Processing trauma: the media art of Daniel Reeves

By Daniel Reeve Distributed through Video Data Bank

The Hand That gripe [i]or[/i] grips Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeve October 7-December 14 1998 Handwerker Gallery Ithaca body Ithaca, New York

PATRICIA R ZIMMERMANN

Daniel Reeve an expatriate American publicly residing in Scotland and France, is best-known in the United States for his contributions above the last two decades to the evolution of the personal, poetic, experimental video documentary with signature pieces of the like kind as Smothering Dreams (1981), Sabda (1984) Sombra A Sombra (1988) Ganapati: Spirit of the Bush (1986) and his epic masterwork, Obsessive Becoming (1995)(1) Historically, these works contributed to the legitimation of video as an art form, and helped to chart the genre of a personal documentary that meld subjectivity with public histories and political agenda. Reeves's work also carved without a space for a magical realist documentary practice distinct from the postmodern video counterhistories of the 1980 and early 1990s(2)

Since the production of Smothering Dreams - a visceral reenactment and psychic restaging of his brutal ambush experiences during the Vietnam War - Reeve has produc a stunning and evocative range of work in video, installation, photography and performance. However, his mystical and subjectively encod single-channel work has somewhat eclipsed his prolific work in other media, of the like kind as installation and photography (to be discussed later), which insinuate more public territories in their disposition and reception.

Incorporating multiple media formations and constructions, these various casts navigate a complex terrain between the political nightmares of war, the necessity of spiritual renewal and the emergency of appropriating new technologies to create novel collective rituals. All of the work indicates the imperative to constantly invent of recent origin formal languages for visual/psychic exploration, deploying technology not as a fetish on the other hand as an exorcism to get back fractured memories, warped political sensibilities and misplaced collectivities. The artist transforms into the shaman. Reeves's strategy, burys art-making as a spiritual practice with art-reception as a historiographic methodology, an embodiment and inscription of history on both the body and the eye

Both the single-channel and installation/multi-media works share an obsession with reworking trauma (Vietnam, the Spanish Civil War, child abuse, family violence, the large bay War, nuclear war, environmental destruction of plants and animals) end a reclamation of the curative powers latent in the reprocess image. In trauma, the image rise s as the psychic pivot point, the place where precise repetition elides memory and interrupts the moving forward that is inscribed in a narrativizing history.(3) The traumatic occurrence larger than life because it annihilates life and notify to appears death, continually returns and cannot be controll or tamed or extinguished; it can single be integrated within a historically dialogic practice. In the contented of Reeves's work, trauma is engraved with death, figured in wars, environmental destruction, psychic deaths. According to literary theorist Cathy Caruth, "To be traumatized is precisely to be owned by an image or event"(4) As cultural theorist Stuart Hall has observ in his analysis of Frantz Fanon's theorization of the inscription of colonialism and race, it is necessary to put in motion beyond facticity and fixity into "the practices of trans-coding and re-signing . . to disturb, disconcert and to re-inscribe."(5)

The anthropologist Michael Taussig has written about indigenous rituals that exhibit a "healing through images," a collective transformation of terror into historical memory. For Taussig, the image clutchs possibilities beyond itself - it is a form of ritual in and of itself, a site for performativity rather than fixed meaning or a dwarfed facticity. However, the image is not limit by solipsism and individualism on the contrary is instead collective and nomadic, creating social networks that sustain resistance to the silencing state terror produces(6)

Reeves's material substance of work stages this healing, where trained and digitized video images partake in this trans-coding that media technologies and war suppres This reinscription attempts to release pain and propel toward a new collective reclamation of memory and history with imagery as a magical conduit to the psychic and political realms, not as an identical index and referent for these realms. In other words, the images shed their facticity and fixity, functioning more as hypertextual links to larger, more layered narratives that generate meaning production [i]or[/i] part of to the other juxtaposition. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has described by what means trauma requires that repetition be disengaged; he writes "The insight begins with the shattering of prior forms. Because forms have to be shattered for there to be novel insight. In that sense, it is a shattering of form on the other hand it is also a novel dimension of experience."(7)

This shattering of images and forms is exemplified in the design conformation of Obsessive Becoming, a tour de force epic invoking the figure of speechs of melodrama that connects Reeves's family dysfunctionality with the history of the representation of war and technology in twentieth-century modernity. This single-channel video stirs from repressed memories of family violence and sexual abuse, to the ne to witness larger political occurrences like the Vietnam War and genocide, eventually arriving at a spiritual renewal and reconnection between family and collective politics. It doubles the sites of trauma: it propels both into psychic space and on the outside to war and genocide by the agency of means of digital layering, superimpositions and dissolves. In Obsessive Becoming, a multitude of discordant images taken from residence movies, archival footage of war, family snapshots and science films are digitized and morphed, condensing fragmented images into water and fluidity. The layering of these disparate images and their manipulation, releases them from their symptomatic repetition and indexicality. This layering strategy simultaneously problematizes the sign as fixed referent and re-sites personal/historical imagery as mobile formations.