Trauma and the arts

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In recent decades, with the development of the ideas behind psychological trauma and PTSD, becoming just as much a cultural phenomenon as a medical or legal one, artists have begun to engage the issue in their work. Unlike those artists who explored psychoanalysis and trauma as it pertained to them personally, Cindy Sherman for example, this new generation of artists intend to mediate the domains of culture, history and memory. An important breakthrough in this was the publication of Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1972) by Art Spiegelman. There is now a genre of art that focuses on, exposes, and comments on survivors and survivor-tales. Some artists want to see their work as part of a process of healing, and in this they work in a manner akin to older conventions of art therapy and art psychology. There are others, however, who resist the implicit mandate that art should be put into the service of psychological repair.

As an example of the latter, one could point to the various Holocaust memorials in Germany, most of which were made beginning in the 1980s and which coincided with the increased awareness about trauma and its representational needs. These memorials have provoked a good deal of debate about the role of public space. Jochen Gertz and Esther Shavlev-Gertz's anti-fascism memorial in Harburg, Germany is a good example. Erected in 1986, it consisted of a single pillar lined with lead so that visitors could scratch their names and thoughts into the surface. The pillar was designed to slowly sink beneath the ground, which it did by 1993, and now can only be viewed through a glass wall. But what started as an idea to bring the community together in their affirmation against fascism turned into something altogether different when people began to write anti-semitic slogans on the pillar, bringing to light the very opposite of the monument's intentions. The city fathers began to see the monument as an embarrassment. The recently opened Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin that was designed by Peter Eisenman was held up for years because of controversies. James Young discusses the history of what are now called "anti-memorial memorials" in Germany.^[1] The term "counter-monument" is also now in common usage in the art community to describe memorials that deal with difficult topics in unconventional ways. Since the 1990s, there one has also seen the emergence of a new generation of hologaust museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. The Jewish holocaust is not the only cultural tragedy to be studied in a museum. The Chinese Holocaust Museum of San Francisco (opened in 2003) deals with the massacre of Nanking residents by the Japanese during WWII. The question of what is and is not a holocaust, who owns the rights to trauma and how it should be commemorated are increasingly pressing issues, the world over.

In looking at more recent work, innovative is the art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who teaches at MIT and who is known for interviewing people and then projecting these interviews onto large public buildings.^[2] Wodiczko wants to bring trauma not merely into public discourse but to have it contest the presumed stability of cherished urban monuments. His work has brought to life issue about homelessness, rape, and violence. Other artists who engages the issue of trauma are Everlyn Nicodemus from Tanzania, Milica Tomic from Serbia, as well as Rudolf Herz, who lives and works in paris and Munich.^[3] In his "Museum Pictures" he photographed visitors to the Dachau concentration camp and how some tried to efface the pictures of Hitler and other Nazi personalities that were shown in the historical display there. Herz also organized an art show in Munich that examined the work Heinrich Hoffmann, the personal photographer of Hitler. His work intends to provoke questions about where to locate the boundary of decency respective the Holocaust.

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[edit] See also

• Emotion and memory
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Psychology of art
• Holocaust memorials