[Intro Music]
Pain & Sympathy
[Choral music and sound of oxygen mask]
[Choral Music]
History of the Main Complaint
[choral music]
In the activity of making work
there's a sense that if you spend a day
or two days drawing
an object or an image
there is a sympathy toward that object,
embodied in the human labor of making the drawing
[choral music]
and for me there is something in the dedication
to the image whether it's Jericho painting guillotined heads
it's a shocking image
but there is something about the hours
of physically studying those heads and painting them
that becomes a compassionate act for me
even though on the one hand you can say
that is very cold bloodedly and ghoulishly looking at
disaster or using other peoples’ pain
as raw material for the work.
[choral music]
[sound of baseball bat hitting]
[choral music]
[Choral music and sounds of punches]
[cardiac monitor beep]
[choral music, cardiac monitor beep and sound of punches]
I mean naturally every artist does this
use other peoples pain as well as their own as raw material
so there is a kind of, if not a vampirishness
certainly an appropriation of other people’s distress
in the activity of being a writer or an artist.
But there is also something in the activity of both
contemplating, depicting, and spending the time with it
which I hope, as an artist, redeems the activity
from one of simply exploitation and abuse.
[choral music]
[sound of a car crashing]
[sound of telephone ringing]
[cardiac monitor beep]
[exit music]