Counter-scripting the body in pain : an artistic interrogation into pain as practice, site and subversive force

Willenfelt, Johanna and Wilson, Mark and Grimwood, Tom (2020) Counter-scripting the body in pain : an artistic interrogation into pain as practice, site and subversive force. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

Counter-scripting the body in pain, an artistic interrogation into pain as practice, site and subversive force conceptualises and enacts forms of resistance to the human tendency to negate pain, drawing on methods and sensibilities specific to artistic knowledge and practice. Through a series of text-based artworks, this project offers alternative modes for probing, perceiving, and understanding chronic pain, challenging dominant socio-cultural attitudes that regard pain as something to avoid or resist. The tripartite series: 'May and the Potentiality of Pain' (2014-2015); 'It's Always Three O'clock in the Morning' (2016); and 'Gibraltar, A Walk with Disturbance' (2017) are at the centre of an exploration into the motifs pain as practice, site, and subversive force. The artworks were created in tandem with an ethical strategy for art pursued through an experimental art-writing strategy I have labelled counter-scripting. Elaborating and engineering affect through performance, the art texts of the three artworks challenge dominant individual and cultural tendencies to explain, suppress, and ultimately annihilate pain. Looking at the body in long-term pain, it becomes particularly important to regard physical and mental processes as coextensive, intertwined attributes instead of relying solely on linguistic acts to address and understand out sensory and corporeal experiences. Contemporary arts practice has proven particularly effective in mediating embodied experience and knowledge, through its ability to extend beyond the conventional uses of accepted representational motifs to address inter-embodied life. Considering relations of pain as its material, this study directs attention to the significance of contemporary arts practice for reconceptualising common perceptions of the presumed meaninglessness of chronic pain. A change of perspective of long-term pain must be adopted, the study insists, not only by those who themselves suffer but also by societies within which all embodied beings are immersed and whose reality said beings share.