Body as Crisis. Representation of Pain in Visual Arts

Abstract

Pain is a highly problematic concept for a scholarly dissertation. It is thought to shatter consciousness and identity; it is often claimed that intense pain cannot be processed and that it escapes language. Pain has become a sort of acquired incapacity to communicate across the border between two worlds - the painless one and the one of pain. My argument, however, is that the making (as opposed to unmaking) aspect of pain can serve as one of the elements of subjectivity. I see the presence of pain as a dynamically shaping, rather than a passive, condition. People in pain live multiple, layered identities played out at crossroads of social, historical and political factors. Although disability and pain make it hard to secure, those identities are reproduced and reassured in the artworks I analyze. For my dissertation, art and gender constitute two large intersecting areas of cultural research. Establishing a link between embodied gender and representational strategies is crucial to my reading of women's art on pain. Art and literature offer an alternative to medical terminology for describing one's experience with illness. My intention is not only to show how pervasive of a presence pain is in artistic discourse, but also to point out the ways in which pain is being made visible here. In addressing visual culture, my methodological assumption is that we can derive certain forms of knowledge on pain from visual images. As pain does not produce a homogenous group of bodies who are together in their pain, all of my three cases are meant to reveal the particularity of painful experience and to fight against universalization, and therefore a commodification, of suffering. The art of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, American photographer Cindy Sherman and Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow propose the whole complexity of embodied difference. By examining sculptures, paintings and photographs and by discussing critics and art historians' commentaries on them, I investigate how reading the images of pain, particularly connected to the female body, affects contemporary self-understanding. I look at the case of pain resulting from material, specified tissue damage, at the less “straightforward” pain that is a symptom of mental condition and the most complex pain resulting from traumatic, collective past experiences, combined with an unstoppable terminal illness. Chapter One (Kahlo) focuses mostly on the representational techniques used to convey the experience of pain and the mapping of the subject that suffers in relation to its positioning in the society. Chapter Two (Sherman) engages in the problem of the general perception of pain as a result of physical tissue damage and the challenging of that perception by feminist theory. Chapter Three (Szapocznikow) addresses the concept of situating pain in time and space: the memory of pain, its anticipation, its recalling and the possibility of sharing pain across the bodies. The conclusion of the work on pain inevitably poses the question of ethical consequences of viewing the subject in pain. The crisis in the title of this work is not only about the crisis of the body brought about by pain, but also the crisis of representation, language and perception. Instead of basing this work on the notion of stable; female identity, I introduce crisis as a chance for discontinuity and non-fixity of voice of the female subject.