Resumen de Traumatic subjectivity and the continuum of history: Hermann Nitsch's "Orgies Mysteries Theater"
Trauma studies since the 1990s have been dominated by the assertion of trauma as inherently unknowable and thus unrepresentable, while art-historical studies have predominantly focused on interpreting traumatic content through artistic biography and iconography (or the connections between them). This essay reorients and expands these approaches. By drawing upon a substantial body of current clinical studies, it underscores the visuality of trauma's symptomology and posits that the distinctive characteristics of traumatic subjectivity can be productively utilized as a means to identify and to analyze art informed by trauma. This groundwork is set in dialogue with the six-day performance of Hermann Nitsch's "Orgies Mysteries Theater" 1998 in order to explore what traumatic subjectivity looks like, and, by extension, to assess the contributions of artworks to our understanding of trauma and visuality more broadly.
