Pain in Art

When I read the four quotes, I didn’t really know what to say. I needed to go over the article again to get the full understanding. The article gives many examples which made it easier to find what the quotes mean. I also feel like the quotes build on each other.

1)  “The only way people can really describe pain is to objectify it.”

Boxer is listing the words people often use to describe their pain and says that all the words she listed were of things and actions that cause pain. From that moment my mind was blown, I never thought of it that way or even realized it. When I have headaches I usually say it feels like pressure in my head but it’s not really pressure, there is nothing squishing, pushing or causing tension in my head. What I am really doing is describing and relating my pain to something I think would feel similar.

2)  “When people forge tools or build things, they are often trying to alleviate discomfort. But first they must define the discomfort”

This is like saying anything that is created even beyond art is made to relieve us of any pain. She uses an example of a chair, someone made a chair to rest their tired and heavy body. This is an extension of the first quote, to define discomfort we objectify it. It’s like Boxer is saying first we figure out what’s wrong or what is bothering us then we make something to dull our suffering.

3)  “the sculpture [of Laocoön] didn’t change, but the idea of pain and justice did”

This quote I understand what it is trying to get at but I don’t agree. I’m sure people in Greece saw that Laocoön and his sons were in pain but they knew of his story and no longer felt remorse. No one would pity the man who disrespected their god. But now people see Laocoön and pity him and feel his pain for a few reasons, one being that people do not have the same beliefs, and two they might not even know of this story. Some people just like to look at art and see what they want to see and not what it is meant to be.

4)  “she suggests (Scarry) every impulse to make things—whether a painting, a chair, a poem, a vaccine or a building—is an attempt to ease the burden of sentience by shifting some of it onto the object.”

This quote was extremely funny to me because how is a painting of a chair supposed to make me feel anything. And then, I saw the painting and how used and beaten up this poor chair was. I start imagining what it would be like to be a chair, just constantly being sat on by strangers. Not a great way to spend the rest of your life, wasting away while people only use you for their own benefit. But then again maybe chairs are happy, that is their main purpose. (This started getting weird.)

The process of creation is natural. You want to shelter yourself from harsh winds and snow so you make yourself a shelter or a little home. That old spring mattress is too rough and doesn’t give you enough back support so you go out and make a tempurpedic bed, etc. And sometimes it doesn’t have to be natural, it could be an accident or with the hopes to relieve someone else’s suffering who you may never even see.