[Because the following essay was written for presentation as opposed to reading, I want to begin by noting that I began thinking about the question of art and trauma long before 9/11, while I was teaching in Romania in 1996.  At that time, an architectural contest with the goal of "healing the wound" caused by Nicolae Ceausescu's architectural disruption to the center of Bucharest was underway.  I didn’t talk about that experience in this presentation, but many of my questions and thoughts on art and trauma were generated by my year in Romania.  Yet as I began working on this talk, I realized that I hadn’t answered any of the questions I had then, that those questions had changed, and so had the answers.]
 

Shortly after 9/11, a lot of writing appeared about the expression of pain and grief in art, about the value of art at a time of national tragedy, and most obviously, about the meaning of the towers – as icons, which they had already become in the public imagination or they would not have been targeted for destruction; as architecture, not uniformly admired by everyone before their destruction, and as part of the urban fabric which has now been irrevocably altered, in our imaginations, in movies about New York, and in reality.  In the immediate aftermath, even before the official contest began, proposals for a memorial and for new buildings began to appear.
 

the original models of the winning designs for the reconstruction of Ground Zero and the memorial

Louise Bourgeois sketch, published in the New York Times, 9/30/2001	work from the exhibition The Day Our World Changed, used with permission of the NYU Child Study Center

Deborah Solomon, the critic describing Bourgeois’ drawing, said this: “It manages to encompass at once the solid and the void, the impulse to go forward in time and the impulse to go back.”  The star at the top, said the writer, looks as though it is carrying the energy of the building upward, but the edges of the star seem to be made of wax dripping downward, suggesting things raining down on the city.  When I was looking at the examples of children’s art from the NYC exhibition, the congruency between the painting by the child of the towers as candles, offering hope even as they melt, and Bourgeois’ melting tower, which, and we can’t see this in the sketch, would have had the names of all the victims engraved on the sides, are surprisingly similar.  The similarity lies in the conjunction in both cases of absence and presence; solid, void; movement ahead, movement backward.  Is it only a similarity of the language we use to describe the art or is it a similarity in visual thinking? In either case, this is the language we use when we talk about trauma and the fact that we use it so readily in both our words and our images suggests that thinking about trauma and art has already become reified, regardless of the traumatic incident.  That might seem to be a somewhat despairing statement to make because it might also mean that we can’t make art about trauma, if we’ve codified the language.

But if we do make that statement, the first question we need to examine is the most basic: what do we mean when we talk about art and trauma?  Are we explicitly referring to a particular person’s experience with trauma, the memory of which is then somehow represented or expressed in the work of art?  And if this is the case, then is the art work a therapeutic experience, likely to be understood or meaningful only to the person who made it?
 

works from the exhibition, The Day Our World Changed

How, after all, should we look at these examples of children’s art?  They were living in NY at the time and their responses are genuine, felt responses to the events of the day and after. But if we didn’t know this about them, or if we didn’t know that children had made the work, would we look at it the same way?  And if it is not therapy, does this claim to the traumatic experience and its memory make the artist (and artwork) the owner of that experience?  And if not therapy, why did he or she express it in a public way? Is the artwork intended to unsettle the viewer, to communicate horror and abjection, perhaps to inspire empathy or perhaps not to do that but to force the viewer to recognize the distance between her position and that of the person who experienced the trauma? Or differently, is the work intended to remember trauma, and through memory, to memorialize it?  One more question we might ask: is the representation of trauma serving some other motive or goal?

These are all real questions we can ask but in fact, the problem with most of these questions is that these are motives which are more likely to be attributable to an exhibition, critic, or historian than to an artist, because most artists refuse the idea of an explicit association of their art work with a single, identifiable meaning as an act which limits the art work to the role of illustration, thereby depriving it of the ability to do what we normally expect art to do.  As a result, we need to make a distinction between art ABOUT trauma and an art OF trauma.
 

Giacometti: Hands Holding the Void, 1934/5

To try to answer this, I chose a work which has no relationship to 9/11.  Giacometti’s work does not appear to be about any particular event, although we might imagine that it has some relationship to the impending world war or to events taking place in Germany at that time.  But the power of the work does not lie in associating it with a specific incident; it lies in the mixture of emotions created by the rigidly open eyes, the empty space between the hands, the fragility of the figure and the sense that it is a figure at prayer, minus the prayer book.  To me, the work resonates with traumatic feelings, although I would not go so far as to say that it is a work of trauma.  What is a work of trauma?

The person who experiences trauma is generally the witness to the traumatic event, not the person who has actually been the victim.  And one of the ways in which 9/11 has reshaped the meaning of trauma is that it has created a different type of victim because in a real sense, we – and many people in other parts of the world – are all victims.  Usually, or at least more commonly, it is only possible to speak of the victim of trauma as someone who can make art if the trauma did not involve death or destruction of that person’s capacity to produce and create.  In other words, the trauma is the moment of witnessing, a moment which is not widely shared.  If nothing else, 9/11 reconfigured that sense of trauma as private.  In other respects, our understanding of trauma may not have changed and Freud may provide a useful model.  Freud defined trauma through a story about a man who doesn’t want to wake up from a nightmare in which his child is dying and he can’t save him, because waking up would have meant waking to the knowledge that his child was already dead.  When we speak of an art of trauma, then, we usually do make the assumption that the victim is creating the art, that this person has lost something, that the magnitued of the loss, whether personal or not, is incomprehensible, and that somehow the work of art must communicate the loss or the absence.  The victim lives, and he or she lives with the knowledge or memory of what has been lost, so this loss must also be present, and the trope of an art of trauma almost inevitably becomes an art in which a dynamic of absence and presence is operative.

But at the same time, trauma is traditionally defined and thought of as being beyond representation, impossible to represent.  How, then, can we even talk about an art of trauma or even about trauma?  Is there a language of trauma which generates this work?  One writer (Hal Foster, in The Return of the Real) has suggested that there is a discourse in which the artist attempts to both exhibit and inhabit a place of powerful emotion (psychic shock) at the same time that he or she does not exhibit any feeling, because all feeling has died.  The problem with this is that it is impossible to inhabit emotion without feeling it; of everything in our lives, sensation and feelings are the least abstract.  Or, as a Swiss psychologist, Edouard Chaparede, wrote in 1911, “It is impossible to feel emotion as past” (quoted in Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, p. 22).  What this writer meant is that emotion always exists in the present, if we are feeling it.  If, instead, we remember how we felt, if I tell you that I felt shock, terror, bewilderment, panic, or any of the multitude of feelings I think I remember having felt on 9/11/2001, I’ve already moved away from them and made them into words, and I’ve also made the assumption that my words can actually convey something which evokes the feelings I had.  But I don’t feel it when I say the words, and my guess is that you don’t either.  And if I did feel all of those things right now, I probably wouldn’t be able to talk about them.  But the way out of this predicament may lie in the fact that we can re-experience emotions in a new context.  In this case, then, we are not talking about an attempt to represent an emotion or, for that matter, to represent trauma.  Nor are we talking about an attempt to produce trauma in the person who shares in the artistic experience.  What we may be talking about is the development of an artistic language which engages in a somatic or sensual dialogue with our understanding of trauma.  What this also means is that it probably won’t be possible to make great art about 9/11 because as soon as we say “about,” we’ve moved out of the realm of great art and we’ve moved out of the realm of trauma, and into the realm of description. But this is not to say that it will be impossible to make great art which will evoke a dialogue with the traumatic memory of 9/11.

Which leads to the next question: Is there a kind of memory which produces an experience of  “sensory or seeing truth” rather than “thinking truth”? (I refer again to ideas raised in Empathic Vision.)  And if there is, how will it unite the subjectivity of the immediate production of that sensation with enough contingency to engage the common, shared memory which language produces?  As the beginning of an answer, we need to recognize that if an art work succeeds in remaining outside the realm of representation or common memory without becoming so transhistorical that it loses all reference to the traumatic moment, then it will need to be a work of art that is predicated on questioning and re-seeing, an artwork which centralizes the act of open-ended questioning. But this questioning isn’t about meaning and it isn’t verbal: it is questioning through the body, or through feeling.  The closest most of us come to this in ordinary experiences is probably through television or cinema: the experience of watching something so violent and painful we all but close our eyes to it, even as we can’t close our more visceral senses.  And this, of course, is what happened to us when we watched the endlessly repeated collapse of the towers on tv all that day and night and the next day and night until we couldn’t watch it anymore.  But that wasn’t an art work; that was real life.  And if it is an art work and we do close our eyes, then we are refusing the experience of both art and trauma.

I think cinema does have an advantage, however, as do other time-based arts (or 4-dimensional arts, as the in-group calls them). The first work I want to talk about in the context of trauma is a movie, Elephant, directed by Gus Van Sant (2003).  I want to try to convey a sense of what it achieves through a brief discussion of still shots from an episode near the beginning of the movie.
 

The movie is ostensibly about a Columbine type of incident.  At the beginning of this scene, we’re in the school yard.  It begins with a long shot in which the camera doesn’t move but the students do, and two of the important characters come into view at different times (first, a girl, Michelle, comes into view and looks up at the sky, and then Nathan, the boy in the sweatshirt). In our scene, Nathan (but we don’t know his name yet) comes to the front of the frame, puts on his sweatshirt, and starts to walk away from us, going toward the school.  The camera follows him. The focus in the distance doesn’t change; basically we see more of the school as he (and the camera) get closer to it, but the camera stops moving before he enters the building and from that point on, he gets farther away from us and smaller. Until this point, we hear piano music, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, music which we will hear again later in the movie when we meet another character who is practicing the sonata at the piano.  This music serves as a recurring theme, although in some places it’s “outside” what we’re seeing, background music, as it were, while in other places it’s inside the moment we’re watching.  Right now in the movie, we begin to hear some guitar music which is clearly not part of the background piano music, and as Nathan enters the school, we begin to hear very faintly sounds of the school environment. Slow motion is used as he walks past the girls and we take their point of view.  Then it returns to normal speed and for the first time, rather than walking behind him, we’re facing him, although we still move as he moves, until he meets up with his girlfriend.  When you watch the movie from beginning to end, you realize that this scene is taking place at the same time as several other scenes which introduce us to the other characters in the movie.  You also realize as you watch that you see most of these scenes again, and in some cases, again, but each time we see it, we take the perspective of a different character from within the scene.  So if here we have Nathan’s subliminal awareness of the girls watching him, later we’ll see Nathan pass the girls and they will be our focus.  Because the entire movie is structured this way, we rarely have a true sense of what the real “movie” time is and at the same time, the movie does feel like it’s taking place in real time because the camera stays so close to the characters and their movements. Essentially, this sense of observing random moments at the same time that we think we’re following a single day creates a montage of moments in the life of the school even as the cinematic techniques create the sense of following the day through from beginning to end.  It is largely through this combination of the repetition of visual moments which are always recognizable but never identical and the expansive and sequential sense of time which leads me to see this movie as a re-creation of the experience of trauma and post-traumatic memories – by creating these moments when you feel like time has stopped but immediately defying the logic of that, you vicariously participate in the traumatic experience of knowing that you are powerless to stop something from happening. There is a good deal of blood and horror near the end of the movie but the trauma is not the blood because you know it’s going to happen.  The evocation of trauma is precisely that: you know what will happen and you are helpless to stop it. Still, as much as I love this movie, part of me wants to say that in the end, it is too formulaic, it plays by the rules too closely.  Of course, I’ve seen it several times and I’ve used it as the basis for detailed film analysis, so maybe I can’t be an objective judge anymore.
 

Another work I want to use here was likewise not made in the context of 9/11 although it was made in 2001.  Again, a time-based work, this is Bill Viola's Five Angels for the Millennium. For approximately the past ten years, Bill Viola has been making art in which the subject matter has been almost exclusively related to the experience and expression of moments of extreme passion or emotion. Five Angels for the Millennium is one of two large-scale installation works which Viola made in 2001.  Five images are projected simultaneously on different walls of a room, and sounds which are primarily related to watery sounds are heard endlessly.  Each screen shows an almost identical image of a man plunging into or being submerged in water and eventually rising up or levitating from the water in an explosive and unexpected moment.  The colors of each are different – one appears to be a celestial sky at night; one is most readily perceived as water; one looks like a forest or grassland scene; one is fiery, and one is a sunset.  Only one of them shows the figure above the water and plunging in, although this action does occur in all of them.  But the other four are filmed underwater.
 

I can describe my own experience of walking into an almost entirely dark room, not knowing where to look or stand, and not realizing at first that there were five projections to see.  I can also describe the feelings I had when I realized that each screen was, in fact, presenting an image of ascension and descent, that the images were endlessly recurring, that because of the darkened room and the fact that there was no way I could look at all of them at once, they would never look the same to me as I watched.  If I tell you that I stayed there for an hour and that by the time I left, my face was soaked with tears, you can’t really know what it felt like for me to be there, any more than we can know what it felt like to be in NY on 9/11 without having been there.  Given that Viola made his work in 2001, he wasn’t trying to communicate that.  But without any hesitation on my part, I can say that he created a time-based experience of a sense memory.  I didn’t need to see towers collapsing or bodies falling to the ground; yet that was all I could see in my mind when I was in that gallery.  But what this experience also tells me is that for all my attempts to try to identify an art of trauma, as soon as I use those words, “an art of trauma,” I’m talking about an experience which is not a feeling experience.  I’m talking about an artistic language which replicates in analytic form the meaning of trauma.  And I don’t want to diminish this experience because I think it can be very powerful and I think it can be recognized when it exists.

I’m not going to address the question of memorials which is a different question from that of an art of trauma.  The question of memorials is much more vexed than the question of trauma because it immediately raises the question of whose memorial is it, who owns the memory and who owns the space where the towers used to be.  It ‘s not surprising that construction of the memorial hasn’t begun yet, and ironically, the debates over how to do it may prove to be more of a memorial than anything which will be built.

Yet, I want to suggest that it may also be the case that the best memorials and the only kind of memorial which will succeed in today’s world is one which somehow manages to unite trauma with memorialization.
 

Isn’t that why Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial succeeded so well and so much better than anyone expected?  Because she created a space of memory, of absence, of dialogue, and of the personalization that makes something exist both in time and out of time? Most of the writing about trauma and art, and more recently, a great deal of writing about memorials, has been based on the Holocaust and the memories of second and third generation survivors. The most recent memorial to an event which few people want to memorialize – if this means to honor it -- is Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe (image on the right), which finally opened to the public a little more than one year ago.  Because it’s located in Berlin, I haven’t seen it yet so I can only rely on what others have said about it, not the least of those others being the architect himself.  Eisenman said that underlying his design was the desire to show “that there is no goal, no path, nor direction home, either to or away from memory” – if his work succeeds in this, then he may have done more than create a memorial.

As I wanted to suggest in my beginning, one of the things I realized when I was putting this together is that trauma no longer means the same thing to me that it did in the 1990s and my attempt at that time to describe the language of an art of trauma now strikes me as being naive and idealist, even if it was sincere and painful. All of which says to me that with respect to art, it isn’t just artists and art who were affected by 9/11.  The way we think about the bigger question of trauma and representation has also changed.

Select Bibliography and Image Credits
Jill Bennett.  Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art.  (Stanford University Press, 2005).
Stephen C. Feinstein, ed. Absence/Presence: Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust.  (Syracuse University Press, 2005).
Saul Friedlander, ed.  Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution.' (Harvard University Press, 1992).
Anders Hog Hansen.  "No 'Final Solution' to the Memory Problem." GLOCAL Times, Issue 2, 2005.  Photo of the Holocaust Memorial taken by Hansen, July 2005, and published in his article, "No 'Final Solution.'"
Elaine Scarry.  The Body in Pain.  (Oxford University Press, 1985).
Still photos from the dvd of Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003).
Chris Townsend, ed.  The Art of Bill Viola. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004).   Images from 5 Angels for the Millenium.
Other images from the NY Times archives of projects for the WTC memorial, made available on line, and art works as noted in captions.