After-affects | after-images

Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum

By (author) Griselda Pollock

Publication date:

31 August 2013

Length of book:

416 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm

ISBN-13: 9780719087981

Do artists travel away from or towards trauma? Is trauma encrypted or inscribed in art? Or can aesthetic practices (after-images) bring about transformation of trauma, personal trauma or historical traumas? Can they do this in a way that does not imply cure or resolution of the traces (after-affects) of trauma? How do artists themselves process these traces as participants in and sensors for our life-worlds and histories, and how does the viewer, coming belatedly or from elsewhere, encounter works bearing such traces or seeking forms through which to touch and transform them?

These are some of the questions posed by major feminist art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock, in her latest installation of the virtual feminist museum. In closely-read case studies, we encounter artworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Anna Maria Maiolino, Vera Frenkel, Sarah Kofman and Chantal Akerman to explore trauma and bereavement, fatal illness, first- and second-generation Holocaust experience, migration, exile and the encounter with political horror and atrocity. Offering a specifically-feminist contribution to trauma studies, and a feminist psychoanalytical contribution to the study of contemporary art, this volume continues the conceptual innovations that have been the hall-mark of Pollock’s dedicated exploration of feminist interventions in art’s histories.

Preface
Introduction: Trauma and artworking
I Sounds of subjectivity
1. Gasping at violence: Daphne’s open mouth and the trauma of gender
2. Seduction, mourning and invocation: The geometry of absence in work by Louise Bourgeois
3. Being and language: Anna Maria Maiolino’s gestures of exile and connection
II Memorial bodies
4. Traumatic encryption: The sculptural dissolutions of Alina Szapocznikow
5. Fictions of fact: Memory in transit in Vera Frenkel’s video installation works
III Passage through the object
6. Deadly objects and dangerous confessions: The tale of Sarah Kofman’s father’s pen
7. ‘… that, again!’: Pathosformula as transport station of trauma in the cinematic journey of Chantal Akerman
Bibliography
Index

In Griselda Pollock’s brilliantly-staged encounters between contemporary art and psychoanalysis, the aesthetic emerges as the space in which we can be responsive to the traces of trauma and live with its after-effects. Through incisive and carefully-articulated theoretical insights and reparative acts of close reading, Pollock offers us new ways of thinking about painful aftermaths as well as a new vocabulary for feminist visual studies.
Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University

In this powerful latest book, Griselda Pollock brings her writing on her key concept of `the virtual feminist museum’ to a new phase. What are the legacies of trauma in visual space? How might they be gendered? And is there a psychic realm to which women are closer that allows for a generative creativity equal to the horrors of our times? Once again, the meticulous, detailed respect she shows towards her chosen women artists is matched by a sustained theoretical scrutiny, both of which have become the hallmark of her unique feminist intervention into our understanding of images.
Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London