Scandal in the museum: a symptomatic response

Abstract

The controversy surrounding Luke Willis Thompson’s film autoportrait (2017) raised important questions regarding the role art events and museums such as the Turner Prize and Tate Britain play in representing traumatic images. My concern in this article is with how French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s theorisation of the symptom might help us think about representing traumatic images in museums. First, a symptomatic reading of autoportrait is apposite to representing trauma as it sidesteps a binary oscillation between mimetic and anti-mimetic curatorial approaches that have historically structured traumatic representation in the museum. Second, a symptomatic approach is sympathetic to a theorisation of the ongoing effects of racial and postcolonial trauma as it eludes the single event model that has formed a cornerstone in trauma theory since the 1990s.