Published: 2020-12-30

Diverting Orpheus’s Gaze. (Anti-)archival Work of Bracha L. Ettinger

Anna Kisiel
Section: studies and essays
https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.8044

(Article in Polish)

Abstract

Bracha L. Ettinger’s artistic series, Eurydice, is grounded upon a historical photograph from the liquidation of the Mizoch ghetto on 14 October 1942, depicting naked women and children waiting to be executed. The artist treats this picture as a basis of her artworks and covers it with layers of paint. It is, however, difficult to identify this art as archival. By means of her artistic procedures, Ettinger endeavours to free her paintings from the bounds of representation; what she does is – as I claim – (anti-)archival work. This article aims at studying the relation between Ettinger’s oeuvre and the photographic archive. First, I try to point out the insufficiency of the archive and to identify Ettingerian attempts to work it through. Second, I discuss the notion of the gaze in the matrixial psychoanalysis. Just as the look of Orpheus sends Eurydice back to the Underworld, the spectator’s gaze may kill the women from Mizoch again; this is the impasse Ettinger strives to break.

Citation rules

Kisiel, A. (2020). Diverting Orpheus’s Gaze. (Anti-)archival Work of Bracha L. Ettinger: (Article in Polish). Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture, 2(41), 97–110. https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.8044

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No. 41 (2020)
Published: 2021-02-06


ISSN: 1508-6305
eISSN: 2544-3186
Ikona DOI 10.31261/errgo

Publisher
University of Silesia Press | Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego i Wydawnictwo Naukowe "Śląsk"

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