Contestations of the Archive: Trauma and its Aftermath

I found interesting parallels between Benjamin Buchloh’s article on Aby Warburg’s and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas projects and Charles Merewether’s piece on photography in post-war Japan. Warburg’s Mnenosyne Atlas (named for the Greek goddess of memory) was a frantic attempt to create a historical memory of images from classical antiquity to the 1920’s, presented without commentary and without the traditional divisions into fine art and popular culture, before these markers of western European humanism were destroyed by the Fascists. Richter’s “anomic” archive, (referring to the loss of speech and the inability to remember the names of things), shows the role of photographs in Germany following the Holocaust of WWII. In both cases, Europe’s trauma of the Holocaust is the ground zero of Buchloh’s discussion. In the immediate post-war period, Germany tried to repress the historical trauma of war through pop culture banality. This is exemplified in Richter’s Atlas in which he follows family photos in which the meaning of the image is found in family relations, with panels of images relating to consumer culture – fashion, softcore porn, advertisements - where the identities of the people shown is not important. They have become signifiers of desire. Siegfried Kracauer refers to this avalanche of reproduced photos in the 1920’s as a flood that “sweeps away the dam of memory.” Buchloh asks if “it would be possible to conceive mnemonic images at the moment of the most violent, collectively enacted repression of history, a repression for which photographic media culture had now become, even more than in Kracauer’s time, the primary agent.” He answers the question by locating images of concentration camp victims in the 12th panel of Richter’s Atlas. They are the “punctum,” the prick, that pierces the wall of banal images to reveal the trauma from which the compulsion to repress originated, thus opening up for the viewer access to mnemonic experience.

Merewether uses the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the ground zero for his discussion. He follows a history of post-war photography in Japan beginning with Ken Domon who first created photorealistic documents of the effects of radiation on the bodies of the “hibakusha”, survivors of the A-bomb. Domon says: “It was not that I had forgotten anything. I never knew the reality of Hiroshima in the first place.” Shomei Tomatsu follows 15 years later with photos recounting the aftermath, life among the ruins, in Nagasaki. Echoing Kracauer, Tomatsu wants to “build a dam against the flow of time…and pull back the time during which memory is weakened.” Kawada Kikuji’s photographs of the ruins from Hiroshima juxtaposed with detritus from American consumer culture can’t completely recapture the event that has passed but they can reveal a repression of something that could not be recognized or admitted in the past. In this case, it is the humiliation of Japan’s defeat and the onslaught of American occupation. Beyond this, these Japanese photographers document the space between the event that occurred, the reality of which can never be recreated, and the realization of its meaning, something that can only be accomplished after the fact. Merewether calls this memory as an analysis of forgetting. By 1970, the post-war has become an industrial wasteland. Nakahira Takuma’s photos are unstable, incomplete, in flux. They are no longer the photorealistic documents of Domon and Tomatsu who are trying to reveal truth through examination of the photo. It is a different kind of a document that attests to “both a disappearing past and an uncertain future”- to an archive of the unconscious.

Other artists discussed this week seem to have moved beyond this view of history as trauma that is repressed and must be revealed. They take these cataclysmic events as a given and comment on the archive in a post-apocalyptic world where forgetting is a part of the process of remembrance and where both work in tandem in the archive.