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 :
"This book is an important resource for educators and therapists who want to participate in the civic and political responsibility of museums, mediators and curators who accept the political challenge of moving and being nomadic with respect to exhibition spaces and want to relationally affect their communities more insistently, and for art historians and critical theorists who want to think about the different ways in which a set of practices of a specific history has been deployed from anti-psychiatry, critical curatorship, cultural politics, and the activation of contemporary art."
- Dr. David Gutiérrez Castañeda, National School of Higher Studies Unidad Morelia
