Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma

Israeli/French artist and psychoanalytical theorist, Bracha Ettinger has declared: “In art today we are moving from phantasm to trauma. Contemporary aesthetics is moving from phallic structure to matrixial sphere.” In analysing the significance of this claim, this article will bring together the legacies of feminist, post-colonial cultural theories in relation to the current focus on trauma, memory and aesthetics in an international context. The understanding of the twentieth century as a century of catastrophe demands theoretical attention be given to concepts such as trauma, as artists with deep ethical commitments bring issues of traumatic legacies to the surface of cultural awareness and potentially provide through the aesthetic encounter a passage from the traces of trauma. This article introduces, explains and analyses the contribution of Bracha Ettinger as a major theoretician of trauma, aesthetics and above all sexual difference. In addition, it elaborates on her parallel concept of a matrixial aesthetic practice, enacted through a post-conceptual painting, that retunes the legacies of technologies of surveillance and documentation/archiving, as a means to effect the passage to a future that accepts the burden of sharing the trauma while processing and transforming it. The article demonstrates the dual functions of Ettingerian theories of a matrixial supplement to the phallocentric Imaginary and Symbolic in relation to the major challenges we face as we seek to understand, acknowledge and move on from the catastrophes that render our age post-traumatic

The long journey: maternal trauma, tears and kisses in a work by Chantal Akerman

Chantal Akerman is now one of the most highly regarded filmmakers in Europe with a long career reaching back into the 1970s when she was first hailed as part of a new feminist cinema. As independent cinema lost ground and its own locations, Akerman was invited to create installations for her films and thus to traverse the boundaries between cinema and new media art forms. While still making commercial cinema, Akerman elaborates its themes in other forms. One such installation, WALKING NEXT TO ONE'S SHOELACES INSIDE AN EMPTY FRIDGE (2004), created an occasion for her to film together with her own mother, the haunting presence of many of her films and much of the feminist analysis of Akermanian cinema. This time, Akerman led her mother back to her own mother through an object, the only remnant of a young woman murdered in Auschwitz. This paper is an analysis of what happened during this filming which leads to a retrospective reading of Akerman's films from 1968 in terms of traumatic inscriptions of the shared transgenerationally transmitted but unspoken trauma that finds its moment of formulation in this 'event' that was filmed and then made into an installation. Drawing on Ettingerian matrixial revisions to trauma theory and to psychoanalytical aesthetics, notably through the concept of fascinance as a durational non-visual gazing through which the feminine subject seeks knowledge of a feminine other, I argue that we can, in the light of this 'event' of the 2004 work, reconfigure Akerman's work in terms of a journey towards the traumatic kernel that, encrypted, leads to repetition, but formulated through the durational artwork facilitates passage of its remnants

Monroe’s Molly: Three Reflections on Eve Arnold’s Photograph of Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses

It is often said that Marilyn Monroe was even more brilliant in posing for still photography than for cinematic performances. She posed for a range of remarkable photographers creating a secondary archive of ‘still Monroe’. Eve Arnold was one of the only women who contributed to this archive. Does gender inflect the images she made of this complex modernist woman of the 1950s? The photo-shoot that brought Arnold and Monroe together in 1955 has incited comment from both cultural and literary scholars because of the seemingly bizarre combination of the sex-goddess reading the most challenging modernist text, Ulysses by James Joyce. As part of my current project to re-‘read’ the Monroe still and moving image archive using the tools of a Warburgian art history focusing on gestures and affects, a postcolonial feminist class analysis of modern women as creative agents within/against sexist and racist cultural institutions, and as a feminist cultural theorist using psychoanalytically inflected image analysis within historical specificity, this article seeks to revisit and re-read the double agency of the two women at work together making images mediated by what was offered to Baker-Monroe—and knowingly incorporated by her—by the gendered voice of Penelope-Molly in the final section of Ulysses