Pain is not only the result of physical reflexes and a biochemical process, but also an archetype of subjectivity, felt only within individuals' indescribable solitude and distress. As Elaine Scarry observes, physical pain does not simply make language utterly inadequate, but resists and destroys language, causing a reversion to primal cries and groans. Meeting the challenge of inexpressibility, artists have endeavored to give visual forms to this bodily voice (for example, to the sufferings of Laocoon and Christ), describing the state, process, and aftermath of the body in crisis. Visual representations thus generate interpretations of physical, psychological, social and cultural meanings of pain.

Scenes of Pain: Barbara Kruger's Depictions of the Social Body

Tseng, Shao-Chien
ˇ]Assistant Professor, Division of General Education and Core Curriculum, Tamkang University, Taiwanˇ^

Words and pictures are combined to create scenes of pain in the work of Barbara Kruger from the 1970s to 1990s, including her photomontages and multimedia installations that have been shown in art institutions, outdoor public space, books, magazines, and commodities. The importance of this leitmotif has largely been ignored by art historians. The pictures of bodies she appropriates from news media, advertisements, and medical publications are detached from their original functions and contexts, producing effects of fragmentation, ambiguity, and mystery. In mostly grainy and high-contrast black-and-white photography, Kruger's insertion of contradictory words enables the cropped, wounded, and silent bodies to speak and communicate. The episodes of pain are like staged evidences of illness, violence, and violation, and the bodily injuries, expressions and gestures invite viewers to search for clues and to construct scenarios. They raise issues of sexual politics and social relations rather than provide aesthetic contemplation or lurid spectacles. As Kruger states, her "pictures and words visually record the collision between our bodies and the days and nights which construct and contain them."

This paper first discusses the objectified body and male medical authority in Kruger's early series Hospital. It then focuses on pain in relation to media culture, stereotype, and death in her photomontage works of the 1980s. The final part of the paper analyzes the pain experienced in desire and in childbirth as shown in her installations and outdoor billboards of the early 1990s. Pain in Kruger's oeuvre is both a rich metaphor and an urgent signal of the disorders of the social body such as domestic violence and AIDS. Considering relevant artistic, cultural, and medical discourses, the paper discusses the theme of pain as a strategy to elicit empathy within a gradual culture-wide anesthesia.