Ectoplastic Art Therapy As a Genre of Contemporary Art
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arts Article Ectoplastic Art Therapy as a Genre of Contemporary Art Peter Tzanev Department of Art Psychology and Art Education, National Academy of Arts, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria; [email protected] Received: 10 July 2019; Accepted: 10 October 2019; Published: 15 October 2019 Abstract: Art therapy is the successor of “psychological Modernism”, which during the late 19th and early 20th centuries included medical psychology as well as theories and practices related to more speculative practices of hypnosis, somnambulism, interpretation of dreams, automatic writing and spiritualism. Art therapy emerged in the second half of the 20th century as a new psychological genre and, the author argues, a new kind of art that offered the opportunity for psychological “salvation” in a “psychological society”. This article explores an experimental project called “Ectoplastic Art Therapy” begun in 2002 by the author as a form of therapy and as a form of contemporary art. This therapy has been performed in various institutional settings, such as therapeutic centers, museums and galleries, as well as educational seminars and courses. Focusing on the usual marginalization that accompanies conventional art therapy within the established framework of the contemporary art system, this article examines the situations in which an art therapist could present his practice as a contemporary artist. The author prompts questions concerning the possible kinds of self-presentation that can be found in art therapy as a form of contemporary art. Keywords: contemporary art; psychological Modernism; Ectoplastic art therapy; performativity 1. Introduction: Art Therapy and the Psychological Salvation of Art The practice of what we now call art therapy began in the 1940s. This was contemporaneous with the failed revolution of the psychological Modernism or what Bramble(2015, p. 134), in his history of modernist occult practices, describes as, “The downfall of the modernist culture of soul”.1 Modernism was the first global movement in the history of art that clearly showed that art is a place of conflict between different modes of consciousness, or different patterns of mental life that seek their representations in art. The productive interaction between art and new psychological sciences became the most direct and exciting way to uncover the deepest expressions of the modern individual personality. At the same time, Modernism arose in a psychological context that was not monolithic. The literary scholar Joshua Gang claims that during the first decades of the twentieth century, there was competition between an array of psychological theories—including behaviorism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis—circulating simultaneously and competing against each other and that in this situation, to choose one psychological theory was to choose not only a model of mind, but also a set of aesthetic, philosophical, and political entailments (Gang 2013, p. 117). Of particular interest to me in developing my theory of Ectoplastic Art Therapy was the fact that medical psychology between 1880 and 1940 included theories and practices related to hypnosis, somnambulism, psychical research, dream interpretation, mediumistic psychology, automatic writing, faith healing, and spiritualism. According 1 The epitaphic phrase “The downfall of the modernist culture of the soul” is the title of a chapter in John Bramble’s book Modernism and the Occult, where he argues that syncretic occultism is the cornerstone of modernism. Arts 2019, 8, 134; doi:10.3390/arts8040134 www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Arts 2019, 8, 134 2 of 14 to the historian Micale(2004, p. 18), psychological and aesthetic Modernism can be regarded as cultural domains with two parallel and competing discourses of the idea of The Modern and with shared metaphors for the dissolution of the real, visualizing the unseen, and the primitive in the modern. In a similar plan, the historian Corinna Treitel in her book A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern uses the term psychological Modernism when explores the ways in which occult practices from the 1870s to 1945 had an effect on German modernism. According to Treitel, the occult movement belonged to the larger spectrum of German attempts to elaborate “alternative modernities”, and the distinctive feature of this movement was its embrace of a primarily “psychological solution” to the problems of modernity (Treitel 2004, p. 51). Treitel claims that the modern occult sciences and occult texts assumed canonical status within the field of psychological Modernism (Treitel 2004, p. 72). The category psychological Modernism describes the complex existence of a separate historical phenomenon in the period of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, during which heterogeneous psychological attitudes and ideas coexisted. It can be said that art therapy is the strange and surprising successor to this phenomenon, as it continues to develop the art of psychological Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century (Nikitin and Tsanev 2018).2 The triumph of psychology as an independent modern discipline opened new territories to the development of Western individualism. Psychology not only legitimized a new kind of autonomous subjective space based on psychological terms and concepts but also offered new models for its representation. It would not be an exaggeration to say that many of the representational models of Symbolist art were based on the categories of Transcendent psychology,3 and that Abstract art was born in the secret world of Theosophical psychology,4 and almost all ideas of Surrealism were related to Psychoanalysis, just as Gestalt psychology looked behind the discoveries of Op art, and Abstract expressionism was immersed in the archetypal messages of Jungian psychology, that Minimalism was involved in Phenomenological psychology, and Conceptual art was in coalition with the successful invasion of Cognitive psychology. The claims of psychology to be a new science of “Man” were oriented towards transforming the thinking and desires of modern humanity into completely psychological phenomena. While it can be very difficult to demonstrate how different psychological constructs are realized in art, it is much easier to see the function of art in societies with developed psychological technologies and the influence of these technologies on the historical development of art. The emergence and development of art therapy as a distinct psychological genre after the 1940s demonstrated the role of art in the newly “psychological society” (Tsanev 2014). What is art therapy from the point of view of art? What is the meaning of the invention of art therapy for art? The emergence of the phenomenon of art therapy reveals two new important features of art. First, art therapy declared the independent existence of a new form of art with purely psychological functions. Secondly, art therapy went beyond demonstrating the connection between art and psychology, which experimental aesthetics and Art Psychology had been doing for 150 years. The purpose of art therapy was, instead, to create a new kind of connection between art and personality. 2 In my part of the book Image and Consciousness in Art Therapy, I explore how the origin of art therapy was tied to the expectations of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century to turn modern art into the most important part of the human psychic evolution. Psychological Modernism was related to the idea of higher consciousness, and in this context, it saw art as a psychological tool for the development of that higher consciousness (Nikitin and Tsanev 2018). 3 Transcendent psychology of Carl du Prel was very popular in the late nineteenth century. Du Prel’s Transcendent psychology made the unconscious and its occult phenomena the site where the scientific concerns met spiritual ones. Du Prel understands human consciousness as Janus-faced. One face inhabited the waking world of everyday sense experience while the other lived in the unconscious world of dream, trance, clairvoyant vision, and telepathic suggestion. Between the two lay a barrier of awareness that normally blocked one face from knowing the other. See (Treitel 2004, p. 42). 4 Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, the chief founder of the Theosophical movement, defined Theosophical psychology as the science of the soul. She postulated that every mental change is signalized by a molecular change in the brain substance. For Materialism, mental changes are caused by molecular changes, and for Spiritualism (believers in a soul) molecular changes are caused by mental changes. Arts 2019, 8, 134 3 of 14 Art therapy as a form of art arose with the intention to psychological liberate modern humanity from the restrictive adherence to materialism and physiology. Since art therapy interacts with a subject that is absorbed in a psychological reality, we can assume that art therapy treats art as an opportunity for psychological salvation of the individual in “psychological society”. 2. Why Did Art Therapy Not Become a Genre of Art? Art is an extension of the place that individuals inhabit but also extends the structure of human space and behavior through the new artworks that function as artistic research objects. The contradictions of the new modern art objects, such as the “collage”, the “readymade”, and the “surrealistic object” that appeared in the early 20th century, formed a new niche in the individual’s space, which can be