Bringing the Pain

I've been meaning to thank my friend, Baseera for recommending Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others to me. She thought it was relevant to some of my current work and she hit the nail on the head. 

For background, one thing I often bring up when asked about depictions of violence in my work is the contemporary status of violence in all things media. More and more often, images of extreme violence are used not only for dramatic, but even comedic effect (think Tarantino or Shaun of the Dead). The rationale is fairly obvious: in a cultural economy built on spectacle, the bigger/brasher the spectacle the better chance it will be noticed and therefore profitable. When I use violence it's in a way that is meant to be read as both an ironic reference and historically indebted. Ironic, because it exists in a cartoon environment historically inhospitable to blood and guts, but that is increasingly populated by the gruesome (think Itchy and Scratchy or Frank Miller). When I say "historically indebted," I'll give you a passage from the essay itself in which Sontag is talking about Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas (but which is equally appropriate to, say, one of Seth Alverson's pieces):

In each instance, the gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look. Those with the stomach to look are playing a role authorized by many glorious depictions of suffering. Torment, a cannonical subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something being watched (or ignored) by other people. The implication is: no, it cannot be stopped-and the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscores this.

-Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 42

So, our fascination with the spectacle of violence is nothing new. It has existed throughout our Western cultural history. We enjoy watching people get hacked up, blown up, mutilated and eviscerated – either because it informs us about the nature of suffering and it's seeming inevitability, or entertains us because we've been conditioned by economic motives to enjoy the spectacle. But what about our moral responsibility in the face of representations of horror? Sontag addresses that question in regards to photography, but I think it's applicable to other visual mediums:

  It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract reality of photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision–the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. But this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.

  There's nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: 'Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.'

-Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 118

Sontag's ultimate point being, in a culture inured to the aestheticization of violent acts, perhaps the better representation of violence is the one that makes you empathize with the suffering, or, at the very least, makes you think about what it means to endure violence. I worry about this every time I choose to depict violence in my work, and I think it's an essential consideration. I can't help but wonder if, when hacking someone's arm off or spilling someone's guts, a director like Tarantino does the same.

Seth Alverson, Word has it that everything has been permitted for quite some time now. Oil on canvas,  90" x 144" 2007. (Image courtesy of Seth Alverson)