The Ordinariness of Trauma: Reconstructing Intertextuality as an Aesthetics of Trauma

Abstract

In 2012, the Whitney Museum of American Art displayed an exhibition by Canadian artist Mischa Grey under the sober title Grey – A Retrospective. Pictures of the series Vietnamization from 1998 were among the pieces of art on display. The catalogue describes this creative phase of the artist with particular detail, and one sentence of the phraseology used there takes us to the core topic of this anthology: the discursive relation between image, trauma, and literature.1 It reads as follows: “By drawing heavily on image material from the Vietnam War era and recirculating it, Grey has created an art series that symbolizes the loss of contact with the self.”2 Vietnam played the lead role in the fight for medical recognition of traumatic suffering: as is commonly known, the American Psychiatric Association decided to react to the mass traumatization of the Vietnam veterans by adding Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to their manual of mental disorders in 1980 (Mülder-Bach 2000: 8).3 Considering that 18 years later, Grey compiled a series of images under the title Vietnamization, all of which depict “the loss of contact with the self,” this phrasing presents a suitable description for the paradoxical situation of the traumatized person: the sufferer loses contact with his present life because the past – in the form of mental images within the traumatized memory – forces its way between the self and the present. The point of Grey’s art is that she de-