THE MORNING STAR is of course no star but the second-closest orbiting planet to the sun, Venus, the closest planet to our own home, Earth. Venus is associated with femininity, just as our other neighboring planet, Mars, is associated with masculinity.

Both planets have their own place in Greco-Roman mythology, much of the foundation for our contemporary civilization. The forbidden love affair between the god (of war) Mars/Ares and the goddess (of love) Venus/Aphrodite resulted in the birth of their beautiful daughter Harmonia. Of course, Harmonia eventually gets killed and the associations exerted on our cultures by the symbolism of our neighboring planets have caused anything but harmony.

Images of people suffering fill the annals of art history. During the Renaissance the focus seemed to be on saints. Think of Christ, the Pieta, and St. Sebastian pierced by arrows to mention but a few. Many are rendered to look exsanguinated, to visually emphasize blood loss and approaching death.

The worship of sufferers, the reminder of their sacrifice, to benefit a greater good, and in the case of Christ to suffer for all so they may be forgiven for their failings, is rich material, referenced not only in the era when the Church was the main patron of the arts but also photo-journalistically later on. Think of Robert Capa's image of a falling soldier during the Spanish civil war, published in Life magazine; Nick Ut's image of a naked Vietnamese girl running from napalm bombs, which won the Pulitzer Prize; Ladislav Bielik's image of a man facing down a Soviet tank in 1968; and, only twenty-one years later, Jeff Widener's photo of a Chinese dissident standing resolutely in front of a column of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square. There are of course many more, and far more gruesome images of suffering during war and human cruelty. However, these are among the iconic images that have resonated in ways that have redefined perceptions of what was occurring in the face of overwhelming odds. To quote Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek character Spock: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” and in a later iteration “… the needs of the one.” Self-sacrifice has therefore held sway in hero imagery and frequently not in images of personal suffering, often dismissed as self-indulgent or self-destructive.

Larry Clark's black and white images of heroin users and later Nan Golden's color exploration of dysfunction and personal isolation are examples of efforts to address suffering in private, apparently not linked to the needs of the many but to the needs or even the desperation of the individual. Everlast's What's It Like or Amy Winehouse's Rehab are musical examples of addressing individual suffering and in so doing challenge societal edicts you may have come across. Glamourizing self-destruction or self-indulgence are the primary objections to such works. Yet, personal pain exists, and needs to be chronicled, possibly all the more so for its apparent irrelevance in the face of exponentially increasing tensions around the globe in nearly every context imaginable.

It is against this background, and the weight of ongoing stigmatization and dismissal that Mainhart has chosen to engage the world of mostly unseen pain, linguistically characterized as “self-harm.” She too was criticized for visually engaging, even glamourizing and potentially triggering urges to commit self-harm.

This lengthy introduction is due in part to establish a context for her work and in part to suggest that you, the reader, may want to skip the rest of this chapter, just as students were allowed to leave the class who felt triggered when her work was under consideration.

It is not for me to either censor or impose the work on anyone. My decision to include Mainhart's work in this text is no different than the reasons for the other images we have looked at. The work has a viewpoint and demonstrates a sustained inquiry and is rich with subtext. Mainhart takes on the renaissance strategy of some of the aforementioned images directly, by rendering her subject's skin as “exsanguinating.”

She applies this not only to people but also to situations.

How Can the Image Be Interpreted?

In Roman times the suicide of Lucretia, who could only think of saving her honor by taking her life after being raped, appears to be referenced here, although the Renaissance paintings and etchings of her seem to be more sexualized by the more frequent depiction of a dagger held between her bare breasts. We are unlikely to know the true number of raped women and, to a lesser extent men, around the world. Statistics reflect an alarmingly high percentage, though it is impossible to know how many because, by definition, unreported rapes can't be tracked and therefore can't be known. The devastating effects of such crimes on the victims are not quantifiable and survivors cope in many different ways.

FIGURE 26.2 Untitled. © Hannah Mainhart

It is not uncommon for victims to blame themselves and to turn their pain on themselves. Self-hate or lack of self-worth often have convoluted roots and may not easily be uncovered. Even if they are fully known and understood rationally, the emotional devastation often remains. Insidiously invisible as such injuries are, the mind often turns on the body as punishment or, to make visible what can't be seen (Figure 26.2).

FIGURE 26.3 Untitled. © Hannah Mainhart