About the Book
Deinstitutionalizing Art of the Nomadic Museum explores the possibility of the "nomadic museum" to facilitate social and political resistance through engagement with critical art practices and imagery. Grounded in a decade-long art therapy project in a contemporary art museum setting, this book offers a theoretically rich conceptualization of this experience.
The text establishes an institutional critique of both the dominant psychopathology discourse and the instrumentalizations of art practices. Innovative in its approach, the results are analyzed in the framework of subjects such as hegemony-subalternity, subjectivity, resistance, the nomadic, critical art practices, narratives and minor language, deinstitutionalization, anti-psychiatries as well as institutional therapy. With a special focus on Latin America, international artists’ writings and works are intersected with the thoughts of curators and museum decision makers. The inevitable connection of the arts with social and political fields is highlighted, enabling the exploration of the intersections of art, critical analysis, social science, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy.
This text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, researchers, libraries and museums curators in the fields of art therapy, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, social & cultural anthropology, and political philosophy.
Table of Contents:
1) Introduction: Art and the political exercise of thinking
2) Beyond the walls: Art therapy applied to adolescents with challenging behaviors and the museum
3) Spaces beyond hegemony: Gramsci and a critical review on psychopathology and art
4) The nomadic museum: Arts and subjectivities
5) Critical art, co-options, resistance, and the museum
6) Deinstitutionalizing and rearticulating art and psychiatry
About the Author :
Eva Marxen is Assistant Professor of Art Therapy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, US.
Review :
"A fundamental theme of this book is the growing interest from the social sciences and humanities in including art (in all its manifestations) as a way to enhance research methodologies and configure social action strategies that allow a critical commitment to counter hegemonic discourses. […] Art is transformed into a social space of social experimentation, where the social is transformed into a field of research, allowing not only research and creation, but also sociocultural change. […] This kind of artistic experience allows for a form of social resistance that challenges dominant discourses and narratives, where the self and the mind are seen as facts in which the person is isolated from themselves, from their social relationships, and from life itself."
-- Luis Felipe González Gutiérrez, Psychology Professor, University Santo Tomás, Bogotá, Colombia
"With Deinstitutionalizing Art of the Nomadic Museum: Practicing and Theorising Critical Art Therapy with Adolescents, Marxen invites the reader to understand the sociohistorical efforts that were made interdisciplinarily in anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy, and political science to deinstitutionalise the instrumentalization of art and the psychiatric establishment through rigorous scholarship, creativity, and persistence."
-- Tomoyo Kawano, Associate Professor/Program Director of Dance/Movement Therapy, Antioch University, USA
"This important work by Eva Marxen transcends the boundaries of art therapy. Her transdisciplinary approach is the faithful reflection of the author's solid academic, epistemological, and therapeutic training. It shows an anthropological, psychoanalytic, political-philosophical, art critical, artistic, and art therapeutic perspective. […] As an artist and art therapist, I felt interpellated by her position regarding the prominence that the artistic and art therapeutic device must have in society as an emancipating and transforming tool of individual and collective subjectivity. […] According to the author, art is crucial, since it offers epistemological experiences that can influence collective processes. […] Eva Marxen's book invites us to question the coventional, the expected, and the things one should know how to do. It prompts us to become active agents, the protagonists of our journeys, in control of our own destinations, and as artists capable of creating new subjectivities and 'counter-devices' that free us from hegemonic powers."
-- Estela Garber, Art Therapist and Artist, Center of Psychotherapy Studies, Buenos Aires, Argentina
"Marxen brings her academic and professional expertise to challenge the dominant discourses of the ‘making and perception of art’ and of psychopathology. To this end, she introduces the reader to an impressive account of the radical and significant work that has been carried out since the 1960s by artist and practitioners, primarily in Latin America, Spain, Italy, and France […]. The principal merits of Marxen’s project are threefold. Firstly, it is significant for alerting the English-speaking world to the phenomenal amount of activity and radical engagement in the field of museum practices beyond the Anglo-American horizon while it documents many of the principal agents involved. Secondly, it appraises critical and relational art as a central idiom for raising the spectator’s consciousness of the ‘mechanisms of domination’ and for opening public space for ‘alternative narratives’ so that the spectator becomes a ‘conscious agent in the transformation of the world. And lastly, Marxen’s cross-fertilization of art psychotherapy and medical anthropology critique is methodologically useful insofar as it demonstrates the validity and benefits of an interdisciplinary approach in this domain."
-- Daniel Stolfi, Anthropology & Medicine
