Observing the trauma of images: aftermath in the practice of collage

Freud describes as traumatic any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. This paper will explore the trauma of images as means to reframe the practice of collaging the photographic image. Vilém Flusser identifies the image as 'a significant surface'; a map of elements, codes and dialogues. The practice of collage is an unmaking of the image leaving it within a state of traumatised memory. Writer and Philosopher Maurice Blanchot wrote 'an image must progress through a necessary series of deaths'. If as theorist WTJ Mitchell asserts 'Images are animated beings with desires, appetites. Demands and drives of their own', collaging an image acts as a form of trauma. The artist as iconoclast disassembles the body and memory of the image leaving a ruin in aftermath. Collages emergence during a century of conflict mirrors the forced dismembering of bodies, architecture and territories. Howard Cargill argues that the destruction of a work of art; its passing out of existence, is closer to its creation. As Freud asserts ‘accumulation puts an end to the impression of chance’. The breaking or editing of an image acknowledges the fact that memory; supposedly fixed by an image, can by the intervention and imposition of collage be a metaphor for traumatic experiences encountered by the body. Paul Virilio calls for the establishment of a Museum of Accident. The meaning inherent in accidents is in their highlighting delusions of progress and optimism. Historian Robert Harbison, reflecting on the Balkan crisis, stated 'everything is accident in a will less aftermath'. Collage leaves the image within an aftermath traumatised and bound to fractured memory