SHAPELESS

by Annie Zhang

It was as if my eye had torn in half. Light took no shape. Formless shadows moved in front of me, yet I saw nothing.

This was curious kind of pain that was foreign to me that I struggled to articulate.

Writer Elain Scarry considers this phenomena the “inexpressibility of pain.” She argues that “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” But pain is also governed by temporality. 19^th century American abolitionists articulated the pains of enslavement explicitly, using it as a metaphor for the evils of slavery. There was a changing epistemology of pain in the 19^th century driven by shifts in religious thought, the invention of anesthesia, and sentimentalism, which presumed that witnessing pain through any of the senses was akin to experiencing it. Abolitionists believed that “experiencing” this pain would elicit sympathy and sway audiences to the anti-slavery cause.

The details were shocking yet strangely alluring. Their appetite for violent slave narratives could not be satiated. Pain became an entertainment- what Foucault called a “spectacle.” Historian Karen Halttunen calls it the “pornography” of pain- pain was “obscenely titillating precisely because the humanitarian sensibility deemed it taboo.”[1] Art too is voyeuristic. Interactive art invites the audience to engage intimately with the artist’s vision. My piece is entitled “Expressibility of Glue” and represents my most painful experience, a corneal ulcer.

If pain cannot be articulated but can be conveyed through the senses, is art the medium with which pain can be expressed? Can it be felt through a painted canvas? Can it be touched? Can it be shared? Here, I offer an open invitation for you to feel my pain.

 

The artist, seated at her desk, explains the epistemologies of pain she is invoking in her artwork followed by an exhibit of the piece and what it means.

References

Halttunen, Karen “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,”

The American Historical Review 100, no. 2. 1995.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1985.

[1] Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995). pg. 304