Across Space and Time: Representing trauma in the art of Dinh Q. Lê

Pazzini-Paracciani, Loredana

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/102229

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Pazzini-Paracciani, Loredana

Abstract(s)

Stemming from critical literature on the power of images of trauma in visual culture - of historical events to current violence - this essay focuses on the representation of trauma in the art of Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Lê. In particular, this paper centers on a close analysis of Pure Land, a new body of work developed by the artist in relation to the physical and mental trauma inflicted on the Vietnamese people in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Departing from issues pertaining to the war, this paper explores notions of time against those of history to understand how art enables the past to live in the present. To do so, the essay’s first line of inquiry revolves around the theme of memory, considered the enabling factor to conjure, in the present, our personal and communal past, as a space that stretches its parameters across time. Viewed in this perspective, within Pure Land’s visual iconography, the past is brought to the present in the form of ‘ritualistic repetition,’ thus morphing into French historian Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, or memory spaces. By virtue of its physical experience of memory and of its placement within history’s unfolding narrative, Pure Land functions, the paper argues, as a site of veneration through an aesthetics of divinity. This is consequently unpacked as a second line of inquiry in order to evaluate how ‘encoded’ elements, such as faith and spirituality, can collapse temporal barriers within larger frameworks of religious symbolism and iconography. Drawing upon the vast literature on the display and reception of religious imagery in temples and museums, the paper considers the power of replication of images in Buddhist art, and how this applies to the sculptural reproductions of Pure Land.To do so,the paper examines both the placement of religious icons at sites of worship, and, simultaneously, the placement of Lê’s works in the contemporary art gallery setting. As the paper ultimately argues, while Pure Land relates to the horror and trauma of past events, it also escapes a fixed temporality through repetition. This in turn raises the question: what role does the spectator/audience’s gaze play in the present and in the now of the gallery space where the art is viewed and experienced? While there has been tremendous contribution in advancing gaze and reception theories in the Western-centric discourse, the paper argues for the need to decentralize the notion of the gaze away from Eurocentric, passive/active conventions. Embracing a decolonial approach to the gaze in order to restore local knowledges, otherwise pushed to the pe- riphery, the paper discusses the gaze in terms of ‘Darshana’ or vision in Sanskrit, to explore how the audience’s involvement partakes two concurrent modes of interaction with the works: that of the viewer of art and of devotee paying respect to the images. This intrinsic relation of the gaze towards religious iconography implicitly transforms the audience/spectators into devotees, whose curious gaze confers to the sculptures on the lotus plinths a quasi-divine status. While memory acts, in Pure Land, upon time by pushing the boundaries of history into the present, spirituality and repetition act upon space by conferring to the gallery the sacred essence of a shrine. Furthermore, while the trauma of the war belongs to the past, the divinity echoed by the sculptures speaks of the present in a circularity of time, which, like religion is atemporal and intrinsic. It is in this way that, in Pure Land, art enables the past to live in the present.