Group Therapy

Oh and I forgot to mention….

I’ve dug out this exhibition catalogue for a Haywood touring exhibition that Jill Bennett mentions in her book Empathic Vision (see post from 24th June). It uses Trauma mostly in relation to a more collective awareness of national and international disasters from what I can tell so far…., but its got some pretty interesting artists in it such as Willie Doherty and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. I’ll let you know how it is when I have had a proper read!

Its been an intense couple of weeks and it seems that my focus has drifted slightly from this project to other seemingly more pressing matters. Last Tuesday saw me in London for a job interview, after which I decided to spend my afternoon in the pub with my London friends. The wine flowed a little too freely leading me to abandon my last train home in favor of another glass. It was a beautiful feeling arriving for work in Liverpool on Wednesday morning in yesterday’s job interview clothes, especially on one of the hottest days of the year! But it was worth it, I have no regrets!

In general the world seems to be a brighter place then is was six months ago and I am pleased that I managed the very intense trip down South with no major panic attacks. Therapy seems to finally be helping me make some changes. Its probably the kind of stuff thats undetectable to anyone else, but for me its really important. Its amazing how learned behaviors that a person creates for themselves over the course of a lifetime can be so detrimental, but can build such a clear and incontrovertible image of what reality looks like. Its nice to begin to believe that I am actually living in a kinder world than the one that I had created for myself!

I attended a really nice dance and health session at the Bluecoat last night that was run by Liverpool Improvisation Collective. We practiced what the workshop leader called ‘toweling:’ a form of body therapy where one participant moves the other’s limbs using a towel. Sounds very bizarre indeed, but having your limbs lifted and released with such a none invasive method of touch is a bit like floating in water. It left me feeling intensely relaxed! I’m also back in Wales for a day of Feldenkrais with Veronica this weekend. I’m hoping the weather holds out so that I can walk by the river afterwards.

So…. I will try to get back on topic with my next post. I’m becoming very aware that I need to expand my research methods in order to find other artists who I might potentially invite to the exhibition. I’ve got a great shortlist list at the moment, but it’s probably not even half of a proper show.

This book looks interesting: Empathic Vision; Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. Its by Jill Bennett. I’ve grown a little weary of the ‘mental health’ terminology struggle and have decided to search for a new discourse with which to frame my thinking on ’emotional and psychological disturbance.’* So I am hoping this text might be useful, particularly as one of it’s chapters is called “Insides, Outsides: Trauma, Affect and Art.” Its one of the key texts which Lewis Biggs (director of Liverpool Biennial) gave as recommended reading for this year’s festival. He says that it….

“takes the subject of Trauma (eg Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, N Ireland) as content,
but (is) most interesting for the arguments in favour of the priority of formal means (over
information / subject / representation) in producing affect and an adequate response
to the trauma through art.”

I’m interested in this tension between form and content as recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how visual art often prioritises formal discourse over emotion and affect (see for example Lewis’s use of the phrase “adequate response” ) I am not sure how relevant this line of thinking is going to be to the Group Therapy project, but I’m thinking that this book will probably help to give me some answers!

* This term borrowed from a recent email that I received from Andrew Bryant (thanks Andrew, its a good phrase). I’ve decided to use it instead of ‘mental ill health’ for the time being at least.

I suspect I will return to the discussion covered in my previous post many times during the course of this blog. Its important for me that the arts do not yield too readily to the language of abstraction, while ignoring the socio-economic back drop against which they rest. However its also really important to me that the arts should avoid didacticism or over simplification and should have the courage to challenge existing assumptions or social norms. Part of the curatorial task of this show is to strike the right balance of both understanding and challenging our existing perceptions of ‘metal health.’

Anyway my previous few entries have been very wordy and I’ve been thinking that it would probably be a relief for everyone if we have some new pictures to look at and a new artist to think about!!

I’ve been intending to mention a film by Harun Farocki called Immersion http://www.farocki-film.de/immerseg.htm for a little while now, having stumbled across it twice in the past few months: once at Raven Row Gallery and then again at FACT. The work is a collaboration between the artist and the Institute for Creative Technologies, a virtual reality research center which develops immersive therapy for war-veterans suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. It documents a group of ex soldiers as they relive their traumatic experiences suffered during the Iraq war, guided by a therapist who coaxes her subjects into retracing the specific emotional journey that gave rise to the original trauma. Its presented as a split screen installation, with once shot focusing on the virtual reality imagery and another taking in the exchange that occurs between the subject and the therapist. This method of display renders the title highly appropriate as it very much situates the viewer within the work and allows them also to observe the traumatic moment through the virtual reality simulation in tandem with the individual soldiers. The emotional journey of one particular solider had such intensity that I found myself shedding a few tears and mirroring his sensations of fear, helplessness and sadness as he experienced them.

The use of virtual reality for treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is becoming increasingly common in the USA, partially for soldiers returning from war. This seems to be because the time and money needed for intensive person to person therapy is often unavailable so the government employs technology as a substitute. This blog has some interesting discussion on the topic http://www.noahshachtman.com/archives/002189.html and outlines some very pertinent arguments about how technology can be a blessing or a burden when it interfaces with the human body. Thanks to Somaya Langley http://www.criticalsenses.com/ who originally pointed me toward this study.

I need to find a better phrase than ‘mental ill health’. In my previous post I discussed what it might mean to group together artworks created by persons with ‘mental health issues’ and how this might serve to give a voice to a marginalised group. In response Sid Volter has emailed me to point out that in fact this might serve only to homogenise groups of artists in an unproductive way.

“You could argue that by curating a show on mental illness with people showing work that is all bound together under that header, you are picking out a specific quality. Like calling it ‘depression’ in the first place sort of objectifies it. I would be worried about being identified with such a show, if I were seen as ‘a depressed artist’ or ‘an artist who makes work on depression’ because it’s singling out a part of myself for no reason! It’s all me!

What is ‘the mentally ill?’ What is the ‘marginalised underclass?’ Would I want to be grouped under that header? All people under that category would be judged on similar ground using the same frame of reference. What if I don’t want to be judged on similar ground? It’s important from a societal point-of-view to voice things that aren’t said, or talked about. I also know the importance of groups to help understand and identify the problem. I liked your interesting comments on validating and questioning standards of acceptance. But you see the problem when trying to group together into one concept. More interesting, I would suggest, is the idea of curating something that focuses more on the variance of individuality rather than the category itself.”

I think in response to these points I need to make clear how I see the difference between curating a show of successful artists who language their own experiences around ‘mental ill health’ through their practice and curating a show of artworks by individuals who have no previous training as artists and whose ‘mental health’ problems have contributed to their becoming socially or economically marginalised. Although I am concerned with the former rather than the latter, I feel a great imperative that this show should not glamorize or deal carelessly with conditions that can be chronically disabling for some people. Its a statistical fact that a high percentage of people with ‘mental health’ issues in the UK are from the economic migrant community or from disadvantaged backgrounds. I’m pretty sure that they are not marginalized purely because they have mental health issues, but because of a number of social and economic triggers. I won’t be dealing with this issue as part of this exhibition, but it’s important to me that I consider the social and economic background as part of the show’s evolution.

However I emphatically accept Sid’s assertion that ‘mentally ill’ is a too blunt phrase which draws all subtlety out of a complex psychological subject. It strikes me that ‘mental ill health’ belongs to the language of policy makers and pharmaceutical companies and is conducive to reductive arguments that see people as groups rather than individuals.

Better that this show should deal with the complex issue of individual psychologies rather than groups who have ‘illnesses’ and in a way I think that this is what art is for: expressing experience from a personalised perspective.