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.
