. Taking a cue from Forensic Architecture and the careful measures taken by the collective, I will only refer to the former detainees by their first name in order to protect their anonymity and the safety of their families.

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violation at Saydnaya. It is a condition of being that you have to describe, and that the architecture is a part of.”64 Arabic-speaking architect Hania Jamal, who simulated the virtual space, and artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who reconstructed auditory memories, conducted the interviews using a methodology they had previously developed with the forensic psychology unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. The psychologists warned FA that “recollections of horrifying experiences might emerge as a result of an indeterminate cognitive process that is triggered by momentary, unpredictable relations — a distributed process that includes bodies, spaces, sounds and objects.”65 For this reason, Abu Hamdan and Hania Jamal asked questions about architectural and acoustic details that the former detainees could still remember, helping them memorise relations without letting them fall back into traumatic episodes and keep their focus on the architectural 3D models and acoustic software on large screens right in front of them.66

 

Image 26: Left: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). Forensic Architecture, 2016. A former detainee works with Forensic Architecture researchers to recreate elements of the prison in April 2016.

64 65 66

Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London. Weizman (2017), 88. Cf. Abu Hamdan (2017), 139fn.

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Image 27: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). Forensic Architecture, 2016.

Image 28: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). This corridor in the prison, known to be linear, was experienced by a survivor while he was tortured and the space was distorted by the traumatic conditions at the moment the memory was encoded.

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5.2.2

Architecture of Memory

For the architectural and auditory reconstruction, FA relied on cross-referencing the witnesses’ descriptive testimonies, because despite its spatial vastness there are no photographic images of Saydnaya. Furthermore, there are no external monitors and only very limited visual accounts from testimonies, as the systematic inflicted punishment includes making prisoners cover their eyes with their hands, using blindfolds or the general deprivation of light as a constant condition to keep detainees, literally, in the dark. Therefore, non-visual sensory memories were the only available source material that could be used to generate truth about the detainees’ conditions, the spaces they spend their time in and the cruelty of the prison’s systematic torture. Moreover, the time spent in Saydnaya was traumatic for most former detainees, meaning that when asked to recollect this period individuals are likely to share memories that may not be limited to visual and spatial accounts but may also be emotionally distorted. As trauma scholar Ruth Leys points out, “Post-traumatic stress disorder is fundamentally a disorder of memory.”67 Therefore, as Weizman concurs, “Memories of violence are rarely straightforward records or internalised representations that are stored in an orderly manner and easily retrieved. Memory, like matter, is plastic, continuously morphing, and affected by violence.”68 The architectural model of Saydnaya was thus not based on chronological recollections, but particularly focused on the momentary and sensory quality of traumatic memories. By preparing a set of architectural 3D modelling tools, objects and structures prior to the interviews, Hania Jamal virtually simulated the witnesses’ detailed descriptions of the dimensions of the space. These descriptions were rendered into objects and people placed at eye level within the architecture while talking to the survivors who thus became “active participants in the project”69 and “could locate themselves virtually in it.”70 According to Varvia, the questions “helped the witnesses to create a portrait, as if the architects’ [hands] were their own (…), they became their tools to give their own account. It was the witnesses guiding it.”71 Varvia explains that this empowerment stems from the unfolding of memory space in front of their eyes, helping the former detainees to see architecture as something else as “they would see their memory being externalised. […] Architecture was no longer that torture tool they had been forced into, but all of a sudden it was an object that they could see from afar.”72 The witnesses thus actively 67 68 69 70 71 72

Leys (2000), 2. Weizman (2017), 87. Ibid., 88. Ibid. Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London. Ibid.

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Image 29: Forensic Architecture. Project: Mir Ali (Drone Strike, Case 2). Image: Forensic Architecture, 2013.

helped to digitally reconstruct the architecture of the prison with their testimonies and were also asked to sign off on the project’s final visual result regarding its accuracy. All witnesses experienced extreme traumatic incidents and constant anxiety and hunger on a daily basis for a period of several years of living in detention, all of which had a strong impact on their spatial and time-based memory. This timelessness and the witnesses’ focus on specific moments rather than coherent narratives prompted FA to respond to this distorted memory structure by developing the virtual model “not as a reductive synthesis” but as “an archive in which testimonies were placed within the spaces they described,”73 including gaps, errors and spatial distortions described by the witnesses. The interactive map and its sequences are therefore not built in a chronological manner; instead, they inhabit specific locations and narrate momentary memories – ‘memory objects’ as Weizman coins them – as related by witnesses. By representing the witnesses’ memories of their time at Saydnaya, the virtual platform reflects these momentary ‘memory objects’ that the witnesses have chosen to share with FA, in an effort to describe “an experience that lasts for years. After a while you just

73

Weizman (2017), 91.

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end up talking about the most horrific events. […] It is a complex reality, because it is life for three years.”74 Traumatic memories often contain “[t]errors, contradictions and lacunas”75 which, according to FA, testify to the traumatic nature of memory, seeing as such distortions “reveal something of the experience of a detainee and their psychological condition.”76 Referring to Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s aforementioned book Testimony (1992), Weizman argues that it is the “testimony’s imperfections that bear witness to the fact of violence.”77 Trauma, Felman and Laub argue, is manifested precisely in the distortion of memory. This type of traumatic memory distortion is highlighted in a scene that shows the former detainee Anas describing the spatial structure of the corridor outside his cell. Although he was not allowed to open his eyes once he had stepped outside of his cell, he nonetheless managed to catch a glimpse at the corridor while being beaten in the face. He describes having seen “a circular hall with lots of cells... a huge circle, like a cylinder.” According to the research conducted by FA and the reports of the other witnesses, however, the corridor must be straight rather than circular. Weizman argues that this glitch “is possibly the result of the beating and a sense of total incarceration. This lapse might thus testify to the violence of Saydnaya more precisely than any faithful architectural description.”78 Qualities such as accuracy thus gain a different layer of meaning when testimony is not regarded as being opposed to evidence, but rather when this opposition is removed. According to Varvia, testimony, in the case of Anas’ spatial recollections, is “evidence of the fact that there was trauma involved there; evidence of the fact that there was violence. To have a distortion of space of that scale — this human error testifies to the impossibility of perceiving it properly, because he was being tortured at the time.”79 The architectural model created by Hania Jamal during the interviews did not only serve the purpose of mimetically representing the former detainees’ memories, and thus serving as evidence of their condition. Seeing an instantaneous simulation of their memories in terms of architecture on the screens right in front of their eyes also helped the former detainees recollect more details and incidents. FA has made use of this spatial mnemonic technique80 in previous investigations as well, such as those dealing with civilian victims of drone strikes in which the creation of simulations helped witnesses remember crucial details of violent and 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London. Weizman (2017), 91. Ibid. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 93. Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London. Cf. Weizman (2017), 46.

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traumatic events that could help investigations find architectural evidence.81 Based on his experience with victims and survivors of traumatic incidents in several cases, Weizman explains, “Architecture […] can provide more than just investigative tools for the production of evidence. It can also be used as a mnemonic device for enhancing memories obscured, hidden or distorted by the experience of trauma. […] Testimony after the ‘forensic turn’ had returned as a material, sometimes architectural practice.”82

5.2.3

“Listening to Violence”83

In Saydnaya, Weizman argues, “spatial perception […] [is] fully defined by sound.”84 Footsteps, food bowls, doors, beating, torturing, dripping water and the wind outside structure the former prisoners’ memories of the space and of the time they experienced during confinement. Not only is vision extremely limited at Saydnaya, but speaking, whispering or crying is generally prohibited85 – even when sitting inside a cell or while being tortured – which leads to the detainees developing “an acute sensitivity to minute variations.”86 For that reason, former detainees remembered tactile and acoustic details with remarkable precision. They had to listen to how others were tortured or even killed, but never heard even the slightest sound from the detainees. “The first thing they tell you is that if you make any sound you’ll be beaten even more,” says Anas about the prison’s previously mentioned arrival ritual, which they sarcastically refer to as the ‘Welcome Party’. This ‘silence’, as Lawrence Abu Hamdan argues, “is not only brutally enforced but part of the brutality itself.”87 Creating an ‘Architecture of Sound’, the audio investigator and sound artist simulated sounds similar to those described by the witnesses and let them decide on the precise details, speed, noise, rhythm or echoes in an effort “to give language to the survivors’ acoustic memories.”88 Abu Hamdan 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88

This investigation is titled Mir Ali (Drone Strikes, Case 2) and was created in 2013, based on a single witness’ testimony of a drone strike hitting her home and killing several people in Mir Ali, North Waziristan on October 4, 2010. Through the architectural modelling process, which she was part of, she could suddenly remember certain objects that were connected to traumatic incidents. She could, for example, remember finding burned human flesh with hair in the wings of a circular fan of which she had been trying to remember the exact physical position. Weizman (2017), 82. Abu Hamdan (2017), 133. Weizman (2017), 93. “Detainees must maintain silence at all times; they are not allowed to speak or even whisper,” Amnesty International (2016), 36. Weizman (2017), 88. Abu Hamdan (2017), 147. Ibid., 135.

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thus enables the traumatic memories expressed by the survivors to take on a new form and become externalised from their minds. Although ear witness testimony can provide crucial evidence to illegal torture and human rights violations beyond Saydnaya, Abu Hamdan highlights in his research that this is an “overlooked field”, and that “to this date there still has been no major scientific study on ear witness memory to non-voice-based acoustic stimuli.”89 My evaluating and reconstructing sound, Abu Hamdan utilised the ear witness testimony to reconstruct several elements of Saydnaya’s architecture and the specific places in which detainees are held. A technique of ‘echo profiling’ thus helped to estimate sizes of rooms, depths and materials of spaces within Saydnaya. He elaborates, “In the instances when the witnesses were particularly confident in their capacities to hear and recall the sounds of the prison, I used a technique called echo profiling. This involved a playback of different impulse sounds, such as a click or a strike, varying the reverberation time, and in doing so virtually and digitally extending or contracting the size of the acoustic space. To do this I used a convolution reverb algorithm, which works to simulate the acoustics of a physical space. It […] can effectively convolve any sound with any space in order to simulate audibly how any sound would resonate through any given space.”90 All witnesses underline that they developed a strong acoustic sensibilities that included being able to identify which weapon was being used to torture detainees in neighbour cells only by the sound of the tool. They were also able to tell which person was walking just by the sound of the footsteps, and they could sense the danger and anxiety only by noticing little acoustic changes in their daily routines. Abu Hamdan explains, “Like a form of sonar, the sounds of the beatings illuminated the spaces around them. […] The prison is really an echo chamber: one person being tortured is like everyone being tortured, because the sound circulates throughout the space, through air vents and water pipes. You cannot escape it.”91 The enforced silence causes detainees to whisper and to lower their sound level of speaking in all situations to a radical extent. This had a strong effect on their ability to speak, even after being released, and also heightened their capacity to listen. By measuring the level of whispering through tone tests with the witnesses, Abu Hamdan was able to identify an audible tone of -84db and -79db, which is

89

90 91

Ibid., 126. / The only study, to which Abu Hamdan also refers, was conducted by Lisa Öhman. Öhman, Lisa. All Ears: Adults’ and Children’s Earwitness Testimony. Gothenburg: Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, (2013). Ibid., 139. Abu Hamdan in Wainwright (2016).

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barely noticeable. The only former detainee who identified a tone 19db higher than this average was Diab, who, as previously mentioned, was imprisoned prior to 2011. Abu Hamdan subsumes “The 19db drop after 2011 allows us to hear the transformation of Saydnaya from a prison into a death camp. The mass murder taking place there is audibly corroborated, not only in the ex-prisoners’ testimonies but in the level of whispers of their voices while imprisoned there.”92 Unable to visually grasp the physical structure of the prison or the daily routines that went on there, sounds often replaced vision and afforded detainees with the only form of orientation available to them. Basing the virtual model entirely on the witnesses’ perspective, the ‘Architecture of Sound’ was thus a decisive element for its investigative scope and also its aesthetic representation. The filmic sequence One Drop of Water exemplifies the investigative and the aesthetic use of sound, as well as highlighting the importance of sound in the recollection of traumatic memories. Based on two separate interviews with former cellmates Samer and Jamal, who both chose to remain anonymous, the three-minute film describes an incident in which the prison cuts off the water supply for three consecutive days.93 Jamal remembers, “People were even trying to suck water out of the dirty toilet hose.” After three days they received a little bowl of water to be shared between all 9 cellmates. Then the water supply was cut for another three days; the detainees began hallucinating. “When I closed my eyes, I started seeing waterfalls,” Samer remembers, while a simulation in the film shows a drizzle that emerges on the texture of a prison wall and slowly drips down with a loud dripping sound, as if the walls were sweating heavily. “On the fourth day,” Jamal recounts, “one prisoner found the courage to shout: Water! So the next cell shouted the same: Water! And the next cell: Water! Water!” Both repeating the desperate shouts they ear-witnessed, Samer and Jamal’s voices are now heard simultaneously in the film, while the architectural simulation moves through the corridor of cells. After a short silence, loud drops can be heard. “Suddenly, we heard the sound of water, dripping in the pipes,” Samer remembers. “At first we thought we were still hallucinating, that the sound wasn’t real. I swear, I cannot describe that sound, the moment we heard it everyone started crying from the bottom of their souls like little children.” The animation zooms into a steady image of a water tap and moves up the dark spout.

92 93

Abu Hamdan (2017), 151. According to the Amnesty International report, the prolonged denial of water, both for drinking and sanitary purposes, was a regular technique to torture detainees. Cf. Amnesty International (2016), 42.

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Sound, in this sequence, is the binding and narrative element that unpacks the enormous impact of this incident to both the detainees in their cells as well as the viewers of this film. The withdrawal of water was “a condition that went throughout the whole prison,”94 Varvia notes. FA highlighted this by means of creating a cinematic dramaturgy focusing on the water pipes, symbolising and identifying the architectural network this disastrous situation was subject of. In its vivid reconstruction, the architecture of the detention centre is revealed as a tool of violence and, in turn, the violence acted out on the detainees is visible via the brutality of the architecture. Weizman argues that in the Saydnaya investigation “we realized that the building functioned not only as a space where incarceration, surveillance, and torture regularly take place, but that it is itself, an architectural instrument of spatial and acoustic torture, and as such, one of the most extreme manifestations of architecture.”95 Trying to render this visible, Varvia explains, “We wanted to show that there was a moment that was all wired up in this building. Although we are dealing with individual cases, they are all part of the same narrative, even though each reality is being described from particular vantage points. We had to take a leap because we needed to show how the architecture itself plays a role in it. The air vents were vessels through which sound would travel. The water pipes became the roots through which the good news came, when they could hear it dripping, or the bad news too, if there was no sound.”96 As opposed to most other filmic and virtually rendered sequences, FA inserted a more noticeable artistic interpretation into this sequence. The dramaturgy and the visualisation of hallucinations, for example, are amongst the few moments in the overall visual aesthetic of the Saydnaya project, in which FA went beyond representing the evidentiary facts and instead translated subconscious processes and emotions described by the interviewed detainees. In this particular case, there were two reasons for this decision: first, it was a “pragmatic issue” that compensated for there not being “enough good footage” to illuminate what happened and second, to do justice to the former detainees’ vivid descriptions, as they “were obsessed with water, describing that they could see drizzles on the wall. It is a bit of an artistic interpretation […] We just need to do it with measure, coming from their perspective.”97 According to Varvia, in the Saydnaya case there was always the difficulty of “making sure to keep a genuine impression of whatever truth we got to know and at the same time being able to communicate that truth.”98

94 95 96 97 98

Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London. Weizman (2017), 91. Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London. Ibid. Ibid.

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5.2.4

Representing Violence

Ultimately, it comes down to the question of ‘measure’ regarding the limits and possibilities of representing the witnesses’ horrific testimonies, particularly in regard to the descriptions of physically violent incidents at the prison. As opposed to the fictional aesthetic projects discussed in the previous chapters, the inquisitional work of FA must do justice to several parties: respecting the testimony of the witness, the truthful representation to serve the investigation and the emotional sensitivity of the spectator. This leads to a central question of the Saydnaya project, and many other Forensic Architecture projects: how much violence does an image need in order to convey the traumatic experience that the witnesses want to express, and in order to prove the extent of the violence against human rights, while simultaneously “steering away from the fetishisation of violence”99 , as Varvia underlines. In FA’s presentation of Saydnaya prison, violent acts are never explicitly shown, but they are nonetheless represented vividly. By means of the space of the architecture, for example, or through sounds as well as the absence of sound, in the visual simulation of torture tools or in narrative descriptions of points of orientation, smells and emotions. “No one dared lift his head, because we thought one of the guards might be in there. […] There was a smell of grease and blood,” Samer remembers regarding his arrival at Saydnaya, once the guards had put him in a cell together with many other naked men. In another sequence Anas remembers: “Hunger is the worst thing. Sometimes there was someone dead next to us while we ate. You just need to eat.” Uncommented and without dramatic gesture, the real violence of their testimony is revealed, conveyed by ways of neutral information of the detainee’s everyday conditions. It would be wrong to describe the Saydnaya project as being censored, as it relies fully on the witnesses’ testimonies. The material accessible to FA was therefore more limited than in other cases the collective has worked on. In the investigation Torture and Detention in Cameroon (2016) about detention centres in Cameroon that were officially used as a military strategy against members of Boko Haram, FA decided to show visual evidence: an explicit scene of torture that had been recorded by a soldier, underlining “the fact that making the image itself is part of violence.” In Saydnaya, analogue to the restrictions imposed on detainees regarding seeing and speaking during confinement, the representation of their experiences transports these limitations. Instead, the screaming and crying is replaced by the witnesses’ calm aural descriptions of horrific situations, by simulations of the sounds that occurred during the violent acts, while the visual violence is replaced, e.g., by eyelevel simulation of plain architecture in and through which the violence took place. 99

Ibid.

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Image 30: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). Witnesses were asked to describe architectural details, such as dimensions and textures, and these recollections solicited further memories of the prison and experiences had within.

The focus is frequently shifted onto architectural details, textures or objects, which seem to function as ‘memory objects’ around which narratives evolve or can even be triggered by. For the Saydnaya investigation, as opposed to cases in which violations of human rights lasted for shorter periods of time, the primary challenge of representing the violence in the prison was that it went on latently for many years, and that this violence was inherently part of the architecture. Representing strategic violence of this scope implies rendering the sensation of living under given conditions, including constant anxiety and terror, always hungry and being subjected to humiliation. Asking, “how it is possible stay human under those conditions,” 100 as Varvia points out. The sequence Time Stretches Out told by Salam speaks to this urge to remain human by finding distractions from the reality they were imprisoned in: “We know the cell tile by tile, so well we can walk in it even in the dark. The tiles have random patterns, so some days I would count how many stones they have. And some have shapes that look like an animal or a person.” Simulating these descriptions in the virtual model, FA emphasises the representation of details, objects, textures, hallucinations, smells, sounds and architectural structures, as they play an important part in the conveyance of their constant condition. Varvia argues,

100 Ibid.

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Image 31: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). Counter Investigations (2018) Exhibition view. ICA London. Photo: Mark Blower.

“In the Saydnaya case we had to deal with this question of representation the most […] How to describe this issue of timelessness, of boredom, of having nothing to look at, nothing to read or to see for years? You start looking at the tiles; you start to see patterns or animals in them. They would describe them as that, because space is all they had. […]”101 While the constant terror is thus represented in the visualisation of details, the memories of concrete physical violence are less visual but rather sensory. The measure with which FA approaches the balancing act of representing physical violence is exemplified in a sequence called Through the Window, in which Samer describes an architectural detail called ‘the hatch’. Asked to describe the cell’s door, he remembers the small rectangular window in the door, about 30 centimetres above the ground and about as wide as the length of his face. “I know that, because one of the ways they punished me was to put my head out of the hatch to have it kicked,” he remembers. The film shows a simulation of the grey cell, zooming in from above: it is a solitary cell in which about a dozen men have been placed;102 each person ap101 Ibid. 102 According to Weizman, all new detainees spend “between a week and five months” in solitary cells “used to hold up to fifteen people at one time.” Weizman (2017), 92.

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pears as a black, skinny silhouette; some are standing and some are sitting. Samer describes how guards once complained about their cell being dirty, ordering him to put his head sideways through the hatch. The simulation zooms close to the hatch from inside the cell, it shows how it is opened from the other side, and then fades out into black as Samer recalls: “Then he straightened my head, so that my throat was pressed against the edge and he jumped with all his weight on my head. I couldn’t breathe. I don’t know what I felt, the whole world was spinning. […] he started jumping and stomping […] The pain and the humiliation was unbearable.” While he recalls his memory, the image remains black and only the numb sound of the jumping and kicking plays. No cries, no screams. Not simulating the physical violence of this or indeed of any brutal incident at Saydnaya visually creates an analogy to the constant state of sensory deprivation the detainees were subjected to. Furthermore, representing Samer’s memory without a visual restaging of his experience reflects the important guideline of “trying to find a respectable way of not making a spectacle out of it.”103 This respectful approach was applied for all visual aesthetics in the Saydnaya project, including the decision to not show explicit scars or photos of the time right after confinement as they are shown as evidence in the Amnesty International report. In its supplementary function parallel to the 50-page Amnesty International report, FA’s virtual platform thus did not need to be visually explicit regarding physical violence or delivering visual proof. In its aesthetic function the Saydnaya project nonetheless translates testimony into an accessible format that has not glossed over the truth of the events. While these two traditions – humanitarian activism and aesthetics – are usually separated, the general practice of FA challenges this opposition and questions whether these two functions – as human rights activists and as aesthetic practitioners – need to be separated at all.

5.2.5

Forensic Aesthetics

Weizman situates the practice of FA in a genre he has coined ‘Forensic Aesthetics’.104 He seeks to establish aesthetic practices as investigative tools and vice versa, and is critical of artists’ work having only an illustrative function in investigative practices, as well as of the separation of disciplines. Within the scope of the work of Forensic Architecture, Weizman argues, “Forensics is an aesthetic practice because it depends on both the modes and the means by which reality is sensed and presented publicly. Investigative aesthetics

103 Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London. 104 Weizman originally coined this term with Thomas Keenan in Mengele’s Skull. The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, (2012).

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slows down time and intensifies sensibility to space, matter and image. It also seeks to devise new modes of narration and the articulation of truth claims.”105 This merging of investigative and aesthetic practices is crucial to FA’s approach of representing traumatic narratives, as investigative tools are employed in order to uncover the truth about events during which human rights are presumed to have been violated. The investigations and the testimony of survivors must be rendered visual in a manner that is respectfully ‘accurate’, but that nonetheless adds an aesthetically transformed layer in favour of facilitating the communication of that traumatic event. Regarding the testimony in the Saydnaya project, Varvia explains that the group needed to “find a balance between the amount of information they had provided us with, which was more than we could portray at that time, and having to artistically interpret it in some way, because we wanted to communicate it […]. We saw the platform that resulted from it as a communication tool; the architecture became a non-linear way for telling the stories by entering those spaces.”106 Extending an open invitation to join investigative and aesthetic practices, Weizman points to different levels of investigative processes that have aesthetic qualities. One of them is the ‘material aesthetic’, which, according to him, can be “regarded as an aesthetic sensorium,”107 manifested in solid matter such as artefacts, objects, architectures or landscapes. He considers the transformation of this material, such as capturing matter through photography, film or digitalisation, as a sensory and crucial process as well, often serving as an investigative tool. While these processes of editing, animating and treating matter and its transformation into readable formats are primarily part of the aesthetic production, another crucial level for the work of FA is the aesthetic representation of their cases, which may take place in a media environment, on social media, the Internet, in legal hearings, political interaction, books, lectures and exhibitions. Weizman democratically sums all of these places and spaces up as ‘forums’, referring to the initial relation between ‘Forensics’ and ‘Forum’: “Derived from the Latin forensis, the word ‘forensics’ refers at its root to ‘forum’. Forensics is thus the art of the forum – the practice and skill of presenting an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering. Forensics is in this sense part of rhetoric, which concerns speech. However, it includes not only human speech but also that of things. Because objects cannot actually speak, there is a need for a ‘translator’ or an ‘interpreter’ – a person or a set of technologies to me-

105 Weizman (2017), 94. 106 Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London. 107 Weizman (2017), 94.

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diate between the thing and the forum. […] Forensics thus organizes the relation among three constituents: a thing, an ‘interpreter’, and a forum.”108 The purpose of forensics is thus suggested as a relation of three elements: the object/case, the interpreters/translators and the forum in which the case is presented. The forum creates an audience and thus fulfils the task of providing a space for acting upon those issues, for debate and for exchange. Forensics, from Weizman’s perspective, is the art of the forum, which may have different shapes and fulfil different purposes. Depending on each individual investigation FA undertakes, the cases are presented in various forums. Being present in legal and political forums enables FA to contribute information directly to the juridical or parliamentary inquisitions. On the other hand, civil society forums, media forums and cultural forums enable them to gain a wider audience, to become part of a public debate and to use given forums strategically so as to put pressure on the accused or on the leaders of parliamentary investigations by generating publicity.

5.2.6

“The Exhibition is a Potent Space”

In recent years, the forum of the exhibition has proven to be a productive frame for the aesthetic practice of FA. Its format is well suited for enabling the desired merging of investigative and aesthetic practices. In an exhibition’s press release FA explain that space of the exhibition “challenges us to consider how contemporary artistic practices and media technologies can be geared up to engage this reality of post-truth.”109 The forum of the exhibition, for FA, is both a starting point and a place to publish results and (post-)truths; it is a hub, a place to communicate, to learn and to teach, to see complex images and to learn to reflect them. The exhibitions, however, never serve the purpose of showing ‘works of art’, because the work as such in not declared as art. This could potentially elicit several critical questions, e.g. regarding the autonomy of their work, but it could also be read as an appeal to discard the argument of the genre in favour of a practice that acts spatially and multi-disciplinary. Varvia points out, “We are based in visual cultures, but our work goes beyond that perspective, it expands outwards.”110 She elaborates, “First of all, we exhibit because it is part of our mandate of being based at a university to create new methodologies and new knowledge, and to disseminate this. […] It seems important to us to create a culture of reading images, of understanding the news that we consume about distant places, helping to develop a critical

108 Ibid., 82-83. 109 Press Release for Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 2017. 110 Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London.

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mind for that kind of information flow, which we are a part of. […] On the other hand, we use certain strategic exhibitions that are useful for our projects.”111 Amongst the strategic exhibitions referenced by Varvia, FA’s involvement in the documenta 14 in Kassel (June 10–September 9, 2017) is of particular note. The case 77SQM_9:26MIN investigates the German secret services involvement in one of the killings committed by the racist terror network NSU (Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund). By ways of an architectural reconstruction in their exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, FA was able to factually prove that the German secret service agent Andreas Temme must have physically witnessed the murder of Halit Yozgat in his Internet cafe in Kassel. With this case, FA chose to present a work ripe with current political urgency in Germany, using the location of Kassel and the cultural forum of documenta 14 as a temporary focus point to bring the effects of different forums together. A timeline shown at the most recent exhibition of this work’s progress at the ICA in London illustrates how responses in some forums cause reactions in others, and how these reactions interfere with each other. The participation in the cultural forum of documenta 14, the uproar it caused in the media forum and the involvement with human rights organisations (civil society forums) that took place at the exhibition garnered FA with enough attention to involve legal and political forums as well. Investigators and politicians visited the exhibition and accepted to consider FA’s investigation as evidence for the parliamentary inquiry. A similarly influential effect was generated by the exhibition Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City. The Enforced Disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa Students is an investigation of the 43 missing students in Mexico and how both state agencies and organised crime are involved in this on-going crime. FA extended invitations to different NGOs, families of the missing students and the public to come to the exhibition and to use it as a hub. Varvia argues that not only did FA establish the failures of Mexican law enforcement, but furthermore “[a]ctivated the conversation through that exhibition. That is incredibly powerful and it opens up a new forum via which it is possible to directly engage with the public. You don’t need to be invited to a parliamentary inquiry; you can go down to the exhibition and figure out what has happened for yourself. […] The exhibition space is a potent one.”112

111 112

Ibid. Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London.

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Image 32: Forensic Architecture. Project: 77sqm_9:26min (2017). Timeline of the investigation. ICA London, 2018. Photo: Mark Blower.

5.2.7

Exhibiting Trauma

FA introduces complex relations and truths about conflicted places and areas from around the world with a visual clarity in an aesthetic context, providing readable narratives of traumatic events, as well as using exhibitions to help spectators respond to these images by developing aesthetic tools. The various representations of the Saydnaya investigation in different exhibitions made this project a best-practice example of how FA creates a hybridity between activism and art, bridged by the use of aesthetic practices, and how traumatic narratives are communicated through testimonies manifested in and through architectures. Beyond its continual accessibility as a virtual platform, the Saydnaya case has been presented in several exhibitions in cultural institutions, though it was displayed differently each time, contingent on both the architecture of the exhibition’s space and its context. Saydnaya: Inside Syrian Torture Prison was presented publicly for the first time at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (September 29–October 1, 2016) for the short duration of an interdisciplinary symposium on Memory and Justice. For this presentation, the project was exhibited as a video installation. Eight synchronised channels set at human eye level and positioned in a circular shape each showed

Trauma Spaces

 

Image 33: Forensic Architecture. Towards an Investigative Aesthetics (2017). Exhibition View. MACBA. Photo: Miguel Coll.

different videos from the project, images or animations and transmitted an open ambient sound. The eight screens encircled viewers, repeating the witnesses’ experience of being deprived of their mobility through a moment of feeling constricted and surrounded. In 2017, FA realised their first large solo exhibition titled Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, which took place at Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (April 28–October 15, 2017), followed by a somewhat altered version at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City (September 9–December 30, 2017). Curated by Rosario Güiraldes and conceptualised by Anselm Franke, Christina Varvia and Eyal Weizman, the exhibition at the MACBA was organised around the scale and method of the individual cases and considered as an extension of the investigative practice.113 This research and information-based approach was also very apparent in the display of the project Saydnaya: Inside Syrian Torture Prison, as it was presented not unlike an educational mind map on a wall painted blue. Showcasing quotes, explanatory texts, photos and a screen with headphones that played all 113

The exhibition at MUAC was conceived in a similar manner, but its focus was on Forensic Architecture’s case The Enforced Disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa Students –– an incident that took began at the Escuela Normal Raúl Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa, in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26–27, 2014.

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of the videos and animations of the digital platform in a semi-chronological order, this presentation reflected the suggestion to read the investigations as being a learning environment and research publication. A different method of displaying the Saydnaya case was opted for in more recent exhibitions which include the group show Beautiful New Worlds: Virtual Realities in Contemporary Art at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, Germany (November 11, 2017–April 8, 2018), curated by Ina Neddermeyer, and the solo exhibition Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (ICA) (March 7–May 6, 2018). In both exhibitions, Saydnaya: Inside Syrian Torture Prison was shown on a large single screen in darkened spaces, so that the experience of the successions of individual witnesses’ testimonies was immersive rather than distanced or neutralised. A single bench in the middle of the screening room at the ICA and four speakers in each corner surrounding the bench were the only objects placed in the gallery space; on the wall facing the screen, an explanatory text and a computer screen showing the virtual Saydnaya platform provided further interaction with the investigation. The sound of the survivors’ voices is calm, whereas the simulated soundscape of the prison is loud and intense. There is a cinematic quality to this type of presentation, particularly due to the black curtains separating the cinema space from the rest of the exhibition. The differences between these display methods emphasises the variety of options the exhibition space provides to the work of FA, and how these curatorial decisions have an intense impact on how spectators read the images. The Saydnaya project is built entirely on traumatic memories of five former detainees and this trauma is visible in every narrative and every architectural simulation. Without making a spectacle of their tragedy, fetishizing violence or employing dramatic pathos to conjure up more empathy and emotion, FA nonetheless finds a balance to present undeniable images of trauma in an exhibition space without censorship or fade-outs, but only by relying on the witnesses’ testimonies. As such, the presentation of this case in exhibitions creates an awareness of the traumatic situation that detainees still endure in the Syrian prison and, particularly in its presentation at the ICA in London and in light of Brexit and UK refugee policies, it also has the strategic effect of visualising “where people are running away from”.114

5.3

Memories in Motion

Architecture and spatial practices are central tools and/or frameworks utilised in all works that have been discussed in the previous two chapters. While Forensic

114

Varvia, Christina: Personal interview, 09/03/2018, London.

Trauma Spaces

Architecture recreates a participative architectural computer model for an investigative purpose that serves as an aesthetic framework, Paul McCarthy uses solid stage architecture symbolically for fictional traumatic narratives, interpreting and challenging trauma as a social condition. Given their entirely different approaches to worldly traumatic events and conditions, as well as their use of facts and fiction, comparing the practices of FA and McCarthy may seem questionable. Yet a direct comparison is nonetheless useful, for it is precisely the discrepancy in both formal and contextual expressions that underpins my argument regarding not only the existence of explicit representations of trauma in contemporary art, but also the diverse rhetoric and formal realisation thereof. Meanwhile, the objective in both instances is a similar one: providing tools for understand images of trauma. Transforming collective social processes, such as cultural conditioning and familial trauma, into hyperbolic fictive narratives, Paul McCarthy employs architecture as a frame for and an embodiment of trauma. Spatial concepts, in the shape of houses or stages for example, convey the conflicted dilemma characters are faced with, imprisoning them in their own home and making their psyche visible within and through the confined space. At the same time – and just like repressed traumatic memories that cannot be controlled and re-occur frequently – the spaces dominate the lives of the characters. Realising the idea of an “architecture of the body — or the body as architecture,” McCarthy describes a recurring phenomenon: the architectural contrast – a demarcation – of the abstract inside and the outside. McCarthy’s work circles around a confrontation between puritanical and prurient extremes within the American society and its media landscape. He continually abstracts the striking contrast of assumed appearance and reality: moral versus drive; disinfection versus contamination; happiness versus trauma; cuteness versus uncanniness; outside versus inside. The houses, costumes and bodies emphasise the difference between inner and outer spatiality. Borders and frames are performatively destroyed and erupted, while fluids unify all subjects and objects into one large bacterial mess. Meanwhile, the audience remains trapped: confronted with images of disgust inside the trauma-architecture, viewers are challenged to see the work’s humorous and cynical aspects — human primitivism, cliché́ lives and contextual emptiness. McCarthy deals with the trauma subject, but he rarely identifies it or assigns a specification. The cipher of Pinocchio does not suffer from trauma, although this just may very well be what trauma looks like. It comes down to the question of fiction and reality: ketchup or blood? In his work, the human body becomes the theatrical stage, the object, the corset, the architectural restriction, which is then blown open by viscerality, uncanniness, ugliness, traumata, interiority, all of which become apparent through the repetition of farce of repression and repression of farce. Not in a similarly symbolic but rather in an investigative manner, Forensic Architecture self-identifies its practice as an agency. The research group explores

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spatial structures, traces, architectural interiors and exteriors, satellite images, sounds, maps, testimonies and other accessible data, in order to bring them together in a ‘image-data-complex’ and use them as evidence for counter forensic practices in human rights violations and crimes acted against nature and animals. Merging investigative and aesthetic practices, FA visualises investigations and the testimony of survivors in exhibitions used as cultural forums, communicating the impression of whatever truth they arrived at and adding an artistically interpreted layer on top of this in order to help facilitate the conveyance of the traumatic event or circumstance. This becomes particularly visible in the investigation Saydnaya: Inside Syrian Torture Prison in which the presentation of architecture not only serves as a container in which traumatic events take place, but also through which violence and prolonged traumatic circumstances are executed — a strategic architectural instrument of spatial and acoustic torture. Therefore, architectural complicity in human rights violations and subsequent traumata is revealed. We see trauma in architecture, trauma as architecture and, beyond this, architecture as a mnemonic device for accessing the traumatic memories of witnesses and survivors. Within this threefold activity, architecture is the central rhetoric tool for expressing trauma in the work of the research collective. The Saydnaya project virtually recreates sounds and spaces, thus revealing systematic torture patterns executed by the Syrian military. Sound plays a particular role in the Saydnaya investigation and the reconstructed auditory memories of the survivors, as the deprivation of vision and speaking is a crucial element of the torture strategies applied in the prison. For this reason, it is notably the absence of sound as an inverted element of evidence that testifies to trauma. Analogue to the restrictions regarding seeing and speaking enforced on detainees during confinement, the representation of Saydnaya incorporates these limitations and furthermore emphasises ‘human errors’, such as distortions of space in the witnesses’ memories, as evidence for the fact that trauma and violence were involved, making it impossible for the survivors to perceive their surroundings properly. Remaining very close to reports, testimonies and other evidence, FA represents trauma with minimal use of artistic interpretation and without fetishizing violence. The discussion surrounded the aesthetic practice and research by FA and Paul McCarthy shows that although contexts and formal expressions differ immensely, both positions employ spatial strategies and explore architectures as visual tools for representing trauma. Addressing themes such as the broken sanctuary of home, the space of the individual’s body, the opposition of interiority and exteriority and architecture as violence, trauma is suggested as being a condition that is manifested and visible in and through architecture. As opposed to Gaston Bachelard’s notion

Trauma Spaces

of memories being motionlessly fixed into space115 which I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, FA and McCarthy enable these memories to regain motion, to be reactivated, but also to be controlled and become visible for the spectators who are willing to look. The research in their works also shows how much both practices contradict the logic of the unrepresentable as the prime way to communicate trauma. As well as the social and current political urgency entailed and conveyed by McCarthy and Forensic Architecture’s works, their practices also reveal how obsolete and out-dated the claim for trauma having to remain in the domain of the unrepresentable or the category of the void appears. For the traumata evoked and revealed by these works have been rendered invisible not necessarily by processes of psychological repression of traumatised individuals or groups, but by the strategies concocted and employed by nation states and large media corporations, purposefully obscuring traumatic conditions that resulted as consequences of political or corporate actions. Reading the works of FA and McCarthy through this lens – which is certainly but one of many ways of interpreting them – I argue that the condition of trauma is a contextual link through which their practices may be understood as an exploration of the causes of contemporary conflicts, the conditioning of new generations and social symptoms of trauma. Their works therefore complete the important task of communicating truth while remaining self-reflective regarding the visual tools they utilise. By using exhibitions as potent spaces to exhibit trauma and making calls to action, they are taking on the responsibility of not only sending out a warning by making the global atrocities of our time visible, but to also provide tools to process these images, to understand the conditions of their production and their reception, their cultural impact and their emotional effect on society, politics and media.

115

See Bachelard (1994) [1958], 9.

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Trauma – Curational Perspectives

How does trauma find its way into the museum? Although trauma is a relevant and explicit topic in many contemporary artists’ works and in exhibitions, there has been little research on possible institutional and curatorial responses to this type of artistic research. In this chapter I hope to broaden (or even simply activate and kick off) this inquiry, starting off with a set of general questions that strike me as relevant to the discussion: how do curators integrate the subject of trauma within group exhibitions without prioritising one particular event or one particular political agenda? Which exhibition formats have been realised in relation to trauma in the past? Which perspectives have been chosen to be displayed — the victim’s, society’s, the aftermath, the event itself, the overall situation? Which artistic materials are being included? How do curators balance different positions, different tragedies, different cultural standpoints and global discrepancies? Is it ever possible to produce a successful exhibition around a topic surrounding which there is so much dissonance? What might the outcome of such an exhibition be for spectators, for the audience? Do we potentially run the risk of trivialisation by embedding trauma as an overall theme within an aesthetic context? And finally: how is the reading of art works affected when these are not pooled together so as to contribute to the discussion revolving around a certain traumatic event or period in history, in a specific place, community, cultural or individual fate, but rather so as to be part of a discussion on the effects, i.e. the visibility and the rhetoric of trauma itself? Might it be possible that such a reading of art works would also distort the Western canon in favour of a more global perspective on trauma and art, and possibly undermine the prioritisation of certain traumatic events as opposed to others? Guided by these and other questions, I became interested in researching various curatorial positions, as well as the recent history of international exhibitions that aim to bring together contemporary positions in order to formulate what some are calling an ‘overview’ or ‘survey’ of trauma or topics closely related thereto. What has been labelled as ‘socially engaged art’ or ‘interested art’ by the academy is clearly experiencing a renaissance of sorts, drawing large audiences. Jill Bennett argues, “World events, it seems, are now back on the agenda of contemporary art. Major

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exhibitions, biennials and art publishers have, for a moment, turned their attention to global politics.”1 In her research into how art works with different contextual links to traumatic events may interrelate, she has become interested in “reorienting the discussion of art and the catastrophic or traumatic event away from historiographical endeavour.”2 Bennett explicates: “The re-emergence of a political aesthetic in this fashion might be understood as resonating with philosophical interest in the concept of the event, which highlights the extent to which its apprehension (in thought or philosophy or art) works against a notion of the historical and of historical time.”3 Major exhibitions have also taken a new interest in global catastrophes, and indeed a number of buzzwords related to the notion of trauma have been coming up in exhibition titles throughout the international exhibition framework. These terms include ‘catastrophe’ (Catastrophe? Quelle catastrophe! We all live in a catastrophic world! [2010], Manif d’art 5 – Québec City Biennial, Canada); ‘disaster’ (University of Disaster [2017], Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion at the Venice Biennale); ‘war’ (Krieg kuratieren, Kunstraum Innsbruck [2016] and The Image of War [2017-18], Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm); ‘killing’ (Killing [2012], Kunstpalais, Erlangen). In its manifesto, the 10th Berlin Biennale We don’t Need Another Hero (2018) claims to “confront[…] the widespread states of collective psychosis,” while the antecedent edition (2016) showcased a light box by Martine Syms in the entrance hall of Akademie der Künste, which displayed the words ‘TRAUMA VS UPLIFT’. This heightened interest in addressing and discussing notions of trauma and the discourse surrounding it may stem from an increased global interest and involvement in politics in the post-9/11 era, but, beyond this, the words in themselves attract attention. Not only do they seemingly promise to provide answers to and accessible perspectives on catastrophic conditions, but, seen from a critical perspective, these buzzwords and topics also tend to facilitate the access to thirdparty funds thanks to the educational function they are commonly ascribed with having. In a lecture titled “Mega Exhibitions and the Antinomies of Transnational Global Form”4 curator Okwui Enwezor underlines the current ubiquity of exhibitions addressing the subject of conflict and trauma on a global scale: “If we exclude Venice Biennale and Carnegie International, in Pittsburgh, most, if not all large scale, cyclical exhibitions that currently exist within the international framework are largely post World War II activities. Of these, I have been interested

1 2 3 4

Bennett (2006), 67. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 67. Held at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin on December 4, 2001.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

in the degree to which the desire to establish such an exhibition forum have been informed by responses to events connected to traumatic historical ruptures.” 5 Okwui Enwezor was himself a curator of large political survey exhibitions, such as documenta 11 (2002), the 2015 Venice Biennale All the World’s Futures and the ambitious survey exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 shown at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2017. The latter exhibition as well as Art in Europe 1945–68, which ran at the same time as Postwar at ZKM in Karlsruhe, both aimed to expand the Western perspective on post-war art. Both revealed the vast scope of artistic positions (predominantly 20th century positions) whose works may easily be put into the context of the artists’ experiences and the consequences or the aftermath of the trauma of war. War, violence, catastrophe — there is such a wealth of material that I am forced to hone in on but a small area of interest. I therefore opted to focus exclusively on exhibitions that explicitly attempt to explore trauma as a global, contemporary social and psychological phenomenon, excluding exhibitions on related subjects and trauma exhibitions in which all works revolved around the same traumatic event, one individual or one collective trauma.6 The selection was crucial in order to get a sense of curatorial strategies that approach visualising trauma within the framework of an exhibition, as well as how different artists producing work about trauma are being paired and juxtaposed, which images and intensities are being chosen and how trauma affects global, artistic expressions in the context of contemporary art. This selection process resulted in drastically paring down the number of international group shows I would include in my research. Drawing from this small pool, I will introduce three 21st century exhibitions that explicitly addressed trauma in the contemporary art museum. My research shows that not only is there a lack (and possibly even fear) of examining curatorial theory and history in regard to trauma and its place in contemporary art exhibitions, but also a (public/curatorial) desideratum for exhibitions on trauma beyond classic history or war museum establishments (which, in turn, sparked my interest to take a look at how war museums incorporate contemporary art into exhibitions about trauma). Using the term ‘trauma’ in curatorial statements – or even only in reference to psychological pain – surely also entails a certain amount of risk for the

5 6

Enwezor (2002), 47. There are countless exhibitions that address subjects closely related to trauma (i.e. war, violence, pain, mourning, memory, death, disasters, loss etc.), and there are many exhibitions related to one specific event history (i.e. the Shoah, Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, 9/11, the Rwandan genocide, the Kosovo War, the Iraq War), and many exhibitions related to natural disasters (i.e. climate change, dwindling resources, agriculture, exploitation of the earth) and individual traumata.

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exhibition makers. By doing so, they opt to take on a cultural discourse on representability that has had polemic tendencies for decades, though on the other hand the ‘trauma’ umbrella also provides a framework for exhibiting seemingly non-related works in a completely democratic and global context. I would also like to underline once more that, like with any other survey, this chapter cannot go beyond its mission to provide an outlook — a small excursion into the recent history of trauma exhibitions, curatorial strategies and their future possibilities.

6.1

Space and Time Frame

The active political and/or social capacity of art that addresses trauma is a key aspect within the framework of most exhibitions that include traumatic content: can art have any effect on the situation or the media that it is taking a critical look at? Can it move people, can it facilitate better understanding and reflection for spectators, can art prevent violence? Can it, as Dorothea von Hantelmann asks, effectively do something? Although the following statement may seem obvious, if we can discuss all the possible forms and effects of trauma in contemporary art at all, it is because this art we are discussing exists in the first place. The curator Theodor Ringborg suggests that what kind of impact these works might have on society is less important than acknowledging the necessity and the social freedom required so that they can exist at all. How images might render trauma and conflict visible ultimately boils down to a matter of taste and, to some extent, the respective political agenda or neutrality, but it is essential that artists feel the need to produce these images, that they are allowed to exhibit them and that spectators are willing to look at them, because these images demand reflection. This premise has been central to Ringborg’s curatorial work for the international group show7 The Image of War at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm (2017–18), which focussed not specifically on trauma, but on images visualising and reflecting the violence of war (though it featured artists whose works are closely related to trauma, as we will re-encounter throughout this chapter, such as Phil Collins,

7

The exhibition The Image of War included works by: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mari Bastashevski, Broomberg & Chanarin, David Claerbout, Phil Collins, Bracha L. Ettinger, Iman Issa, Alfredo Jaar, Gavin Jantjes, Gülsün Karamustafa, Gerhard Nordström, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Eva Löfdahl, Rabih Mroué, Trevor Paglen, Mykola Ridnyi, Michael Rakowitz, Martha Rosler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Gilles Saussier, Susan Schuppli, Allan Sekula, Indrė Šerpytytė, John Smith, Sean Snyder, The Atlas Group and Maximilien Van Aertryck & Axel Danielson. Screenings with: Marwa Arsanios, Harun Farocki, Jumana Manna & Sille Storihle, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Oraib Toukan.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

Alfredo Jaar, Martha Rosler and Indrė Šerpytytė). In his curatorial statement Ringborg writes, “The point is that images that make violence visible work on an intricate ethical, moral and political wavelength that requires reflection. Reflecting on this type of image doesn’t dispute the necessity of creating them. It suggests rather that a crucial political project is finding ways to see violence. Images such as these are often understood in one of two different ways. Either they are seen to be instances of a type of devastation-voyeurism where the only thing more obscene than the violence is the demand that it be materialized and evidenced through visualization that has as a consequence a paralyzing apathy to other peoples’ suffering. Or that, despite potentially determining a tolerance toward production and viewership, they allow for an awareness that may lead to action. Which is to say that violence without an image would be a greater tragedy as it unseen would be destined to remain unlamented. The problem, of course, is that both of these opposing ways to understand the image may be true. These kinds of images seem capable of doing good and harm at the same time. How can we better understand this contradiction?”8 The answer to this question, according to Ringborg, lies in the search for modes of perception and in the spectator’s ability to understand not only the violent content of the artwork, but also politics beyond the violence of the image — the systems, the governments and the economic agendas that make the content of these images possible. “Worse than realizing that these images are nothing but the exploitation of the spectacle of misery would be to realize that we do not see the politics in them. That is, we do not see the prevailing political system that makes the violence in the pictures possible. The intention of the kind of picture we’re concerned with here does little use in a society that perhaps sees the violence but does not in turn see what that in itself shows. The challenge is to learn to see that.”9 Providing a framework – a performative stage, so to speak – the format of the exhibition is a decisive premise to make these images and aesthetic strategies accessible to spectators within a protected, independent and partly fictive space that exists beyond normative societal and cultural structures and orders. With his notion of ‘Relational Aesthetics’, curator Nicolas Bourriaud formulated such a premise of the exhibition as being “an interstice, defined in relation to the alienation reigning everywhere else. […] [It] does not deny the social relationships in effect, but it does distort them and project them into a space-time frame encoded by the art system, 8 9

Ringborg (2017). Ibid.

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and by the artist him/herself.”10 In Rancière’s terms, this extraordinary ‘space-time frame’ allows for a “‘politics’ of art which consists in suspending the normal coordinates of sensory experience.”11 Art, Rancière believes, “is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples in this space.”12

6.2

Traumatised Art

While Ringborg sees the exhibition as a place where we may learn new and more reflected ways of seeing (violence), and Rancière and Bourriaud refer to the unique ‘space and time frame’ that exhibitions provide, curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev tackles the topic from a similar starting point, identifying the exhibition as being a ‘striated space’ which “allows one to hover and remain in the realm of ambiguity and contradictions, in the space of opacity. Therefore it is a space where one can exercise the capacity to understand complex and apparently unresolvable conflicts. Art is an exercise in ambivalence as opposed to violence […].”13 Although she regards the exhibition as an ambivalent space for finding solutions to conflicts happening beyond the museum’s walls, she proposes an uncommonly non-fictional and non-symbolic role for the artworks themselves. As the artistic director of documenta 13, Christov-Bakargiev dedicated one of the one hundred notebooks, which were published jointly as one comprehensive exhibition catalogue, to the topic of trauma. Titled On the Destruction of Art – or Conflict and Art, or Trauma and the Art of Healing, she posed the question how exhibitions might look at or relate to conflict and trauma via the radical step of exchanging the role of the victim with the artwork: “But what if instead of the traumatized person, one were to think and see things from the point of view of the apparently inanimate art work? Instead of exploring how we express trauma through artworks, we might explore how artworks themselves become traumatized, losing orientation, severed from the experience of their environment (in an exhibition, in a collection, in a museum, in a public place, in the minds of the people who should engage with them). What would the traumatized subject ‘think’ if that subject were an artwork or a cultural artefact? What 10 11 12 13

Bourriaud (2002), 82. Rancière (2009) [2004], 25. Ibid., 23. Christov-Bakargiev (2011), 9.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

does an object feel when it is destroyed or ignored or misunderstood, or even misplaced?”14 These traumatised artworks, according to Christov-Bakargiev, suffer from the exact same symptoms as psychologically traumatised individuals. They are thus “silent”, “on standby” and “speechless, numb witnesses of conflict, traumatised subjects unable to tell their stories.”15 Amongst the few examples of works she chose to feature in the small notebook, she mentions two photographs taken on the same day. The first one was taken by the artist Lee Miller when visiting the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, accompanying U.S. Troops as a photographer for Vogue magazine. Miller’s photograph shows dead bodies lying in front of a train. The picture is somewhat disturbingly neutral. A second and apparently staged photo, taken by photographer David E. Sherman, shows Miller herself, sitting naked in the bathtub of Adolf Hitler’s Munich apartment. Her boots and clothes lie in front of the tub, a framed portrait of Hitler, who committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on that very day, can be seen on the left. For Christov-Bakargiev, this photo is a direct artistic reaction to the events that occurred at the time: “It is a ‘traumatized’, silent photograph that suggests the impossibility of speech after what she had seen at Dachau that morning. […] Miller takes his [Hitler’s] place, creates a substitution; in part she becomes the victimizer, washing herself of his crimes. It is a ‘mythic’ photograph – as if she were attempting to cleanse humanity of his sins.”16 The second photograph stands in lieu of her verbal report of what she had seen — it reveals her shock, as an artist, when faced with the trauma of the Holocaust. Other examples mentioned in Christov-Bakargiev’s text include destroyed art works and acts of iconoclasm on cultural heritage, such as the melted archive in The National Museum of Lebanon, the destroyed Bamiyan Buddha in central Afghanistan, Hanna Ryggen’s tapestry work that was partially destroyed in the bomb explosion in the lobby of a high rise building in Oslo during the terrorist attacks committed by Anders Breivik on July 22, 2011, or Gustav Metzger’s manifesto on Self-Destructive Art from 1959. Central to her argument is that these works, artefacts or archives are witnesses, victims even, who have ‘felt’ something whilst being violated, and thus respond to this violation with symptoms of trauma. Christov-Bakargiev’s thesis is an uncommon curatorial approach: her suggestion to exchange the roles of victim and artwork also brings with it the notion of redemocratising art, removing it from its high-up position as the output of the mind of a genius. That is to say, as opposed to the traditional model of the hermeneutic 14 15 16

Ibid., 6-7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 20.

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perception of the sublime work of art that ‘teaches’ the spectator what they did not know prior to seeing the work, the model of the inherently traumatised work put forth by Christov-Bakargiev elevates the artwork to a companion in misfortune, a thing one can have a dialogic exchange with, an object with an actual history that the spectator might relate to. An object that freely admits to its own helplessness regarding not having all of the answers, to its inability to report back on its experiences. The notion of removing the human being from the centre of art’s representational functions and, more generally, her interest in dissolving art’s traditional boarders, lies at the heart of her thesis: “That is where the sphere of art, which is poised on the edge of the private and of history, becomes a location in which one can experiment with the experience on the edge of the anthropocenic, where the rubble lies, and can build an imaginative society where the human is not at the center of our cosmology, but only one element within an accord of all the makers of the world, animate and inanimate, including traumatized people and objects.”17 Although the focus was not specifically on conflict or trauma related art, the production of documenta 13 saw Christov-Bakargiev apply her controversial and nonhierarchical curatorial concept in her dealing with this broadened notion of art that transgresses established borders, often inviting spectators to expand their anticipation of what defines a work of art. Animals, plants, the ecosystem (in Pierre Huyghe’s works, for instance) were regarded as equal to the art in this edition of the documenta, and thus expanded the aesthetic framework. The equation could also be read reversely: art was expanded beyond the aesthetic framework and regarded as equal to humans and the ecosystem. When addressing trauma in an aesthetic context it is all the more important to realise that trauma is something only living beings can experience. Involving ‘traumatised art’ in exhibitions may be one strategy for exploring and representing trauma in museums, but it bears a risk of promoting precisely this questionable proposition of regarding inanimate objects as traumatised in a way that is equal to sentient subjects. Seen from this perspective, the strategy would seem particularly productive when realised symbolically in images and objects, and/or through the democratisation of art and the planet’s ecosystem. Christov-Bakargiev provides a hint for this by contemplating on how “the example of their [the artworks’] loss and damage help us to react to a sense of the precariousness of life,”18 thus implying that traumatised works are ultimately representations of social, cultural or individual traumata.

17 18

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 8.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

6.3

Trauma in the Contemporary Art Museum

Exhibitions on trauma will often attempt to grasp and convey the overall tone of or the societal mood resulting from the traumatic event, the mourning and the aftermath of trauma. These are most commonly reported from the victims’ or the witnesses’ perspective. Only rarely will exhibitions and artists attempt to visualise the perpetrators’ perspectives, or the side of the unwilling bystander, such as in Cardiff and Miller’s The Killing Machine. Only few exhibitions have attempted to approach this more contentious perspective; one example is the controversial show Mirroring Evil (2002) curated by Norman Kleeblatt at the Jewish Museum in New York. This exhibition focused on works by a generation of younger artists exploring Nazi imagery, the sexual fetish side of fascist subcultures, as well as images of Hitler himself. It resulted in a polemic on whether exhibitions should serve as forums for the persecutors’ perspectives, and whether it was right to show these images at all. The emotional debate that ensued, generated and fed by an art exhibition, reflects the crucial role of cultural discourse engaging in trauma in remembering the victim’s experience, but also to understand the perpetrators’ motives and their strategic, politically informed decision-making. A closer look at three exhibitions hosted by contemporary art museums that all addressed trauma without focusing on a specific event may help to further identify formal and contextual analogies and patterns in curatorial and aesthetic strategies.

6.3.1

Trauma — Hayward Gallery London (2001)

The international group exhibition that explicitly addressed the subject of trauma through contemporary art (even in the show’s laconic title) was organised in 2001, prior to 9/11, by the Hayward Gallery in London and subsequently toured through England. It featured works by twelve artists: Martin Boyce, Willie Doherty, Kendell Geers, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Johan Grimonprez, Guillermo Kuitca, Maria Lindberg, Tracey Moffat, Lucia Nogueira, Anri Sala, Ann-Sofi Sidén and Christopher Wool. In the exhibition catalogue’s introduction, the show’s curators Fiona Bradley, Katrina Brown and Andrew Nairne take into account the origin of the term, including its mechanisms (repetition, disturbance in memory functions, repression, concealment, neuroses) derived from psychoanalysis and psychology, the ambivalence of it being a collective and individual phenomenon, a focus on language and how it is shattered or interrupted by trauma and the term’s meaning in culture and how it is influenced by the mediation and repetition in media. A key premise for the exhibition was the variety of perspectives on and strategies regarding collective and individual traumata. To this extent, the curators underline

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“The artists whose work is presented here develop a range of different relationships with trauma in which they in turn involve the viewer to varying degrees. Some place themselves and the viewer in a position of witness to a particular event and its potential or actual aftermath. Others generate a situation for the potential of trauma. Few draw on personal experience […] Rather […] they offer the viewer the chance to contemplate it as an intrinsic part of the experience of living, and as a subject matter for a significant strand within contemporary art.”19 In the same vein as Bourriaud and Christov-Bakargiev, the curators see exhibitions as “a space, in which to think about events they describe, an image within which meaning may begin to collect” and relate to the traditional, hermeneutic model of art in which “[t]he power of images to interpret events and emotions is a basic premise of art.”20 They therefore expressed the hope that the different artistic positions selected for the Trauma exhibition might “encourage contemplation and may perhaps lead to a deeper understanding of trauma in contemporary life.”21 The show received much scepticism prior to its inauguration, and reviews voiced the art critics’ disbelief in the capacity of this (or any) exhibition doing justice to a subject so enormous and ambivalent. Although he had to give props to the “tightly orchestrated show” for “its intriguing internal echoes and rhymes, rhythmic disruptions and contrapuntal movements,” critic Caoimhin Mac Giolla Léith begins his review for ARTFORUM with hesitation: “There is an inherent difficulty, even an incongruity, in attempting to address such a potentially unmanageable topic as trauma within the confines of an exhibition. How can the orderly containment and presentation of a collection of artworks exemplify rupture and disfiguration?”22 To avoid the vastness of the “unmanageable topic” of trauma, the real strength of this exhibition lay in the striking interrelations of traumatic structures and patterns, embedded in different themes in the artists’ works, as well as the different strategies and materials through which these works represented and identified trauma. The topic of private and public, or of the home and family as a broken sanctuary, for example, was central to the works of Tracey Moffat, who showed the photographic series Scarred for Life II (1999) featuring disturbing, but not shocking, family cases from earlier decades. Each picture was exhibited with a neutral explanation of the situation, written by the artist. The descriptive text paired with the emotional, at times beautiful images underlined the discrepancy of how we see, register and take in news of individual traumatic experiences, how and if we 19 20 21 22

Bradley, Brown and Nairne (2001), 9. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Caoimhin Mac (2001), 132.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

empathise with the victims and how images have the ability to affect perception immensely. The theme of home as a precarious safe place was also central to Martin Boyce in his work Now I’ve got to worry (1997), staging a domestic interior as a protective and defensive shield. He re-built a classic shelf by Charles and Ray Eames, adding statements such as “GO HOME, THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE” onto the furniture, highlighting the contrast between the conflicted private and the invasive public. This work was inspired by the O.J. Simpson case, in which neighbours tried to shield off the crime scene from the curious press. Christopher Wool, who also incorporated text as a motif for his otherwise blank painting Untitled (1991), referred to the construct of home as an imaginative and lost scenario: “The show is over. The audience gets up to leave. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around. No more coats and no more home.” Home, as one central theme of this exhibition centred around the notion of trauma, offered an accessible and less abstract path for artists to engage with the subject at hand, showing that what we connect with trauma is both personal and simultaneously an identifiable structure within a culture. Other artists featured in the Trauma exhibition chose to work on a meta-reflexive and critical level, tackling the issue of the transmission of collective trauma in and through the media, such as in Johann Grimonprez’ work dial H-I-S-T-O-RY (1997), a one-hour video compilation of news broadcasts featuring stories about aeroplane hijackings, or in another piece by Martin Boyce titled Something’s got to give (1995), which addresses the gap between real and mediated encounters with trauma by means of a single sentence on a screen-printed fabric: “Watching all the day’s horrors on the evening news, I thought back to earlier and the stuffed toy animal I had seen stuck to the rear window of the car in front of me.” Both of these works deal with the issue of not being able to process all of the images and news bytes revolving around global conflicts occurring daily and being directly delivered to consumers of news broadcasts and documentary features. While Grimonprez broaches the overwhelming effect these images have by employing looped repetition that leads to the redundancy of the singular image, Boyce’s words employ a more personal tone to speak of one’s own incapacity to react appropriately to the sheer amount of media broadcasts. The repetition of images, narratives and words, such as in Grimonprez’ work, is a theme that is directly related to the repression of traumatic memories, stemming primarily from psychoanalytic accounts. “Memory and repetition,” the curators point out, “are key components in the thematic of trauma”23 and as such they form another curatorial theme under which aesthetic strategies applied in

23

Bradley, Brown and Nairne (2001), 9.

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some works discussed here may be subsumed. Kendell Geers’ two-channel installation Double Time (2000), for example, shows found footage of Steve McQueen being locked up in a prison cell and repetitively uttering the phrase “I’m gonna be fine” while doing press-ups. McQueen’s face is framed in a structure similar to a cell, mimicking the looped and open-ended situation the character finds himself in.

 

Image 34: Johan Grimonprez. dial-H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997). Film still. Three hijacked jets on desert airstrip, Amman, Jordan. 12 September 1970.

6.3.2

Dream and Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens — Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK (2007)

The cultural origination of trauma in Freudian psychoanalysis played a crucial role in the conception of the large exhibition Dream and Trauma. Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens at Kunsthalle Wien in 2007, which included over 40 artistic positions and was curated by Gerald Matt, Angela Stief and Edelbert Köb. As suggested by the title the exhibition emphasised “the borders between the conscious and the unconscious and […] the inaccessibility of the suppressed psychological

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

content of the unconscious.”24 Playing particularly on the opposition between reality and fiction, and on the repression, inaccessibility and repetition of traumatic memories, the exhibition reflected the most traditional canon on trauma, seeking to underscore “the impossibility of depicting the traumatic experience since, as an inner shock, the traumatic experience resists symbolic transformation.”25 For this reason, the curators describe trauma – in Freudian and Batailleian tradition – as a “non-place, zone of formlessness and fragmentation” and furthermore as a “psychic deformation and a symbolic wound.”26 Consequentially, in referencing the etymology of the term ‘trauma’, they argue that “An aesthetics of trauma depicts forms of pain, fear or injury […] show the wounds of being and the injury of the existential and depict inner states of feeling, altered, crazy perceptions of reality.”27 In their undertaking of bringing the dreams and memories of trauma together, the curators suspect both spheres of being more than mere “dimensions of human experience,” but rather that they also “both generate imaginary worlds of the mind and fantastic scenarios.”28 The curators underscore this entertaining promise of phantasmagorical aesthetics by arguing that the artists represented in the exhibition would employ “secretive, unclear, ambiguous, and mysterious” means in bridging the gap between the conscious and the unconscious. Their belief is that “a trace of darkness” and “the unordered, the formless and the chaotic”29 accompany the three realms of dream, trauma and art, which led them to employ formal devices such as darkening the exhibition hall of MUMOK and reflecting the aesthetics of an underground labyrinth or cave. These notions become visible in Nari Ward’s work Hunger Cradle (1996), for instance, which is a chaotic web structure that expands spatially, containing everyday objects and rubbish that have been woven into the structure by the artist. More examples include William Kentridge’s three-channel video installation Ulisse: ECHO Scan Slide Bottle (1998) that simulates a labyrinthine journey into the artist’s body, or with the apocalyptic video animation 2nd Light (2006 ) by Paul Chan, installed at Kunsthalle Wien. Charged with a focus on dimensions of the mystical dark and rotten, the exhibition included a considerable amount of abject art positions that represent uncanny, even nightmarish images of the suffering human body as a metaphor for the traumatised and wounded mind. Poka-Yio’s sculptural work Self-Decapitated (2005) shows the chopped-off replica head of the artist that was presented pierced on a 24 25 26 27 28 29

Matt, Köb (2007), 9. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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Image 35: Cindy Sherman. Untitled #315 (1995).

black pole. The artist duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster were also represented with an uncanny self-portrait in form of the sculpture Black Narcissus (2006), consisting of a stack of casts of Noble’s penis and Webster’s fingers, creating a Janus-faced silhouette of the artists’ heads when its shadow is projected against the wall. Cindy Sherman’s strong and disturbing photograph Untitled #315 (1995), refers to the idea of the dissembled, dismembered wounded body and the third eye. Paul McCarthy’s dirty, crushed Mannequin Head (1995) and Urs Fischer’s drawing Face Hole Friend (2003), which shows a face with nothing but an anus in the middle as the sole feature, both portray the human face as distorted and fragmented. Sex-

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

ualised subjects appear in the sculptural work Mother and Child (1993) by Kiki Smith, in which a woman and a man each lick themselves without interacting with each other. And, finally, Natalie Djuberg’s animated vision Tiger Licking Girls Butt (2004) of a zoophile scenario visually forces perversion and cruelty onto the viewer. In contrast to these larger themes, a much smaller focus was dedicated to the notion of the void, such as in Barnaby Furnas’ abstract, 7-meter long Red Sea (Painting II) (2006), which employs the colour red to evoke notions of blood and death, while Christopher Wool’s Steel Curtain (1986) treats the difficulty of the non-representable, which is suggested as being an integral element of the abstract work. Serving as a visual reflection of the notion of a formless trauma, which the curators describe as the “the repressed, the discarded and the abject,” the artworks selected for the exhibition address “the decomposed, the decayed, the deteriorated.”30 Bearing this in mind, as well as the fact that the exhibition was populated using available pieces in the Dakis Joannou collection, the high number of works that address trauma’s formlessness in a visceral or sexualised aesthetic might nonetheless carry the risk of utilising the concept of trauma in order to make possible a mystical and entertaining exhibition of violence. This curatorial strategy is consequential as it may provide a certain leeway to being uncritical of – and thus facilitate the voyeurism of – horror by means of shock aesthetics and nightmarish fantasies. It ultimately runs the risk of manifesting trauma aesthetically and turning an exhibition into a spectacle of ‘traumatainment’. This possible trivialisation adds to the general problem of visualising trauma primarily by means of the aesthetic tools of the abject register, which, as I have argued, parrots the psychoanalytical canon.

6.2.4

In the Aftermath of Trauma: Contemporary Video Installations – Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis (2014)

Hosted by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, the exhibition In the Aftermath of Trauma: Contemporary Video Installations (2014), curated by the museum’s director and chief curator Sabine Eckmann, brought together five artistic positions with a focus on video art, installation and photography, in order “to explore individual and collective memories of traumatic occurrences.”31 The exhibition relied on a tighter and nonetheless global selection of artists that featured Yael Bartana, Phil Collins, Alfredo Jaar, Amar Kanwar and Vandy Rattana. For Eckmann, it was important “to learn more about other instances of traumatic experiences and how they are mediated in contemporary art. I felt this inquiry would be more focused and in-depth if I would limit the project to one medium – hence the concentration 30 31

Ibid., 21. Eckmann (2014) Press Release, eflux.

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on video installations.”32 Each work addresses different traumatic historical periods or political issues and social conditions resulting from traumatic events. Aside from the chosen medium, the artists also share an interest in the gap between truth and fiction, as well as a joint approach to finding new aesthetic strategies beyond the psychoanalytically informed canon. The exhibition catalogue summarises, “[T]hese artists use the semi-documentary format to delve into the very nature of trauma. Offering ways of comprehension that go beyond the dichotomy of headon confrontation versus denial or repression, the five video installations in the exhibition suggest a more nuanced and complex relationship between the original event and its present ramifications. They confound the relation between fact and artifice, truth and art, through a variety of formal methods.”33 The exhibition’s press release explicates that the artists “investigate the nature of trauma but also seek distance from it, questioning and challenging conventional notions of representation and closure,”34 and thus reflect on the notion of trauma and its position in contemporary societies. Instead of focusing on the debate of unrepresentability, Sabine Eckmann chose to move “beyond this issue and to explore it within a broader framework that also includes concepts of fact and fiction as well as history and memory.”35 She argues, “I don’t really see these notions as resulting in dichotomies, but as interpenetrating factors that make a clear distinction between them impossible.”36 With only five art works displayed, the exhibition emphasised telling stories of conflict from different periods of time and parts of the world.  Other than a shared interest in the role of trauma regarding their work, and shared formal analogies such as the utilisation of semi-documentary techniques that challenge the sharp dichotomy of fact and fiction, there is no contextual connection between any of the artists. The exhibition thus emphasised the equality between events, so that, as Eckmann notes, “distinct traumatic experiences mattered as much as geographic diversity.”37 The fictional scenario staged in Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007) by Israeli artist Yael Bartana addresses an imagined Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland and challenges the notion of national identity. The film, which is the first part of a trilogy, reflects the artist’s attempt to break with traumatic Polish history, her notion of current reactions to migration, anti-Semitism in Poland and her openended, utopian question about how people and nations can ever live together. Yael

32 33 34 35 36 37

Eckmann, Sabine: Personal email interview, 27/02/2018. Eckmann (2014).4. Eckmann (2014) Press Release, eflux. Eckmann, Sabine: Personal email interview, 27/02/2018. Ibid. Ibid.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

Bartana believes that “nations are fiction”38 — her interest lies in breaking these strong collective structures and memories, and she hopes that her film might act as a kind of “collective psychotherapy”.39 She collaborated with leftist activist Slawek Siekarowski on this provocative project, who plays himself in the film: an activist who tries to convince 3.3 million Jews in Israel to return to Poland. Siekarowski wrote his script himself, further blurring the delimitations between fact and fiction, aesthetic utopia and real activism. Three works in the show employ similar artistic techniques in an effort to address the ambivalent co-existence of traumatic memory in personal testimonies and its generalised ramification within social history. While investigating different events or contentious periods, all three works utilise documentary first-hand accounts of subjectively experienced traumatic events, paired with archival footage and landscape images, presented as long take establishing shots. The work marxism today (prologue) (2010) by British artist Phil Collins investigates personal accounts of trauma caused by the destruction of an ideology. His film is composed of short portraits of former East German teachers of Marxist-Leninist ideology and theory. Collins conducted interviews with three former teachers, pairing them with archival GDR and propaganda film footage so as to give a sense of how the marginalisation of communism led to a loss of the teachers’ identities, a loss of their belief in a system and how this would affect them for the rest of their lives. Not unlike Collins’ work, a film by Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana also uses a documentarian approach for a testimony-based film. For Bomb Ponds (2009), Rattana recorded personal witness accounts of the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and paired these sequences with steady landscape shots of today’s so-called ‘bomb ponds’. These craters, formed like circles, are the result of bombs dropped on neutral Cambodia by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. With their surprisingly innocent, even romantic aesthetic, these establisher shots in both the film and parallel photographic series obscure the pond’s radioactive nature — an effect caused by the uranium contained in the bombs that turned rainwater into a toxic fluid once it creates a pond in a crater. The metaphorical suggestion here is that the craters can be seen as society’s traumatic wounds and reminders of a traumatic time in history, but the work also advocates a more transparent recollection of the country’s history, which is currently suppressed by Cambodian historical revisionism. The third work employing a similar technique is the eight-channel video installation The Lightning Testimonies (2007) by Indian artist Amar Kanwar. The piece physically encircles spectators who find themselves surrounded by screens, looking at the artistic interpretation of the sexual violence experienced by thousands 38 39

Bartana (2016), video interview. Ibid.

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of women during and following the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and India in 1947. A poetic choreography of moving images comprised of first witness interviews, archival material and symbolic and landscape impressions explore how the violence has been remembered, how it continues to be perceived or even legitimised in present-day Indian culture, as well as how communities and individuals recollect this particular time in their history.

 

Image 36: Yael Bartana. Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007). Video, installation view. Photo: David Johnson.

The exhibition’s only installation that did not consist of moving images was a work by Alfredo Jaar, who investigated the relation of traumatic events, history and their representation in the media over the course of the last decades. In the media installation May 1, 2011 (2011) the Chilean artist juxtaposes two images: presented on a TV screen, one is the viral photo (known as the Situation Room photograph) of Barack Obama and his National Security Council watching the operation during which Osama bin Laden was killed, while the picture next to it is simply blank, suggesting the absence of an image of bin Laden’s body, which Obama decided not to release. Not only does this work highlight the political impact of President Obama’s decision not to show explicit images of the terrorist’s death – despite public demand for visual proof – but it also highlights how non-violent images,

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

 

Image 37: Vandy Rattana. Bomb Ponds (2009). Video, installation view. Photo: David Johnson.

such as the one of Obama and his team caught in a moment of high tension, may serve as placeholders for deeply violent events. Although all five works featured in the exhibition address different traumatic experiences and varying degrees of catastrophic impact, they all explore the role of trauma and its visible structures in societies and on the individuals who have experienced it. Eckmann’s curatorial approach – not unlike Okwui Enwezor’s vision of a new, post-WWII period of art history – suggests trauma as being a central experience of the time since World War II, and advises other museums and cultural institutions to use this term productively when exhibiting political art: “I think that in the post-World War II world, with its frequent occurrences of violent events such as war, revolutions and terrorist attacks, trauma has become a central experience. Moreover, many nations struggle with the afterlife of trauma and its post-traumatic eruptions as one can witness it currently in the Unites States in relation to slavery and the genocide of indigenous Americans. […] much of today’s art is political and hence I would suggest that contemporary and other art museums should explore trauma in sensitive yet also pressing ways.”40

40

Eckmann, Sabine: Personal email interview, 27/02/2018.

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A certain danger of trivialising trauma by embedding it in a context of aesthetics will always remain, but this, as Eckmann believes, “very much depends on the seriousness and thoughtfulness of the individual artwork.”41  In conclusion, with the smallest and most media-specific curatorial selection of artistic positions addressing the nature and status of trauma today, the exhibition In the Aftermath of Trauma: Contemporary Video Installations presented not an entirely new, but a very reflective perspective on trauma and its representation, especially by challenging the western canon by means of international positions. By opting to not exclusively focus on the dichotomies of approaching trauma by means of non-representational abstraction, shocking abjection or by referring to traditional psychoanalytical notions of trauma (repression/repetition), this exhibition was able to point out the blurred and ambiguous relation between fiction and fact, memory and history. Moreover, it challenged the disruption of these dichotomies as trauma’s central core structures or rhetoric, making visible the respective complex individual or social processes of having to cope in the aftermath of trauma. In this sense, this exhibition pioneered a form of democratising trauma by emphasising it as being a social and individual phenomenon that is global rather than local, and that victims, survivors and witnesses suffer from the same symptoms and feelings, regardless of cultural and geo-political borders.

6.4

Contemporary Art on Conflict and Trauma in the War Museum “More or less every museum is at one time or another confronted with displaying topics of war and violence. And, in most cases, the presentations of war and violence oscillate between, on the one hand, the fascination of terror and its instruments, and on the other hand the didactic urge to explain violence and, by analysing it, make it easier to come to terms with or prevent.”42

Wolfgang Muchitsch summarises this notion of ambivalence in the introduction to Does War belong in the Museum? (2013) as being both a fascination with the visual representation of trauma and simultaneously an attempt to approach trauma didactically. War, military and history museums that have a much longer tradition of including exhibitions related to trauma in their programming naturally also run a greater risk of staging trauma and violence as a form of entertainment. According to Muchitsch, war museums are thus frequently challenged with “the dilemma […] to present the unpresentable, to exist within the ambiguity of being museums as well as memorials and the necessity of overcoming their national perspectives.”43 41 42 43

Ibid. Muchitsch (2013), 10. Ibid., 12.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

Spurred on by these latent issues, war museums have invested in more thorough research and gained insight and experience from the dialogue between museums and trauma and memory studies. One of the field’s most prominent researchers is Jay Winter, who regards war museums as “sites of contestation and interrogation,”44 and as “a kind of semi-sacred space,” replacing moral institutions “[i]n light of the fading of the conventional churches.”45 Winter outlines two main problems war museums are faced with in regard to representing conflict and trauma: the glorification of war, i.e. nurturing and enhancing the voyeurism of violence in war museums, and the promise to which he refers to as ‘pseudo-realism’ that falsely suggests the museum experience as being “something approximating the experience of combat.”46 Rather than imitating the experience of combat, Timothy P. Brown has identified the need for “a theory of crisis and pedagogy that can address the forever wounded artefact – the individual and collective body.”47 He argues, “the artefact is symbolic of a traumatic rupture, the same kind of dissociation that comprises communities of trauma.”48 In her monograph Mediating Memory in the Museum. Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia (2013), Silke Arnold-de Simine points to both the difficulties with and possibilities in exhibiting conflict and trauma in war museums, in what she hopes is a “contribution to an emerging field of research which is situated at the interface between memory studies and museum studies.”49 Her research provides knowledge of the key issues concerning trauma exhibitions in war museums, of which some are also crucial for the field of contemporary aesthetics. Arnold-de Simine addresses the difficult balancing act between glorifying and downplaying trauma: pointing to the danger of exploiting trauma not only politically, commercially and economically, but also in a tendency that John Lennon and Malcom Foley have coined Dark Tourism (2000) (i.e. memorials, war museums, exhibitions on conflicts or sites relating to disasters, trauma and atrocities that become tourist magnets).50 The expected risk here is that these images may numb the general public from perceiving the suffering of others with empathy. On the other hand, however, war museums and contemporary art museums alike are faced with the challenge of having to tone down the intensity of traumatic content, so as to be able to welcome all kinds of visitors from various backgrounds and generations.

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Winter (2013), 37. Ibid.,24. Cf. ibid., 33-34, 36. Brown (2004), 248. Ibid. Arnold-de Simine (2013), 1. This issue is also discussed in Anne Rothe’s publication Popular Trauma Culture. Selling the Pain of Others (2011)

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“They [the museums] are tasked with the balancing act of providing a secure environment in which people can encounter difficult histories, of passing on marginalized memories without alienating their visitors or reflecting a flux of identities but nevertheless distilling the heterogeneity of their visitors’ experiences and attitudes into a consensual discourse around discernible core values and sensibilities. […] The argument that images of suffering might brutalize spectators and normalize atrocities rather than stimulate sensitivity has caused just as much concern […] as the suspicion that the need to be family-friendly will lead to heavily sanitized versions of peoples’ suffering.”51

6.4.1

Age of Terror: Art after 9/11 — Imperial War Museum London (2017-2018)

This balancing act between glorifying and downplaying traumatic content has also been a key concern of Sanna Moore’s, curator of the contemporary art exhibition Age of Terror: Art after 9/11 (2017-18) at the Imperial War Museum London. Addressing risk of both glorifying and sanitizing trauma, she argues “You always think about who the audience is, and the audience here is very different to that of a contemporary art museum. About 80% of the audience is not informed about contemporary art. There are many school groups, so it’s about the interpretation of the works and how these are being written. We worked very much as teams as we wrote the interpretation — it's really not contemporary art language at all. It’s very accessible and very clear, making sure that the factual and political aspects are correct. Lots of effort went into the panels; they are all quite short and concise, taking into consideration how the museum visitors would make their way through the exhibition.”52 Showing over 40 international and contemporary artistic responses to the attacks of 9/11, to other terrorist attacks and to 21st century wars, the exhibition took into account personal, political and social conflicts that were consequences of the initial four coordinated attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The show featured different genres, immersive and conceptual works and both instantaneous and long investigative artistic practices. Spectators were not guided through the exhibition in soft transitions, but the intensity of the works shifted constantly between these poles. With its bleak prognosis, the exhibition claimed that all post-9/11 art is shaped and affected by the trauma of terrorism and its political consequences. The exhibited works do justice to this claim, echoing the curatorial agenda quite literally at times and more subtly at others. While I would not dispute that artistic 51 52

Arnold-de Simine (2013), 46. Moore, Sanna: Personal interview, 06/12/2017, London.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

practices are influenced by global events, I do however question whether, firstly, the specific events of 9/11 exerted such an enormous impact on all worldwide art practices, and secondly, whether the focus on terrorism is necessarily the main reason for the global trauma that was diagnosed within the framework of the exhibition. With its four main themes, Age of Terror: Art after 9/11 frequently touched upon the notion of trauma, though it did not seek to analyse trauma in contemporary art as such. The exhibition themes were not specified in aesthetic terms, but rather brought together subjects and perspectives of artistic reactions to 9/11 and its aftermath. The first exhibition chapter, presenting “artists’ direct or immediate responses to the events of 9/11,”53 highlighted not only the extremely different responses to a traumatic event of that scale, but also made clear how the respective temporal distance to the event might influence the evolvement of the works. While some artists waited several years before producing work responding to 9/11, like Gerhard Richter with the aforementioned painting September (2005),54 others responded the very next day, like Hans-Peter Feldmann with his work 9/12 Front Page (2001), an archival collection of the front pages of international newspapers on the day after 9/11, presented in six long rows across the wall, or Grayson Perry’s glazed ceramic vase Dolls at Dungeness, September 11th 2001 (2001) featuring a scenario of dolls with several comic airplanes flying overhead, created right after the events. Sanna Moore considers these temporal differences between the events and the production of the works equally relevant. She explains: “The day after, he [Grayson Perry] makes the work. To some people this meant that he was trivialising the event, but to me it doesn’t mean that at all. It’s just an instant response, and just as important as the one that took months and months to develop. That is also a reflection on contemporary artistic practices: some will work quickly and some will spend two years making a film. That is what we are doing with the show: showing different artistic practices and each artist has a different way of working through trauma.”55 While the second exhibition chapter focused on “issues of state surveillance and security” and the third on “our complex relationship with firearms, bombs and drones,” both brought together artworks that underpin the exhibition’s claim that the politics regarding security measures, media broadcasts and international relations have been heavily affected by the events of 9/11. Omer Fast’s video 5000 Feet is the Best (2011) and Mona Hatoum’s glass cabinet filled with hand grenades made

53 54 55

All chapter subtitles were featured in the press release and wall texts of Age of Terror: Art after 9/11, IWM London 2017. Richter’s painting was presented in the exhibition as a print. Moore, Sanna: Personal interview, 06/12/2017, London.

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of Murano glass Natura morta (bow-fronted cabinet) (2012) were presented in this section, along with other works addressing issues of weaponry, strategic war and torture. The photomontage Election (Lynndie), taken from Martha Rosler’s new edition (2004-2008) of her iconic series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home from the early 1970s, shows the American soldier Lynndie England, who became famous for a picture showing her at the Iraqi prison of Abu Graibh, holding a leash attached to a naked prisoner. Her cutout shape is inserted into the tableau of a modern kitchen, purposefully misplaced and mismatched. A two-channel video installation by Francis Alÿs titled Sometimes Doing is Undoing and Sometimes Undoing is Doing (2013) juxtaposes two soldiers on a split screen, one Taliban and one British, each disassembling and reassembling their weapons, thus showing both men as being human individuals that are equally part of institutionalised and politically informed structures of war. May 1, 2011 (2011) by Alfredo Jaar (which was also shown in the trauma exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Art) also plays with pictorial juxtaposition, though this work points to the political decision of not showing the actual act of killing Osama bin Laden. The fourth exhibition chapter assembled works under the umbrella theme “destruction caused by conflict on landscape, architecture and people,” and thus addressed issues surrounding trauma’s aftermath most directly. Sanna Moore explains, “What was important to me was to show those kinds of human responses and impacts […] I wanted to include artists who had personally experienced conflict and had to leave their country – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – because of it, showing that side of the impact of those wars as well. […] I haven’t thought of trauma as separate from human consequences.”56 With its emphasis on artistic positions from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and not unlike key focus points in the Trauma exhibition at Hayward Gallery, the last chapter of the exhibition revolved around the theme of ‘home’ and its potential threat. This chapter presented both the non-Western perspective of artists who were born or still lived in present-day war zones, no longer able to feel at home and safe, and those of traumatised soldiers returning to their protective homes from these very war zones, suffering from PTSD symptoms, their minds invaded by the terror they have experienced. Works presented in this section of the exhibition included the two-channel video installation Homesick (2014) by Syrian artist Hrair Sarkissan, who destroys a miniature model of his parents’ house in Damascus to make visible the anger and frustration he feels about living in exile while his family remains in war torn Syria, and Tuj (2012), a short film by Syrian artist Khaled Abdulwahed showing a corridor in which a ball is being thrown against a wall, thus emphasising 56

Ibid.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

the surreal conditions under which children in Syria play ball on the street while aerial bombardment takes place in the neighbouring streets. A work from Afghan artist Lida Abduhl addresses the destruction of Afghanistan by showing the artist painting the ruins of the former presidential palace white. White House (2005) refers not only to the destruction of her home country, but also to the USA’s involvement in the conflict. In contrast, in his performance and photographic series Veterans of the Wars of Afghanistan and Iraq Facing the Corner (2013), Spanish artist Santiago Sierra addresses the theme of the returning soldier. He invited and paid war veterans to pose for 30 minutes, facing the corner of a museum wall. While Sierra’s work speaks of the guilt of participating in war, the photographic series Gateway II (2009) by British artist David Cotterell underpins the physical and mental trauma experienced by soldiers, showing a triptych of sequences from inside a military plane in which wounded and sedated soldiers are being transferred home during a night time flight.

 

Image 38: Alfredo Jaar, May 1, 2011 (2011). Two LCD monitors and two framed prints; Original White House photograph by Peter Souza; Photo: Frazer Spowart.

Although it featured artists from Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, Age of Terror: Art after 9/11 was a thoroughly British exhibition that took a clear standpoint. Sanna Moore argues that this perspective is a necessary consequence of the museum’s location:

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Image 39 & 40: Hrair Sarkissan, Homesick (2014). Two Channel video installation.

“We are an a-political museum, so we are literally presenting a collection of artists’ responses. It was important that there be diversity. For me as a curator, there was a wealth of artistic practices from other countries that I felt needed to be reflected in the show. Some people have been saying that the exhibition has a very Western perspective, but I think as a museum in the West this is of course where we come from.”57 In her research, Arnold-de Simine also identifies this ambiguity – being an a-political museum while nonetheless communicating a position and thus a political background – as one of the most challenging difficulties for war museums. She argues, “Even though museums might try to avoid providing a grand or master narrative, the different small narratives of and from the people are often selected so that they add up to an uncontested account of the past.”58 Often serving a patriotic agenda, war museums tend to present their collections in a manner that can be seen as historically biased, and thus may risk dominating individual and global counter-narratives. Despite the fact that many war museums proclaim having an a-political position, the western canon is strongly represented in programmes tied to national and ideological interests. If certain contentious moments in history are prioritised, this may have negative effects on the necessary neutrality of exhibitions that address trauma. On the other hand, war museums have a bigger freedom to express traumatic histories more explicitly than contemporary art museums, as they are less bound to aesthetic discourses and theoretical frameworks. This freedom, as Moore argues, also facilitated her curatorial work for the Age of Terror: Art

57 58

Moore, Sanna: Personal interview, 06/12/2017, London. Arnold-de Simine (2013), 8.

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after 9/11 exhibition, and enabled her to be more explicit in representing violence and trauma: “There were a lot of questions around taste — what should and what should not go into the show, how far we could go with it. […] People have somehow tiptoed around this subject, and when MoMA PS1 did their 10-year anniversary exhibition in 2011 they went for a very conceptual approach, and I do understand why you would do that in New York. But 16 years on, in London, in the context of a war museum, this has enabled us to be a bit bolder, to include those works that are a bit more confrontational. Representing war and conflict is what we do here. People aren’t coming here expecting something else.”59

6.5

Aesthetic Strategies

Although only few exhibition makers are willing to use the term ‘trauma’ or risk explicitly referring to its discourse, I would like to argue that ‘trauma’ can, in fact, be a highly productive term in regard to bringing together artists’ practices that would otherwise not relate to each other, formally or historically, geographically or politically. Moving beyond these borders, I believe there to be great potential in – and indeed benefit to be gained from – looking at a selection of artworks through the lens of trauma, as this perspective may shift the perception of contextualising within closed categories of genre, culture, country, time or gender, moving instead towards the only common denominator of a traumatic condition. As opposed to related themes such as war, ecocides or terror, which tend to have a specific point of reference, trauma is a human condition that can be observed in individual, collective and cultural narratives and images. More complex than most other human experiences, trauma’s psychological, social, political or historical structures can act as a link, offering multiple curatorial possibilities and unexpected relations that may emerge only by situating specific artworks within a context of trauma and its aftermath. Furthermore, from a curatorial perspective, I also argue that the focus on trauma is helpful when it comes to enforcing a more empathetic view on and through art. It explicitly employs aesthetic measures to communicate human traumatic experience and the aftermath thereof, so as to place these narratives and experiences in a cultural discourse, using the framework of the exhibition as a forum that requires a reflected dialogue with the public. The exhibition – as an inbetween space of possibilities in which worldly problems may be addressed without the risk of psychological or physical harm – is ultimately a necessary place, in

59

Moore, Sanna: Personal interview, 06/12/2017, London.

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which we might examine and interact with issues of trauma through various practices and formal languages. In an effort to summarise the previously discussed curatorial and artistic strategies addressing trauma, let us revisit a few key topics and aesthetic or curatorial strategies that I have identified as having been used repeatedly in relation to trauma and traumatic conditions. These strategies, in no particular order regarding their quality or intensity, thus also underpin how different works of art may find a common narrative through which a rhetoric pattern of trauma can be identified. In the past decades, one of the most dominant responses to trauma and to the curatorial concepts that it is embedded in, appeared as strategies of anti-representation and discursive reflections thereof. Although I have made the case against a theory of trauma as the unrepresentable as an exclusive demand and a moral dogma, this formal option represents a relevant and critical strategy to afford communicating trauma through art. The aforementioned MoMA PS1 exhibition September 11, for example, expressly opted to “[e]schew[…] images of the event itself, as well as art made directly in response”60 so that spectators could project their subjective perspective onto the approximately 70 works of art that were shown. The curators also chose to put trauma qualities of absence and deconstruction in the foreground as the exhibition was situated in New York, on the site of the traumatic event, and thus it could be assumed that it would draw not only neutral museum visitors, but most likely also be seen by directly affected survivors, witnesses and relatives. The curator Peter Eleey, who had made the decision to show works that were mainly produced prior to 9/11, took a piece by Ellsworth Kelly as a curatorial jumping-off point: the collage Ground Zero (2003) replaces the Twin Tower’s ruins with a plain green colour field. It is a small intervention that points to what is lost, without showing the brutality of the attack. Employing an anti-representational aesthetic, this work suggests trauma’s representation as being nonpictorial and voiceless. In responding to a traumatic event that is felt to be unrepresentable – and in the same vein as such artists as Ellsworth Kelly or Alfredo Jaar – many exhibitions address trauma and the complexity of memory and language dysfunctions caused by traumatic conditions through aesthetics of the void. This brings us directly to issues of traumatic memory and history, the second broad category of topics that repeatedly serves as a heading or a chapter of trauma exhibitions and publications. The central theme in the aesthetic trauma discourse, traumatic memory and its distorting and erasing functions and overwhelming psychological mechanisms affecting individual or collective victims, is also the standout category in recent curatorial strategies. This is one of the reasons why, in the theoretical discourse, trauma studies have often been merged with, or relabelled 60

Press Release, September 11 (2011) at MoMA PS1, New York. URL: http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/338.

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

as, memory studies. In some instances, such as in the previously discussed works of Omer Fast and Johann Grimonprez, memory and history are played out against each other in a non-linear manner, but nonetheless as two equally present and valid realities. Techniques for making memories visible to others and for validating those memories as a crucial part of history are also a central aspect to the work of the collective Forensic Architecture, Phil Collins, Amar Kanwar and Vandy Rattana. In the same way that the borders between memory and history are blurred, the merging of fact and fiction – a third category – is regularly employed by artists such as Yael Bartana, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller and again Omer Fast, so as to explore the complex processes of how trauma affects and alters the perception of past and present events, everyday life, the relation to other people and to oneself. This may, for example, be formally expressed in infinite and looping narratives, real actors in fictional settings and vice versa or stories without protagonists. Fact and fiction also play a crucial role in the works of Ed Adkins, Paul McCarthy, Harun Farocki or Ryan Trecartin, as they look at how staged fictions, fictional and real characters and adapted realities are simultaneously narrated by means of new technologies or the world of the media. While these techniques sometimes imitate real life, they also overtake reality, acting as therapists for soldiers suffering from PTSD or creating reality TV in which fictional or empty shells of characters suffer real pain. The notion of narrative levels of fact and fiction merging together also has a direct reference to the opposition of the conscious and the unconsciousness, which in turn refers directly to the fourth category: psychoanalytical accounts of traumatic hallucination and traumatic dreams. Strategies related to this category suggest the traumatic event as being subconsciously repressed and repeated, or acted out by the victim. This traditional understanding of traumatic symptoms is present in many works, but emerges most notably in artworks that might employ transgressive registers, such as Paul McCarthy’s and Mike Kelley’s (video) performances. These are works that employ the aesthetics of the formless and the visceral, as we have seen in the “Dream Trauma” exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien and the MUMOK (2007). Addressing uncontrolled outbursts of pain, flashbacks and traumatic repression was especially visible in the works of the Vienna actionists, but also in many of the works that are assigned to the context of abject art. Whether traumatic experiences have been physically violent or not, they always act as a violent intervention on the victim’s mind. These abstract and often intangible conditions of fear and pain mark the fifth category of aesthetic reflections on trauma. The results of some form of violence, fear and pain in the mind and the body have been symbolised by many artists in the form of traces, such as scars on the body (Gina Pane), on buildings (Forensic Architecture) or the earth (Vandy Rattana) or even on a whole society (Joseph Beuys). Also violence that is performed in symbolic or fictional acts (Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Paul

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McCarthy, Natalie Djuberg), interior props testifying to a violent act (John Bock) or fresh wounds that represent psychological pain (Marina Abramović). Images of violence, to varying degrees, are referred to in most of the works that have been discussed here, and its effect on spectators is particularly intense when encountered in spatial installations that immerse the audience and create a tangible sense of fear or panic, such as in the works of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller or Gregor Schneider. Another important theme for addressing trauma within the framework of art and the forum of the exhibition is that of a threatened home and life in exile, marking the sixth category. Home stands for both the place that determines one’s origin and one’s identity, and the place that offers shelter and safety. As we have seen, Martin Boyce, Tracey Moffat, Martha Rosler, Gregor Schneider and Christopher Wool have addressed the notion of home in various ways in their works. Creating the border between the private and the public, home is also where subjects are most vulnerable — architecturally, it is the place where traumatic experiences are often the most extreme and the most unexpected, as becomes apparent in the investigations of Forensic Architecture. For the artists Hrair Sarkissan or Shirin Neshat, life in exile has afforded them a new perspective on their home and the conflicts taking place in their countries. They express notions of alienation and estrangement as well as helplessness in the face of the critical state their countries may be in. Finally, the seventh and perhaps the least researched subject that I have identified as being showcased in several exhibitions, is trauma in and as an image. For this category trauma’s omnipresence in the media and political communication is particularly relevant, as well as how that omnipresence, in turn, has created an image of trauma feeding back into popular culture and mass media. With the onset of live broadcasting, social media and propaganda films, this theme has often been put into context with war strategies, especially in the sense of utilising traumatic image-culture for the manipulation of voters, consumers and civilians in general. These issues have been relevant in the work of Yael Bartana, Alfredo Jaar, Johann Grimonprez, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei, for example. By participating in political activism, recent movements, such as the artistic collective Zentrum für politische Schönheit, have employed and reconsidered the use of aesthetic forms of expression. Said forms have thus been used in concrete statements against current right wing tendencies in Germany and to personally confront members of the populist party AfD with art works and public sculptures that may be reminiscent of the trauma of racism and fascism. These seven categories can, without doubt, be extended and supplemented, but they should provide an overview of how versatile the approaches to trauma in contemporary art have become, and how, in turn, the language and rhetoric of these works and exhibitions have helped define and identify trauma’s role in the cultural discourse and a broader audience. At the same time, these categories

Trauma – Curational Perspectives

attest to the hypothesis that trauma may act as a contextual and formal link for art works that address global conflicts, their humanitarian consequences and their rising presence in image culture beyond geopolitical and historical borders.

229

Conclusion and Outlook

When Susan Sontag made her plea for letting “the atrocious images haunt us”1 and not forgetting what they show or under which conditions they came to be, she underlined the “good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in this world we share with others.” She did not conform to the belief that images must have immediate transformative powers, but that instead they are “an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers.”2 Sontag’s proposition – to let the images haunt us – has been the central idea around which this book has been developed, and I have argued the necessity of contemporary aesthetic practices that engage in global conditions of trauma — irrespective of genres or of formal artistic decisions. I have also made the case that exhibitions and the aesthetic realm in general provide a crucial forum for reassembling or reformatting traumata, through narrative and spatial structures for example, as well as facilitating understanding of current conflicts, their consequences and their reflection in image culture. Jill Bennett refers to the ‘politics’ of contemporary art as ‘practical aesthetics’, suggesting that art “‘abstract[s]’ from the actualised event a virtual structure that stages […] an affective encounter – an aesthetic encounter which is, by definition, relational and open-ended.”3 One of the key undertakings in this book is to challenge the notion of trauma as the unrepresentable. In the first part, I sought to unravel how the historical evolvement of the meaning of the term as well as cultural, clinical, psychoanalytical and aesthetic theories have created and contributed to the dominant notion of an ethical and moral imperative not to symbolise trauma. Latent doubt about the traumatised victims’ credibility and the conviction that traumatic memories were inaccessible to the conscious mind and only resurfaced in flashbacks led to a precarious and fundamental relation between the concepts of trauma and truth. Traumatic memories and their effects on symptomatic mental and behavioural processes have been obscured to a great extent, motivating researchers up until 1 2 3

Sontag (2003), 102. Ibid., 104. Bennett (2012), 43.

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the present day to attempt to prove and showcase the consequences and inheritance of trauma by making it visible. Over the past decades, the concept of trauma has helped improve the status of the victim considerably, and helped create acknowledgement for larger groups or even entire cultures as being heavily affected by traumatic events. However, the aesthetic representation of these cultural or collective traumata – analogous to the inaccessible psychological trauma – continued to be defined as impossible or indeed deemed as ethically inadequate and historically inaccurate. This conviction struck me as unproductive and unsatisfactory for a discussion of interdisciplinary contemporary aesthetic practices engaging with – and thus representing – trauma in some way, which in turn made me want to look into the reasons for this dogma. The most relevant sources for this investigation stem from three discourses. Firstly, an on-going validation of the psychoanalytical definition of trauma based on a Freudian and Lacanian model of repressed memories [Verdrängung] and the belatedness and subsequent repetition of symptoms [Wiederholung, Nachträglichkeit]. Secondly, the influence of postmodern aesthetic theory, particularly the negative dialectic coined by Adorno and the postmodern sublime coined by Lyotard, in which art is supposed to reflect its own failure to represent trauma through the art itself. And thirdly, an anti-representational demand that has emerged from Holocaust Studies and claims that any representation of the genocide is doomed to failure due to its inappropriateness in light of the horrors of the real events. Research conducted within the field of trauma studies has for the most part perpetuated many of these arguments from the 1990s onwards, which has resulted in the notion of trauma epitomizing the unrepresentable. By the logic of the unrepresentable, art that engages with trauma is thus required to strictly employ an exclusive and generalised anti-representational aesthetic so as to do justice to these dogmata. I have underpinned my scepticism regarding the logic of the unrepresentable by developing a counterargument for the cultural and social necessity of trauma’s representation in aesthetic practices, and referenced theories by philosophers such as Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière. Although Butler believes in the inherent failure of trauma’s representation, she considers this paradox central to the traumatic image and thus highlights the necessity to show it in order to constitute an image.4 This performative claim, in which art is regarded as being generative rather than representational,5 is echoed by Bennett who has identified a necessity for the reconsideration of the expectations of aesthetic representation, calling the undertaking “[a]n aesthetic project […] [that] carries with it the possibility of reorienting the study of the traumatic event […] away from its 4 5

Cf. Butler (2004), 144. Cf. Bennett (2005), 153.

Conclusion and Outlook

historiographical endeavour.”6 For my purposes, Rancière’s theory was particularly enlightening as he, too, challenges the requirements of historical and mimetic accuracy of aesthetic representative acts. He refers to the framework of an aesthetic regime (as opposed to a representational regime), in which fiction, representation and reality are intertwined, informing each other, establishing a new order of the context that is addressed. Fictions and representations, he believes, have already become and continue to affect reality.7 Rancière further questions the notion of unrepresentability as a property of a specific traumatic event, arguing that the inhuman event itself “does not impose any duty on art to represent or not to represent, in some particular way.”8 The implied criticism of prioritising one traumatic event over others has also been emphasised by trauma researcher Roger Luckhurst who affirms that “an aesthetic of unspeakability or unrepresentability would fail to register how cultural forms have actually responded to our torturous times.”9 The third influential source that helped strengthen my argument was Didi-Huberman’s criticism of the concept of the unrepresentable and his outspoken plea for a representational position. He argues that knowing the traumatic event requires imagining it, thus making a plea for “Images in spite of all: in spite of our own inability to look at them as they deserve.”10 My research also demonstrates that Rancière, Didi-Huberman and, most polemically, Giorgio Agamben criticise the concept of the unrepresentable (or related concepts, such as the incomprehensible, unsayable, unimaginable etc.) as a category that purposefully mystifies or even sacralises the nature of an event. Giving memory a place, as Ernst van Alphen claims, preconditions representative languages, so that others can experience these realities.11 In the second part of this study, I thus focused my research on current aesthetic practices that would help underpin my thesis by translating it into specific examples. To emphasise a variety of approaches to trauma, and in order to move away from the exclusivity of the anti-representational aesthetic of absence, I have introduced four case studies and investigated how the condition of trauma and its language is deciphered and reformatted in experimental processes. A focus on narrative strategies in the work of Omer Fast and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller underlines the ambiguous relation between fiction and reality as the central dialectic of trauma. In his looping video work 5000 Feet is the Best, Omer Fast reformats the representation of a drone pilot’s traumatic memories of war experiences by creating an analogy between symptomatic PTSD patterns, 6 7 8 9 10 11

Bennett (2012), 40. Cf. Rancière (2011) [2009], 126. Ibid., 129-130. Lockhurst (2010), 15. Didi-Huberman (2003) [2008], 3. Cf. van Alphen (1997), 12, 15.

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cinematic and narrative editing tools. Merging elements of storytelling, interview situations, psychoanalytical therapy conversation and testimony, this work goes against all expectations of what might be truth or distortion, reality or representation of a storyline, and of the conformity between spoken word and image. It promotes learning to see the complexity of traumatic memories by breaking anticipation. In The Killing Machine by Cardiff and Miller, a fictional story by Franz Kafka is transformed into what the artist duo refers to as ‘three-dimensional writing’. Parallels are drawn to current governmental confinement and punishment strategies, creating an abstract but nonetheless immersive situation of torture and killing, which is itself triggered by the spectators. By evoking uncomfortably fluid borders between spectacle and atrocity, this work addresses the act of looking at and responding to (images of) violence in our society and the sense of responsibility our actions should be informed by. Both works employ narrative measures, and in both instances psychological traumatic processes and fictionalised traumatic events are explicitly represented and explored by means of narrative manipulation and reformatting, poetic immersion, cinematic editing and dramatic settings. Fiction creates the framework in which it is possible to show, speak about and represent trauma. By exploring how architecture, stages and digital spaces might function as aesthetic tools for representing trauma and involving spectators, we looked at the spatial strategies employed in the practices of Paul McCarthy and Forensic Architecture. Along with some of his other work, I analysed McCarthy’s immersive video installation Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma, which addresses the broken sanctuary of the home, the claustrophobic space of the body and the notion of architecture violently dominating the traumatised subject. In the Pinocchio work, architecture becomes a mirror of the traumatised mind and simultaneously his direct antagonist, confining the fictional character within his own psyche. Trauma is thus suggested as being a condition that is manifested and visible in and through space, thereby representing architecture as a frame for and an embodiment of trauma. Architecture’s inherent violence is also the central aspect of Forensic Architecture’s investigative and interactive web platform Saydnaya. Inside a Syrian Torture Prison, which sheds light on the human rights violations and killings inside the Syrian prison Saydnaya. By creating a digital model based on and constructed around the testimonies of survivors regarding the traumatic conditions endured while in confinement, trauma becomes visible as manifesting within the structure but also as the architecture itself, created to inflict violence on detainees. The work addresses and reflects the impact of the prison’s erasure of all human sight and sound by recreating the survivors’ auditory memories of the architecture and ultimately puts forth the notion that the absence of sound acts as an inverted element of evidence that testifies to trauma. The Saydnaya project thus represents trauma in quite a lit-

Conclusion and Outlook

eral manner, making visible what is otherwise kept hidden behind thick walls and in traumatised minds. My study of works by Forensic Architecture and McCarthy shows that both aesthetic practices reactivate traumata by means of spatial strategies, and that they provide their spectators with tools to visualise, understand and even control these traumata. The work of Forensic Architecture in particular begs to invert the logic of the unrepresentable and instead poses the question of whether it can be acceptable to not represent and look at images of trauma. In this sense, as Agamben has suggested, the act of claiming an event as unrepresentable ultimately mirrors the perpetrators’ strategic concealment of atrocities. Critical not only of the context but also of the medium itself, the case studies have also shown that artistic practices may find ways to communicate traumatic conditions in a more meta-reflexive way than media or popular culture. In these practices, trauma is abstracted and narrated through modified channels or multisensory, even immersive scenarios. Conflicts that might arise from trauma thus play out within the forum of the aesthetic frame. Seen through the lens of Bennett’s ‘practical aesthetics’, all four case studies help “to generate counter memories or conditions under which different actualisations might take place, […] potentially upsetting and transforming collective memories.”12 Every representation of trauma performatively generates a new, reformatted reality that may help understand its impact. The condition of trauma thus provides a contextual link between all four works, a link via which the artistic practices may be understood as an exploration of the reasons and consequences of current conflicts, conditioning, responsibilities, suppression and symptoms of trauma. Testing whether this context could be productive in institutional practices, I subsequently devoted the last chapter of this study to curatorial perspectives and group exhibitions as potent spaces to explore trauma. This part of my research is more experimental, providing an (in-process) outlook rather than definitive outcomes. The objective here is also to point out tendencies, problems that were encountered, key strategies and future possibilities for international exhibitions looking to explicitly address trauma without prioritising one specific event. I reference curatorial concepts such as by Theodor Ringborg, who suggests exhibitions as being a ‘space-time frame’ to “finding ways to see violence”13 , or by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who explores “how artworks themselves become traumatized”14 and how these can be presented in the ‘striated space’ of the exhibition. A short analysis of three recent group exhibitions that each addressed trauma directly enabled me to identify key strategies in current curatorial approaches. These

12 13 14

Bennett (2012), 43. Ringborg (2017). Christov-Bakargiev (2011), 6.

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include exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery London in 2001, the Kunsthalle Wien and MUMOK in 2007, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis in 2014 and, finally, so as to be able to compare related issues and opportunities contemporary art museums must face in contrast to war museums, one recent contemporary art exhibition on terror and trauma at the Imperial War Museum London in 2017–18. This part of my research allowed me to emphasise strategies and aesthetic solutions that are repeatedly employed, through which a rhetoric pattern of trauma could be identified. These strategies include (in no particular order): the aesthetics of anti-representation and of absence, as well as of transgression and abjection; a focus on the ambiguous relation between memory and history as well as the conflicted intertwining of reality and fiction; explicit references to psychoanalysis and to clinically defined symptoms of trauma or PTSD, such as repression, repetition, acting out, as well as a prominent placement of the flashback, the so-called ‘signature symptom’ of trauma; a focus on the subject of home and the potential threat that lies therein, as well as life in exile separated from home; the physical and mental violence that trauma entails, and finally, a focus on how the media, politics and visual culture respond to trauma in and also as images. These findings show that in current aesthetic and curatorial practices trauma often appears alongside a frequently repeated set of contextual focuses and rhetoric strategies, leading perhaps to a new perception and representation of trauma that nonetheless still resorts to traditional conceptions. This approach is not uniform, nor is it geo-politically specific and it does not indicate the intensity or impact of the traumatic condition addressed. It will be the task of future exhibitions to draw a more precise picture of how trauma affects present-day societies, visual culture and politics, and how these traumatic circumstances might be detected, understood, visualised and, ideally, made accessible to the public. Exhibitions and the aesthetic practices they display have the potential for both an active contribution to investigations or documentations of current conflicts by communicating collective or personal traumata on a very specific level – such as in the work of Forensic Architecture – as well as providing a space in which fictional and/or non-historical narratives may be used experimentally to create an access to conditions of trauma and its effects on visual culture on an abstract level, such as in the work of Omer Fast. In both cases, “[a]n aesthetic project offers more than a record, a flashback or reconstruction; it generates a means of inhabiting and simultaneously reconfiguring the historical event as a radically different experience.”15 These varied experiences do not simply function as a reflection of worldly traumatic events, however. The relation between the image and reality has changed drastically, particularly in recent years and with the progress of various technolo-

15

Bennett (2012), 40.

Conclusion and Outlook

gies, bringing about a reconsideration of the mechanisms of representation. “The image,” as artist Hito Steyerl proposes, “is a fragment of the real world. It is a thing just like any other — a thing like you and me. This shift in perspective has far-reaching consequences. There might still be an internal and inaccessible trauma that constitutes subjectivity. But trauma is also the contemporary opium of the masses — an apparently private property that simultaneously invites and resists foreclosure. And the economy of this trauma constitutes the remnant of the independent subject. But then if we are to acknowledge that subjectivity is no longer a privileged site for emancipation, we might as well just face it and get on with it.”16 In the face of trauma, the image – a fragment of reality – thus becomes an object that testifies to its own truth, while “we”, as Paul McCarthy suggests, “become representations.”17 Despite and perhaps precisely because of the uncomfortable and powerful nature of these images: let them haunt us.

16 17

Steyerl (2010). McCarthy in Rugoff (1996), 53.

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253

List of Figures

Image 1: Anonymous member of the Sonderkommando. Auschwitz, August 1944. Oswiecim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Image 2: Anonymous member of the Sonderkommando. Auschwitz, August 1944. Oswiecim, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Image 3: Omer Fast. 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011). Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Image 4: Omer Fast. 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011). Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Image 5: Omer Fast. 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011). Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Image 6: Omer Fast. 5,000 Feet is the Best (2011). Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Image 7: Omer Fast. Continuity (2012). Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Image 8: Omer Fast. Continuity (2012). Film still. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Image 9: Omer Fast. Spielberg’s List (2003). Film still: Photo taken by extras during the production of the film Schindler’s List, 1993. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Image 10: Omer Fast. Spielberg’s List (2003). Film still: Photo taken by extras during the production of the film Schindler’s List, 1993. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Image 11: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine (2007). Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez. Copyright Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York. Image 12: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine (2007). Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez. Copyright Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York. Image 13: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine (2007). Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez. Copyright Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York.

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Image 14: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The Killing Machine (2007). Photo: Seber Ugarte & Lorena Lopez. Copyright Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York. Image 15: Janet C ardiff and George Bures Miller. Pandemonium (2005-7). C opyright Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York. Image 16: Janet C ardiff and George Bures Miller. Pandemonium (2005-7). C opyright Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller; Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine, New York. Image 17: Paul McCarthy. Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Paul McCarthy/Karen McCarthy. Image 18: Paul McCarthy. Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Paul McCarthy/Karen McCarthy. Image 19: Paul McCarthy. Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Paul McCarthy/Karen McCarthy. Image 20: Paul McCarthy. Pinocchio Pipenose Household Dilemma (1994). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Paul McC arthy/Karen McC arthy. Image 21: Paul McCarthy. A Skull with a Tail (1978). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Image 22: Paul McCarthy. Meat Cake #3 (1974). Performance/video tape. Newspace Gallery, Los Angeles. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Image 23: Paul McCarthy. Saloon Film (1995). 16mm film. Photographic series. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Image 24: Paul McCarthy. Saloon Film (1995). 16mm film. Photographic series. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Image 25: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya. (2016). Saydnaya prison, as reconstructed by Forensic Architecture using architectural and acoustic modelling. Image and caption text: Forensic Architecture, 2016. Image 26: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). [Image and caption text:] Forensic Architecture, 2016. A former detainee works with Forensic Architecture researchers to recreate elements of the prison in April 2016. Image 27: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). Image: Forensic Architecture, 2016. Image 28: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). This corridor in the prison, known to be linear, was experienced by a survivor while he was tortured and the space was distorted by the traumatic conditions at the moment the memory was encoded. Image and caption text: Forensic Architecture, 2016. Image 29: Forensic Architecture. Project: Mir Ali (Drone Strike, Case 2). Image: Forensic Architecture, 2013.

List of Figures

Image 30: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016). Witnesses were asked to describe architectural details, such as dimensions and textures, and these recollections solicited further memories of the prison and experiences had within. Image and caption text: Forensic Architecture. Image 31: Forensic Architecture. Project: Saydnaya (2016) Counter Investigations (2018) Exhibition view. ICA London. Photo: Mark Blower. Image 32: Forensic Architecture. Project: 77sqm_9:26min (2017). Timeline of the investigation. ICA London, 2018. Photo: Mark Blower. Image 33: Forensic Architecture. Towards an Investigative Aesthetics (2017) Exhibition View. MACBA. Photo: Miguel Coll. Image 34: Johan Grimonprez. dial-H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997). Film still. Three hijacked jets on desert airstrip, Amman, Jordan. 12 September 1970. Courtesy the artist. Image 35: Cindy Sherman.Untitled #315 (1993). cibachrome. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Image 36: Yael Bartana. Mary Koszmary (Nightmares) (2007). Video, installation view. Photo: David Johnson. Courtesy the artist. Image 37: Vandy Rattana. Bomb Ponds (2009). Video, installation view. Photo: David Johnson. Courtesy the artist. Image 38: Alfredo Jaar, May 1, 2011 (2011). Two LCD monitors and two framed prints; Original White House photograph by Peter Souza; Photo: Frazer Spowart; Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co, New York, kamel mennour, Paris, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin and the artist, New York. Image 39: Hrair Sarkissan, Homesick (2014). Two Channel video installation. Courtesy the artist. Image 40: Hrair Sarkissan, Homesick (2014). Two Channel video installation. Courtesy the artist.

257

Social and Cultural Studies Ashley J. Bohrer

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What is Rape? Social Theory and Conceptual Analysis 2018, 282 p., hardcover 99,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4434-0 E-Book: 99,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4434-4

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All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!

Social and Cultural Studies Sabine Klotz, Heiner Bielefeldt, Martina Schmidhuber, Andreas Frewer (eds.)

Healthcare as a Human Rights Issue Normative Profile, Conflicts and Implementation 2017, 426 p., pb., ill. 39,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4054-0 E-Book: available as free open access publication E-Book: ISBN 978-3-8394-4054-4

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Resistance and the Politics of Truth Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou 2018, 148 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3907-0 E-Book: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3907-4 EPUB: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-7328-3907-0

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!