Bracha Ettinger was the artist/theorist/psychoanalyst
"an opening of multiplied occurrence happens at once within a space of subjects."
http://nowfroth.blogspot.com/2009/10/eurydice-bracha-ettinger.html
Bracha Ettinger was the artist/theorist/psychoanalyst I mentioned in class, and there is a good section on her work in a book by the art historian/cultural analyst Griselda Pollock, 'Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, space and the archive' (Routeledge, 2007), which is in itself eerily relevant to lots of what we seem to be talking about in class.
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is central to Ettinger's work, she posits a distinction between an 'Orphic' and a 'Matrixial' gaze in the art-viewing experience: as we look back (in time), like Orpheus looked behind him in the myth, we consign Eurydice (the viewed subject) to objectivity, abandoned at the mouth of Hell. Ettinger's series entitled 'Eurydice' (1994-8) uses photographs (sometimes of her mother, for example as a young woman in Lodz in 1937-8), which she photocopies, interrupting the copying process so the photocopic dust does not fix to the paper. Crucial to her theory (the bit I forgot) of ''reconnaissance'', a word which the artist splits up into its constituent parts (re-co-naissance), a 'co-re-birthing' of subjectivity, Ettinger then uses tiny horizontal brush strokes of coloured paint to 'join up' the gaps in the dust, to build a a membrane between the image looking out, and the gaze of the viewer. Pollock says it better: "colour in its vibration creates space, and the space it creates becomes an affective threshold that reaches out to embrace the viewer in a thickening of what lies between viewer and image, now and then/m, that binds seer and seen, world and subject, image and psyche.''
The Matrixial gaze (as an alternative to the Orphic aggression of looking as possessing), is an idea which is linked to Levinas' idea of 'matrixial painting', and to say it with Pollock once again, it is related to a way of looking in which "our unsighted eyes become what she [Ettinger] calls 'erotic aerials' of the psyche.''
Bracha Ettinger 'Matrixial Borderline' Polyptych, 4 Panels With 25 Elements Mixed Media on Paper, Plaxiglas, Metal, 160 x 35 cm, 1990-1991
Bracha Ettinger 'View of Installation, Pompidou Centre, 1996
Bracha Ettinger , overview of solo exhibition at Freud Museum, London 2009
Bracha Ettinger 'View of Installation, Pompidou Centre, 1996
那些記憶中的發生過的事物, 都是曾經存在的, 口中的冰淇淋, 玩過的樂高, 切
