Art and Trauma since 1950, A Holographic Model

This dissertation introduces the holographic model as a critical tool for the identification and analysis of visual representations of trauma. I develop this model based on parallels between the etiology of trauma and the science of holographs. Traumatic experience is principally characterized by dissociation---a condition whose symptoms include physical and psychic numbing, heightened perception, and the sense that time is altered, slowed down, or sometimes dream-like. The detachment of dissociation is often simultaneously physical, perceptual, and emotional, as is demonstrated by the fact that "out-of-body" experiences are common to traumatic events ranging from war and rape to experimental medical treatment. Holographs provide an analog to the dissociative state often produced in traumatic situations by virtue of their unique physical properties. For example, each piece of a hologram contains the entire image (even if fragmented from the whole), and holograms produce multiple images simultaneously. In effect, holographs demonstrate the possibility both of producing multiple simultaneous perspectives and of containing multiple images within the same physical space---characteristics that are fundamentally analogous to and powerfully evocative of traumatic subjectivity. The term holographic thus encapsulates a visual and phenomenological model for the critical study of art informed by trauma grounded in the visualization of seemingly impossible juxtapositions of space and time. The theoretical claims of this dissertation are explored through a series of case studies which examine some of the most exceptional artist of the 20th and 21st centuries: Andy Warhol, Hermann Nitsch, and Raphael Ortiz. From Ortiz's Computer-Laser-Videos and Warhol's Death and Disaster series to Nitsch's Orgies Mysteries Theater, these works span a range of cultural contexts and artistic media---European and American artists working in painting, sculpture, performance, film, and video from the 1950S to the present---yet share distinctive visual strategies that are identified as formal markers for the representation of traumatic subjectivity. My holographic model thus considers the experiential impact of art informed by trauma on the viewer, and compares that impact explicitly to the essence of traumatic subjectivity, thereby directing the discussion of such art toward a more empathic inquiry into the shared response to trauma.