Gender, Art, Identity II Bracha L. Ettinger's Matrixial Theory and

Contemporary Art Practice

Dr. Tina Kinsella

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkqENGKwp2Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlSxiM_69l8

Art offers for any kind of trauma another transformation into knowledge’

Bracha Ettinger, ‘Uncanny Awe, Uncanny Compassion,’ FLS, 2011, pp. 24-5.

‘The place of art is for me the transport-station of trauma: a transport-station that is more than a place is rather a space, that allows for certain occasions of occurrence and of encounter ... The transport is expected at this station, and it is possible, but the transport-station does not promise that passage of remnants of trauma will actually take place in it: it only supplies the space for this occasion. The passage is expected, but uncertain, the transport does not happen in each encounter and for every gazing subject’

Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘Art as the Transport-Station of Trauma,’ Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger Artworking 1985-1999, p. 91

Eurydice

Sontag is so emphatic that the view of such photographs is a secondary trauma itself, not just because it provides a transparent witnessing of the suffering of someone else, but because it at the same time undermines that witnessing, rendering it inauthentic and impossible. This secondary trauma is not just the shock of witnessing another’s pain, but the tertiary shock of shame at one’s inability to intervene (Mitchell, 2008, pp. 237-8).

Images may wound us, can transfix us, Medusa-like in the confrontation with an indexical witness to horror that breaches the outer ramparts of our discrete subjectivities to lodge the pain of others in our memories (Pollock, 2008c, p. 224).

... there is a difference between the photographic processes. video, photography or any art that starts with the lenses, and the painting process, which, like a sound or a voice, starts again and again from the invisible transensed resonance — transensed by a body-soul — to finally reach the audible or the visible. For this reason I see painting not only as relevant to our time, but also a project that still has a long way to. A project that meet the now from a future auratic era (Ettinger, 2011b, p. 28).

Ophelia Eurydice

Ophelia and Eurydice, No. 1 2002-2009

Ophelia and Eurydice 2002-2009

Ophelia,Eurydice, 2002-2009

Ophelia Medusa

Ophelia, Medusa, No. 1 2006-2013

Ophelia, Medusa, No. 2 2006-2013

Crysallis Butterfly Bird

Ein Raham

Ein means "spring of water" and "eye", and Raham means the big vulture bird and "womb“

https://www.dropbox.com/lightbox/home/Masterclass%20Ettinger%20(1)

Ein Raham, Eurydice

Non-Life

Ettinger insists on a link between ‘pre-maternal femininity and the pre-life condition’ that is ‘not death in life’ (2011b, p. 10). She argues that the passage into life for the becoming subject is uncertain. In the passage into life the becoming-subject is not yet-life and life-yet-to-come, defined by Ettinger as non-life.

In the non-life is a passage into life there is an intricate weaving between these matrixial life drives and the death drive. The becoming-life/I is co-emerging into life alongside non-I whose subjectivity is a composite of matrixial and phallic phantasmatic ... the non-I’s desire is inflected with phallic, castrating, splitting affect, it is also infused with the affective matrixial desire of the archaic m/Other that indexes a ‘desire for borderlinking’ with the feminine-other (Ettinger, 2007, p. 10) and ‘engenders a disturbing desire for jointness with a foreign world’ (Ettinger, 2006f, p. 146).

Ettinger makes a crucial distinction between Freudian Eros (sexual libido) and maternal Eros, and between phallic Thanatos (death drive) and matrixial Thanatos. Becoming-alive in non-life, the not-yet-subject is bathed in a compassionate and hospitable maternal Eros ‘which is ‘languishing-longing’ with/for the unknown other emerging into life ‘that is not sexual’ (Ettinger, 2011b, p. 19).

This compassionate maternal Eros reveals a ‘non-aggressive Thanatos which is ‘a languishing-withdrawing’ from and with the unknown other (Ettinger, 2011b, p. 19). Wreathed in maternal Eros, matrixial Thanatos indexes ‘not death, but the non-life as the not yet emerged, the not yet becoming alive’ (Ettinger, 2005, p. 709). Compassionate and hospitable maternal Eros is co-present with phallic Eros, but maternal Eros and erotic ‘sexual libido are different psychic instances’ (Ettinger 2005, p.709).

Whilst the two types of Eros ‘might intermix’ they ‘nurture different kinds of love’ (Ettinger, 2005, p. 709). When sexual libido is in prevalence ‘compassionate erotic hospitality is often deformed’ (Ettinger, 2005, p. 709).and phallic Thanatos ‘is there, never too far’ (Ettinger, 2005, p. 709). Hence non-life is informed by a certain kinds of life drives and the death drive, which are not in opposition to each other, but rather are interlaced with each other: informing each other, transforming each other and mitigating each other.

Ettinger argues that the artist transforms death, non-life and not-yet-life through the aesthetic affect of the artwork. Death, non-life and not-yet-life can be transformed by the viewer in the aesthetic encounter with the artwork.

If, then, the question of the aesthetic engages with the question of the relation between jouissance, death, and foreclosed femininity in the feminine-matrixial dimension it also arises from the problem of traumatizing co-emerging and co-fading within non-foreclosed feminine jouissance working through the passages in between life and non-life in the passage to the other. The artist desires to transform death, non-life, not-yet-life, and no-more life, in co-emergence and co-fading, in art as the theatre of the soul, with its jouissance and trauma (Ettinger, 2002b, p. 100).

The triangulated dynamic between artist, artwork and the viewer — who participates in the artwork — can contribute to a matrixial sublimation that refuses foreclosure on the enigmatic horror and splendour of the m/Other by self-fragilizing, trans-connecting and co-contributing to the dispersal of trauma and jouissance of the feminine corpo-Real.

‘Portrait photography and self-portrait photography address a future viewer, either the photographer's own future gaze or the future gaze of another viewer. In this sense, photographic self-portraits might be understood as rehearsals for the photographer's own death, because they allow the photographer to pose an image of her own still life, to develop an image of herself as dead’

Peggy Phelan , 2002, ‘Francesca Woodman's Photography: Death and the Image One More Time’ in Signs, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2002), pp. 979-1004

‘Our encounter with the photographic portrait duplicates a previous encounter between the photographer and model. Thus the encounter with the portrait is always a reencounter; it is an experience of repetition. Photographic repetition has two dimensions: the repetition that derives from the capacity to make an endless number of prints from the same negative and the repetition of the literal moments (the uniform measure of time's own beat) that pass between the moment in which the photograph is taken and the moment of the spectator's (re)encounter with it. Photography schools the viewer in the mutative force of temporality itself. "The photograph possesses an evidential force, and . . . its testimony bears not on the object but on time" (Barthes 1981, 89). A photograph inserts the past within the present; the copresence of the past and the present staged by photography links it with theater. Photography's theatricality stems from the possibility that one can address and be ad-dressed by the dead’

‘The blur at once registers the animating force of Woodman's art-it refuses to accede to photography's resolute stillness-and additionally registers the deep affinity between that stillness and the heavy stones that fill graveyards. With this image, Woodman enters the medium of photography as its most supple ghost’

Listen to Sylvia Plath on maternal shocks. From TULIPS: The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me [...] I could hear them breathe Lightly through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound [...] A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck [...] And I have no face, I wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen [...] Before they came the air was calm enough [...] Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise [...] They concentrate my attention, that was happy / Playing and resting without committing itself [...] The tulips should be behind bars [...] And I am aware of my heart; it opens and closes / Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me [...]

Sylvia Plath aches in her trans(sub)jective core—her abjected I and non-I. I is a red rose (daughter-mother) and tulip (daughter/infant) at the same instant or in different time-spaces, she is a red scar and dark ashes in the same instant or in different time-spaces; I and non-I change places in-between different crystallizations of unborn-yet/new-born/girl/adult/(m/)Other clusters.

Anna Akhmatova, from “Lot's Wife”: / ... disquiet speaks uneasily to the just man’s wife:/ “No, now is not too late to look again [...] / the blank openings in the empty windows of the tall house / where you bore your children for your husband.” / Look — a gaze — constrained by dying pain / her eyes enlarge but do not see a grave, / her body fused into translucent salt, / her quick feet rooted to the earth. / And / who will mourn this woman / or her trivial loss, this woman never / absent from my heart — the crushed / life in a single glance?”

When ashes are mirrors to a non-I, the subject aches in her trans(sub)jective core in her abjected non-I. I is a red rose (daughter-mother) and tulip (daughter-infant) at the same instant or in different time-spaces, she is a red scar and dark ashes in the same instant or in different time-spaces; I and non-I change places in-between different crystallizations of unborn-yet/new-born/girl/adult/(m/)Other clusters. The enigma of my birth is related to maternal pain.

The poetic persona of Sylvia Plath as child-girl detests the mother-moon-medusa. As daughter-woman, Sylvia Plath of the Letters home loves and respects her mother and also needs her. Sylvia Plath of the Journals during her therapy mainly rejects her mother ... When Sylvia Plath enters the mother-position in life she embodies and inhabits the symbolic space of medusa and crone. In her Journals she expresses her ardent wishes to become pregnant and to know and share the secrets and meaning of womanhood and motherhood.

Symbolic woman-motherhood is reflected in the poetic persona by joys and sorrows of each passage to life, again and again. Embodied fidelity to the child-girl person, persona and position are reflected in the desire to die young. Growing into adulthood and (non-)motherhood demands the revitalization of the matrixial sphere by the Eros of borderlinking that is involved in the trauma of birthing and phantasms of rebirthing. Isn't the task of the analyst-therapist to join the archaic (m/)Other in these strings and articulate the threads for feminine and matrixial meanings as s/he benefits from the archaic trust in the matrixial-maternal Eros? Death appeals when the languishing to know the other side becomes fatal. A healing interpretation concerning the birthing-mother-body/birthing-I-body will keep holding the mother-birthing non-I by compassionate hospitality even when disgust is expressed and treasure her value as enigmatic, thus acknowledging that the space of non-life is different from the space of death.