The Legacy of Art Making: Agency, Activism and Finding the World

Abstract

Arts in Health has become an umbrella term both for a variety of creative interventions in health settings and for a disciplinary arena in which the borders of psychology, therapy and community arts practice are blurred, indeed contested. In its many practices, the roles of patient and expert are reimagined and relationships renegotiated. There is often an allegiance, albeit one often not articulated, to Freirean and feminist pedagogy where learning is experiential and has the potential to be transformative. Such practices are underpinned by a tacit acknowledgement that the nature of ill-health is complex and that understanding it better requires individual biographies and trajectories to be seen as embedded within a given socioeconomic climate and culture. This chapter draws on a community-based arts project in which artists with histories of mental distress collaborated in the making of a film about their practice. Described elsewhere (Sagan, Thou Art: The multiple gaze of audio-visual, community-based participatory research. Journal of Applied Arts & Health, 2 (2), 125–136, 2011; Connection and reparation: Narratives of art practice in the lives of mental health service users. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 25 (3), 239–249, 2012; Narratives of arts practice and mental wellbeing: Connection and reparation. London: Routledge, 2014) the project is revisited to foreground one aspect of the data, that of the legacy of art making practices in terms of a shift in understanding of the self and other. This legacy can include a heightened political and moral awareness and a more meaningful engagement in various forms of activism and resistance. This, it is speculated, is a more sustainable and conscious engagement as it is embedded and embodied as part of a person’s narrative identity. The chapter revisits the narratives of the participants who reflect on art making, personal discovery, community activism, and giving an account of oneself (Butler, Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). This experience is considered through a psychoanalytic phenomenological lens (Atwood & Stolorow, Structures of subjectivity: Explorations in psychoanalytic phenomenology and contextualism. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014) exploring how subtle shifts in the relationship with(in) I and I and Thou (Buber, I and thou. New York: Scribner, 1958) occur. This is specifically explored via Hannah Arendt’s (The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1973) work on loneliness and the ways in which a political system can alienate and isolate people. The ‘loss of the world’ (Arendt, Men in dark times. New York, San Diego and London: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968) experienced acutely in mental illness is considered, and it is suggested that a restoration of a sense of the world can be achieved through art making practices. Psychoanalytic phenomenological thinking that brings together psychoanalytic understanding of inter- and intra-relationship with the conceptualization of our Being-in-the-world (Heidegger, Macquarrie, & Robinson. Being and time. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1962) offers a useful framework for exploring complex human experience on the borders of mental reparation, agency and personal transformation. It offers a means by which we can also illuminate legacy changes in the way we think of ourselves, others and the world and critically reconsider our community participatory interventions.