Full Description
Making Sense utilises art practice as a pro-active way of thinking that helps us to make sense of the world. It does this by developing an applied understanding of how we can use art as a method of healing and as a critical method of research. Drawing from poststructuralist philosophy, psychoanalysis, arts therapies, and the creative processes of a range of contemporary artists, the book appeals to the fields of art theory, the arts therapies, aesthetics and art practice, whilst it opens the regenerative affects of art-making to everyone. It does this by proposing the agency of 'transformative therapeutics', which defines how art helps us to make sense of the world, by activating, nourishing and understanding a particular world view or situation therein. The purpose of the book is to question and understand how and why art has this facility and power, and make the creative and healing properties of certain modes of expression widely accessible, practical and useful.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Transformative Therapeutics as Healing for the Individual
1. Making Sense of the Aesthetic Experience
2. Making Sense Inside the Clinic: Episodes of the Arts Therapies
3. Contesting the Clinic: Art, Therapy and the Schizophrenic
4. Making Sense Outside the Clinic
Part II: Transformative Therapeutics as a Critical Method of Thinking
5. Making Sense of Territory: Art Practice and Material Thinking
6. Making Political Sense: Vera Frenkel's String Games
7. Making Sense at the Limit
8. Making Sense with the Pharma
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
