Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture

Maria Pia Di Bella, James Elkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136213021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

The presentation of bodies in pain has been a major concern in Western art since the time of the Greeks. The Christian tradition is closely entwined with such themes, from the central images of the Passion to the representations of bloody martyrdoms. The remnants of this tradition are evident in contemporary images from Abu Ghraib. In the last forty years, the body in pain has also emerged as a recurring theme in performance art.

Recently, authors such as Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, and Giorgio Agamben have written about these themes. The scholars in this volume add to the discussion, analyzing representations of pain in art and the media. Their essays are firmly anchored on consideration of the images, not on whatever actual pain the subjects suffered. At issue is representation, before and often apart from events in the world.

Part One concerns practices in which the appearance of pain is understood as expressive. Topics discussed include the strange dynamics of faked pain and real pain, contemporary performance art, international photojournalism, surrealism, and Renaissance and Baroque art. Part Two concerns representations that cannot be readily assigned to that genealogy: the Chinese form of execution known as lingchi (popularly the "death of a thousand cuts"), whippings in the Belgian Congo, American lynching photographs, Boer War concentration camp photographs, and recent American capital punishment. These examples do not comprise a single alternate genealogy, but are united by the absence of an intention to represent pain. The book concludes with a roundtable discussion, where the authors discuss the ethical implications of viewing such images.

Part I
Expressive Pain

Introduction to Part I

James Elkins

We have arranged this book so that each of us introduces half of it, and we each have an essay in the part we introduce. My own essay, on the Chinese “death of a thousand cuts,” is in Part I; and Maria Pia Di Bella’s essay on American prison executions concludes Part II. The choices aren’t arbitrary. We are proposing that representations of pain can be divided, provisionally but very suggestively, into two groups: those in which pain was assigned an expressive value, and those in which it was not. We think that there is a deep difference—a gulf that also marks a difference between cultures and histories—between representations in which pain is intended to be expressive, and those in which pain is not at stake. (Many other things can then be at stake: criminal justice, sexuality, politics, identity, history. …) That, at least, is what we hope this book’s organization makes arguable. My essay on images of Chinese execution is in Part I because those images are perhaps the most painful of all—and yet it can be definitively shown that pain was not the point for the Chinese executioners. Pain was very much the point for the French photographers and collectors who made and disseminated the images, and so the Chinese lingchi, as it is known, is a pivotal example, a hinge between the two understandings of represented pain we want to articulate here.

Several common issues can be seen to drive the essays in Part I. They can be provisionally arranged into four interconnected areas of interest:

1. The epistemology of represented pain. Elaine Scarry’s Body in Pain is a seminal work in this field, even though it is not specifically concerned with visual representation. It theorizes the “projection”—the representation—of pain as the result of a process of diminution, translation, and distortion. “A particular dimension of sentience,” she writes,
   will, by being projected, undergo an alteration in degree: the power of vision is amplified when supplemented by microscope and telescope, as the problem of hunger is diminished and regulated through the strategies of artifice. But the inclusive phenomenon of projection entails not simply an alteration in degree but a much more extraordinary form of revision in which the original given is utterly eliminated and replaced by something wholly other than itself. What is wholly absent in the interior (the missing object in the pure sentient condition of utter objectlessness) is made present (through objectification), as conversely, what is wholly present in that interior state (pain) is (when projection is successful) now made absent.¹
   Scarry’s account has been widely cited in visual art, visual studies, and art theory, for at least three reasons: she supplements the bloodlessness of Merleau-Ponty’s account with a more immediate, visceral sense of the inhabited body; she provides a more politically-engaged account of pain than the conceptual models that had been proposed a few years earlier by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson; and she is interested in what Margaret Di Giulio calls “modes of creativity that seek to express what language resists.”² Scarry’s is a pessimistic epistemology in that it entails failures and inequalities of pain and its representation, but it is also politically hopeful in its attention to the necessity of finding adequate or at least comprehensible representation for torture, what she calls “concussive” pain, and, in general, inward states that begin in “utter objectlessness.” Several of the contributors to Part I of this book work within the frame of this anti-abstract, politically inflected, artistically-inclined sense of represented pain.
   All this may sound somewhat inappropriately intellectualized. Many of these images have a visceral punch, and it is that, rather than their political content or their projection of inner experience, that has delayed the publication of this book. Maria Pia Di Bella and I had this book ready for editing within a year and a half of the Cork conference, but it took three more years, from early 2007 to 2010, to find a publisher. The editors we approached had several reasons for passing on this material, but there was often a sense of unease at the sheer power of the images, and by extension, a doubt about our ability to constrain wild responses by critical discourse. In high resolution, on a large screen, these images can be very unpleasant, very difficult just to see, let alone to think about. If you look at some of these images for a few minutes at a time, you may even feel something physical—you may feel a bit queasy, or even hot. This may sound like an exaggeration, but I think it would be strange if you didn’t feel something over the course of reading this book, even with the reduced size and value range of these pictures. And this visceral reaction is also a question of epistemology. I wrote about strong, visceral reactions in a book called Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, and one of the unresolved questions of that book was the epistemology of such reactions.³ Empathy and mimesis are among the few available theories, but they do not do justice to the fact that such reactions are not irreducibly subjective or private: strong reactions to strong images are often social facts, and can be understood only in terms of communities of viewers and producers. The contributors to this book are united in their concern with the social forms of seeing, and therefore with the problematic transmission of expressive pain from image to viewer.
2. The aesthetics of represented pain. In the 2001 Toronto conference “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Chinese Torture” (see the Preface for the relation between that conference and the one that gave rise to this book) the concept of aesthetics was suspended. We made no headway in understanding what it could mean; it was more a provocation than an analytic term. Let me suggest two meanings that might emerge from a consideration of aesthetics and represented pain.
   During the 2005 Cork conference, even the scholars and critics giving papers often had difficulty keeping their attention fixed on the representations. We were trying to understand particular histories of the production and reception of visual images, but we often ended up talking about the people who were represented in the images: their names, the photographers’ names, the circumstances of the torture or execution they depicted. We were aware of this slide from image to subject, from signifier to signified, from medium to historical event, but we were powerless to prevent it. Indeed, we justified the inconstancy of our attention by appealing to the seriousness of the crimes and violence that are depicted in the images. Images of ethical and political significance need to be attended to as parts of the historical record, perhaps even to the exclusion of any other properties they might possess. (That argument has been raised in different contexts by Claude Lanzmann against Georges Didi-Huberman, and Giorgio Agamben against studies of Chinese torture.⁴) Aesthetics, in this context, could be the name for attention paid to the formal properties of images, when that attention is paid specifically at the expense of whatever appears as ethically or politically significant. Aesthetics would then be under suspicion wherever it occurs. Its most virulent form might be the silencing of actual executions, war crimes, or torture, in the name of misplaced visual pleasure. That possibility is central to a disagreement about the interpretation, dissemination, and scholarly use of photographs of the lingchi, which marked the 2005 conference. Originally, this book was to have more contributions on the subject of lingchi, but some of the researchers disagreed with the use of those photographs for anything other than political and fact-based investigations. That dispute left echoes in Chapter 6 and the Roundtable, where readers will find references to authors who decided to publish their results separately. Their claim was, in effect, that any exploration of non-positivist meanings, whether they are aesthetic in the sense I propose here, or more broadly expressive, is itself unethical and risks a repetition of the imperialist, colonialist, and Orientalizing uses that the images first served. There are two counter-arguments available to that position: first, it can be urged that the images already have a long history as objects of aesthetic use, including the original French colonial appropriations and the surrealist heritage, and that history itself is a legitimate object of inquiry; and second, it could be argued that the objection to aesthetic meaning replays an old trope in the field of aesthetics itself, which separates it from politics—and that the division has always been artificially imposed by aesthetics itself.
   Aesthetics in this first sense it marked by what it is not—it is not, in the critics’ view, an ethically justifiable practice. Aesthetics can also come into play as a marker for part of what we mean by expression. When it is interesting to name the kind of expressive power these images have, the concept of aesthetics can stand for whatever cannot be assigned to iconographic, compositional, technical, historical, legal, or other discursive sources of meaning. This second use of aesthetics is partly compatible with the Kantian sense, in which aesthetic judgment is not made “under concepts”—it is non-conceptual and immune to articulation in language. The Kantian formulation is limited to beauty, and these images elicit a much greater range of non-conceptual responses. There is an ongoing discussion in aesthetics about the status of other aesthetic categories (the ugly, the tawdry, the petty …), and the violent but unnameable expressive effects of some of these images would be part of that debate. The contributors to Part I of this book do not resolve this as an aesthetic question, but their contributions are all predicated on the existence of non-verbal, non-conceptual responses other than beauty.⁵ The subject of aesthetics is especially complicated in regard to representations of pain because this second sense of aesthetics—which is an extension of the original Kantian formulation—is entangled with the larger first sense of aesthetics—in which aesthetics is whatever occupies our attention outside of the social, historical, and political facts of the images.
3. The psychology of represented pain. When traffic slows around an accident, when news programs feature grisly images and video, the unpleasant psychology of represented pain becomes itself an object of interest. We are distracted by traffic accidents, and aware of our distraction: amusement or guilt at gaping mixes with the surprise or horror of the experience to produce an experience that can be exceptionally difficult to control or articulate. At the end of the Toronto conference (2001), Tim Brook invited a plenary speaker from Amnesty International. The speaker had been in Toronto, at a separate meeting, in which he and his colleagues had been studying videos of stoning in Afghanistan. He congratulated us, sarcastically, for our ability to withstand so many days of horrific images. He and his colleagues, he said, had been compelled to take breaks every twenty minutes, but somehow we hadn’t. (I mention this at the end of the Roundtable transcribed in this book.) The pleasure of gaping at traffic accidents, and the guilt at that pleasure, are a toxic mixture: and proof of the toxicity is the fact that both reactions are routinely mentioned in the media, without being analyzed or critiqued, as if it were adequate just to mention that pleasure and guilt comprise our reaction.
   There is some literature on this phenomenon; some essays in this book approach that material, especially Valentin Groebner’s essay in Part II. But there is also a literature on the psychoanalysis of represented pain, especially in relation to trauma, which can be an interesting way to make progress in thinking about the often obdurate psychology of viewing pain. One of the central authors in that regard is Cathy Caruth, whose Unclaimed Experience is cited in visual theory and art history.⁶ Caruth’s account stresses how trauma cannot be located in any “single place or time,” because it is the result of what Di Giulio calls “a double wounding, a wounding in the initial experience and a second wounding as a result of an experience that finds no resolution within the victim’s mental schema.”⁷ This can lead to an attempt on the patient’s part to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Part I Expressive Pain
• Part II Other Traditions
• Roundtable
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index