The Matrixial Borderspace (Volume 28) (Theory Out Of Bounds)

Ettinger is an important feminist psychoanalytic critic. This work is an interesting introduction to her work, her art, and contemporary feminist critical thought.

I had looked forward to viewing the several paintings mentioned but there are only extremely poor b/w apparently xeroxed reproductions in small size revealing so little that the contents of the original paintings seems hidden and completely inaccessible within the book. The writing seems over intellectualized and tedious too. Why not write in a language that is accessible to a wider audience? If there are paintings, why not show them in a way they can be viewed? If the writing and paintings are to be inaccessible, why bother?

Giorgio Agamben speaks of what remains after Auschwitz is ‘an impersonal zone beyond good or evil Auschwitz cannot be explained intellectually: He who would like to understand it has to seek it and experience it’ (Agamben 85). Artist Bracha Ettinger’s incorporation of photographs and painting openly questions the role of visual memory. Her juxtaposition between two media reveals that the traumatic past keeps coming back, permeating both collective and personal historical consciousness. For her Painting is a language, silent, unspoken that as insight speaks a dialogue between images, between people and across time where it seeks to heal the cultural rifts of Europe’s Historic other. Screened on the surface in infra thin oil paint in series of paintings, the initial image is pure fantasy in which the too full of photographic reality is progressively emptied out of all visibility.The ultimate finish is a feeling. It is a dynamic between the two surfaces, and between the images. From grain to grain, so that in every found image from the Lodz Ghetto that she tore early from the toner of the photocopier, means that the over writing that she wrote of the Hebrew and the meaning of French, overlaps and echoes to fade ,before finding a final understanding. To paint from this space is to cross through major trauma, both collective and personal in which art is on the order of survival.