Reading Response #3

In this paper, Trauma, bodies, and performance art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing, the question of how to witness the suffering of another person due to a traumatic experience. Oliver starts out her paper by referencing Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who can reflect on his experience of how the Nazis viewed him as an object, and watched his suffering with no emotion whatsoever. The article then goes on to talk about how we can imagine one suffering, specifically a traumatized body, in the most ethical way. We see so much of this in art, yet we never really think about the background of where this suffering stemmed from. Oliver states that theorists, "Would find it useful to consider some of the theoretical insights about experience, embodiment and spectatorship developed in the field of performance art" (Oliver 120). She explains that this way of seeing is "ethical" because it forces us to take some response-ability towards the body being viewed. Performance art is a different way of seeing the atrocities portrayed in the piece in three core ways: reinterpreting the notion of ‘ethical spectatorship, rejecting the distinction between active artist and passive spectator that forces us as viewers to acknowledge our own role in the performance of representation, and challenging us to view the traumatized body in new terms, opposing our preconceptions of the body as object, alien, other and asserting the significance of the corporeal as a site of resistance and expression in the face of trauma. Oliver admits that performance art is not a way to fix the trauma, but rather illustrate it in a different way that may directly address the problems that cause trauma, rather than just show the end result of the trauma. She then talks about how psychologists have connected this to "sense memory" which can be defined as "a mode of remembering that registers ‘the physical imprint’ of trauma rather than its facts." We relate this to our moral emotions and empathy, which is why Oliver thinks this way of seeing through performance art is more ethical.