Description
Book SynopsisIn 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, Holocaust experience, migration, exile and the encounter with political horror and atrocity.
Trade ReviewIn 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
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Table of ContentsPreface
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
