Publications
APS Bulletin • Volume 14, Number 4, 2004
Pain as Path
Mark Sullivan, MD PhD, Department Editor
Subjective Made Object: Pain in Contemporary Art
Colin Fernandes, MD
Performing a Google search for the terms “Pain and Art” elicits about 4,730,000 matches. The second and third “hits” are links to earlier issues of the APS Bulletin that featured the art of two chronic pain patients.
Indeed, pain and art are inextricably linked. To exemplify this, we have to look no further than the Crucifixion, an iconic image as much part of pop culture as it is religion. In Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude, Nigel Spivey (2001) traces the depiction of pain in Western art. In his Prelude, he writes “Art arrives at the sites of agony; art agonizes there. And art keeps us going, in our wounded state.”
In the East, two artists who transformed their pain and illness into powerful pieces are Chen Zhen and Montien Boonma. Zhen was born in Shanghai but moved to Paris, where he lived, worked, and died from autoimmune hemolytic anemia. His works often reference his illness, as well as the disparity between Eastern and Western approaches to medicine. “Between Therapy and Meditation,” is a collection of works in which Zhen transforms medical equipment into everyday household objects. This poignant and disquieting group of works blurs the boundaries between traditional residences for the sick and the well. He highlights the ubiquity of disease, pain and suffering, while calling to our attention the alienating effect of the sick role. Zhen’s sculptures of body organs pierced by surgical instruments raises questions of when treatment becomes more painful than the actual disease itself.
While Zhen was battling with his lethal blood disorder, Thai artist Montien Boonma grappled with the loss of his wife and father-in-law to cancer. He, himself, would eventually succumb to a brain tumor but not before leaving us a beautiful legacy in Temple of the Mind (Boonma, 2003). Like his Chinese peer, Boonma’s art also attempts to both contrast and reconcile Eastern and Western philosophies of illness, pain, suffering, and spirituality. Boonma’s pieces are often large spaces for contemplation, aided by the colors, shapes, and herbal aromas he presents us with. He wrote: “I have built this installation to provide a space for the audience to examine their beliefs, let them be in a ‘sala of mind’, to rest their mind and thoughts. It may also be a space where people can come and ask a question, like whether God existsIt’s a kind of ritual space.”
The therapeutic effects of art are well- known. Grace Kent, the artist featured in the July/August 1997 issue of the APS Bulletin wrote “the process of visually expressing myself has offered unexpected benefits—from the relief of expressing myself to the control over image and therefore, to a certain degree, perception.” In Ideas in Art Therapy, Gulliver and Holton (1990) write: “the art therapy department is often an asylum within an asylumit provides people with space to express inconvenient or unspeakable feelingsthe pictures often get worse as the patient gets better.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum are healthy artists who subject themselves to pain to make a statement. Perhaps no single artist is more notorious than the self-proclaimed Grandmother of Performance Art Marina Abramovic. She has consistently pushed the limits of artist and audience endurance, while challenging the notion that “Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful.”
The online site eyestorm provides us with a compendium of her feats: “In her performances, she has lacerated herself, flagellated herself, frozen her body on blocks of ice, taken mind- and muscle-controlling drugs that have caused her to fall unconscious, and almost died from asphyxiation while lying within a curtain of oxygen- devouring flames.”
Lips of Thomas by Marina Abramovic |
To view one of Abramovic’s works is to be at once entranced and repelled. You cannot bear to watch, but cannot bring yourself to turn away. You cannot comfort yourself in the fact that this is merely the verisimilitude of acting. Because the trauma and blood are real.
Why do artists like Abramovic subject themselves to such acts of masochism? Some might argue that it is mere sensationalism. In an age of multitasking and image overload, perhaps this is the only way to get our attention. Her work certainly has both political and feminist undertones. Symbolism plays a crucial role, as in the case of the star, which is associated with communism.
“I’m interested in art that disturbs and that pushes the moment of danger; then, the public watching has to be here and now. Let the danger focus you; this is the whole idea—to put you in the focus of now,” she is quoted as saying.
And so Abramovic engages the audience in a powerful way, making them active participants. Some of her performances have ended only when a member of the audience intervened. Kathy O’ Dell (1998) alluded to this idea in her book Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art and the 1970’s: “We have to decide how far we want to stay in our role as viewer or even as voyeurs. There is always the kind of relation between audience and the performer that is full of changing between the role of a passive viewer or someone who gets involved in the action in any way.”
Duchamp believed that art was a “device with which to break mental and emotional habits.” Perhaps, the work of artists like Abramovic is unsettling because it brings us face-to-face with our own fears of pain and suffering. Perhaps, we fear that we too might experience pain similar to the artist’s.
In the movie Wit, Emma Thompson plays a woman coping with a terminal malignancy. There is a moving scene in which she tries—unsuccessfully—to find words to describe the pain she is feeling. As language escapes her, she reflects, “it signifies being alive.”
“[T]he capacity to experience physical pain is as primal a fact about the human being as is the capacity to hear, to touch, to desire, to fear, to hunger” writes Elaine Scarry (1985) in her difficult book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. But herein lies the paradox: while pain is an expected part of human living, it brings us face-to-face with our physicality and decay. While confirming that we are alive, it also reminds us of our human mortality.
Marc Quinn, a member of Young British Artists, a collective of conceptual artists based in the United Kingdom, has subjected himself to pain to allude to his mortality. Over a period of 5 months in 1991, Quinn underwent serial phlebotomy. The collected nine pints of his blood were later frozen in a cast of the artist’s head to produce Self 1991. Exhibited in a refrigeration unit, this self-portrait gained sensational notoriety. The temperature-dependent tenuousness of the sculpture was the ultimate comment on the ephemeral nature of our bodies.
As practitioners of pain medicine, patients look to us to alleviate their pain and suffering. We face the unique challenge of treating a state that is purely subjective with no objective means of measurement. In our efforts to make sense of this nebulous entity, we ask patients to ascribe a numerical rating to their symptoms or use “descriptors” to qualify their pain. We are all too familiar with the patient who “just cannot describe it.”
Scarry adds: “Physical pain is not only resistant to language but also actively destroys language, deconstructing it into the pre-language of cries and groans.”
Perhaps it is precisely because of this “shattering of language” that the visual arts are an important means of representing pain. To witness this, one need only to visit the online gallery of the Chronic Pain Visual Arts Project (www.PainExhibit.com). Founded in 2001 by Mark R. Collen—himself a pain patient—the Web site seeks to “educate healthcare providers and the public about chronic pain through the poignancy of art; and to give voice to the many who suffer in abject silence.”
Further, as practitioners of pain medicine, we need to assess our own biases and fears concerning pain, suffering, and death. The works of artists like Boonma and Quinn serve as a catalyst, provoking reflection. We would do well to ponder them so as to enter the clinical arena better equipped to treat the complex phenomenon that is chronic pain.
References
Boonma, M. (2003). Temple of the mind. New York: Asia Society in association with Asia Ink, London.
Gulliver, P., & Holton, R. (1996). In Ideas in art therapy (D. Waller and A. Gilroy, Eds.). London: British Association of Art Therapists.
O’Dell, K. (1998). Contract with the skin: Masochism, performance art and the 1970’s. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Quinn, M. (1998). Incarnate. London: Booth-Clibborn Editions.
Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.
Spivey, N. (2001). Enduring creation: Art, pain, and fortitude. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Colin Fernandes, MD, is Director, Pain Service, VA Northern California Health Care System–Martinez. He can be contacted at colin.fernandes@med.va.gov.