The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

A decade ago, I emptied my apartment in New York. I sat in the bed that shortly would be left curbside and composed in a single, uncharacteristically breathless pass an essay for a now-defunct artist-run publication. The piece was ostensibly about John McCracken and his lambent plinths as vehicles for dislocation. He spoke with a disarming sincerity of belief about aliens, premonitions of himself returning from the future, and life moving through him to generate form.

As I suspected even then, McCracken was a pretext. I don’t typically write in the I, yet I started that piece with anecdotes about my young children before turning to the artist himself. And then, in conclusion, I wrote of my own spatiotemporal portals, daily diary entries my mother recorded about my life until I left for college:

I always marveled at the dedication, the love hours that could never be repaid, as Mike Kelley put it in describing a mode of sentimentality that is really a gaping maw of pain.… I know that [my mother] liked me, that she loved me, that she dutifully recorded this longing so that I could keep it close. One day, maybe soon, I will follow these stories of a life I think I recognize and come to discover whether I would have liked myself.¹

With the last line punctuated, full stop, I sent my partner in California a text message. I can’t confirm which weeping avatar traveled westward, but a search reveals that Loudly Crying Face was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010—the same year the phrase “all the feels” caught on—and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Was it that one?

Back at my new desk in Los Angeles, I was embarrassed by the reckless honesty, and not just because it betrayed for this “art historian” some quasi-academic pretense. With a sense of first vague, then specific discomfit, it became clear to me that I had been hiding behind other people’s art. I made an alibi of that art. How presumptuous are the supposed competences that authorize us to interpret the art of others. I picked at the scab. Why the disciplinary fixation on the artist’s intentions—as meaning but also in the opacity of refusal—with comparably little attention paid to our own? I had outsourced onto McCracken and others, by way of writing and with the gross impunity of “expertise,” not only reflexivity, creativity, criticality, and politics, but also feeling.

*

Shortly before he died, psychologist Ernest Harms began an essay on the radically unfulfilled development of modern art therapy by justifying its ambition through recourse to precedent. “Biblical sources,” Harms notes, “tell how David tried to cure King Saul’s depression by playing the harp. Greek physicians recommended music and recitation in various forms (Celsus and Asclepiades) as medicine against melancholia.”² Similarly, Judith Rubin suggests in a primer on art therapy that the connection of art to healing is “ancient and universal,”³ extending from cave paintings or fertility amulets to mandalas and icons.

There has been less agreement on just how to heal with art. Regarding the “actual application of arts and aesthetic means to active therapy,” Harms wrote, “we face a virgin forest in terms of established principles of tasks and aims.”⁴ The field was newly consolidating in the early 1970s, when Harms penned his report, and Rubin, after three years as the “Art Lady” on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, where she espoused the value of artmaking as less sanative than prophylactic, was working clinically. It was also scaling its reach through standardization, regulating training and establishing licensure, producing skilled workers as the dominant model of mental-health care in the United States shifted from institutionalization in asylums to outpatient treatment.

A byproduct of experimental art keyed to self-expression, progressive trends in education, and the broadening field of psychology, art therapy as a discipline had remained decentralized for decades after its emergence in the early 1940s. “Many art therapists working alone in different places thought they had invented the practice themselves,” wrote the art therapist Maxine Junge. “They had worked alone, often making it up as they went along.”⁵ Only in 1961 did Elinor Ulman establish the first art therapy journal, Bulletin of Art Therapy, and by the end of the decade, the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) was founded. By then, Paul Fink, Morris J. Goldman, and Myra Levick had opened the first art therapy graduate program in the country at Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Medical College (subsequently shuttered). Protocol was the goal, but many concerns remained as to how deeply individual modalities of intimacy were to be regimented.

In “Art Therapy: A Diagnostic and Therapeutic Tool,” published in the International Journal of Psychiatry in 1973, Fink, Goldman, and Levick—two psychiatrists and an art therapist, respectively—promote the use of art made by the person undergoing therapy, as opposed to readymade projective tests (such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test), as “a personal projection.”⁶ The formal features of the art produced by the patient here are analyzed as data within a fixed framework of DSM-regulated normalizations of health and ability as the ground against which psychopathology figures. Inevitably, these efforts to read art rigorously, and diagnostically, for therapeutic purposes raised more questions than they answered. The orchestration and management of clinically-made art begs who might adjudicate its meaning, and how, and with what interpretive techniques. What kinds of knowledge, inclusive of self-knowledge, does this art then produce, and for whom?

*

There was a fundamental parting of ways among some of the first and focal practitioners of art therapy. For educator–turned–art therapist (and wartime consultant for the Museum of Modern Art) Margaret Naumburg, art was useful in therapy, where patients associate verbally to the images that they make. For others, including Bauhaus-inspired artist–become–art therapist Edith Kramer, art was therapy, with sublimation as the goal of the supervised session for which the therapist engaged as a kind of studio assistant. The AATA currently defines art therapy as “a mental health profession that enriches the lives of individuals, families, and communities through active art-making, creative process, applied psychological theory, and human experience within a psychotherapeutic relationship.”⁷ The emphasis in these approaches is not on taxonomy but treatment. But treatment for what?

Cliff Joseph, a key participant in AATA’s founding and its first African American member, who was also a founder of the Graduate Creative Arts Therapy Department at Pratt Institute, concluded that “capitalism is the root of many problems that are described in an interpersonal framework, within mainstream psychiatric diagnoses.”⁸ As it happened, in 2017, Karen Pence acted in her capacity as Second Lady of the United States to launch an art therapy initiative, Healing with the HeART. Her goal was to “elevate the profession so that people understand that art therapy is a mental health profession, and not arts and crafts,” and to beseech its application for “various conditions, illnesses, and life experiences.”⁹ She also hoped to encourage recruits to enter the profession. AATA responded with a statement sharing their enthusiasm about her commitment.

Let us hold aside for a moment the perversity of stumping for services largely inaccessible in a country without guaranteed healthcare, where medical redlining and seemingly intractable inequities of care are rife. AATA’s alignment with Pence, if done opportunistically to bring attention and government funding to art therapy, prompted a reckoning. (As a New York Times headline synopsized: “Karen Pence Picks a Cause, and Art Therapists Feel Angst.”¹⁰) How could Pence, deputy of a regime actively perpetrating harm that many art therapists were trying to repair, come to stand for their work? Art therapy professor and author of Art Therapy for Social Justice Savneet Talwar was quoted at the time as saying of Pence, “Her initiative is a good initiative but it doesn’t do anything for us. … For us, the crucial issue is to understand the systems of oppression.”¹¹

In early 2019, responding to the exodus of members in the wake of their cooperation with Pence, the AATA Board of Directors circulated an alternative statement condemning the “discriminatory admissions and hiring policies”¹² at the Immanuel Christian School, where Pence returned to work as an art teacher. Inclusivity was the watchword. Yet to Talwar’s point, inclusivity remained aspirational, a promissory note brokered for debts within the field, too. Exceptional in its genealogy of matriarchs—a reward of art therapy’s ancillary role in a hierarchy of mental-health care historically disproportionately presided over by men—it less triumphantly has granted white women the privilege of ministering to the needs of minoritized, often vulnerable populations.

Leah Gipson and others have indicted the extractive logic of a profession that has been unconscionably slow to acknowledge the influence of culturally specific art therapies conducted by Black artists, activists, and educators, from Georgette Seabrooke Powell to Joseph. Drawing on Joseph’s own activism, Gipson and colleagues authored “‘What Are You All Going to Do to Keep Black Women in Art Therapy?’: A Womanist Manifesto for Creative Arts Therapies Education.”¹³ They originally submitted it to Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, where it was rejected without peer review. In excising such examples and corrective critiques from its teaching and literature, we are left with willful and then actual amnesia. Context can also be history.

*

When people ask me how I ended up back in graduate school for art therapy in 2018, I customarily supply answers that track with my research interests. Justifications for studying (and now writing a book about) why people came to make art in therapeutic contexts, and how some of this art ended up in museums, are neither disingenuous nor unimportant. Already in the 1940s, art made under conditions of assessment reciprocally pressured categories of modernism: If an abstract painting, made under the watch of a therapist—whether by Jackson Pollock or an anonymized veteran—was not modern art, just what was it? But these intersections, alibis of other kinds, miss the more personal searching that for me underpins them: an openness to processes of unknowing, to retraining as an act of submission.

In my art therapy classes, what surprised me the most was not the curriculum—surveys of past and contemporary methods and theories, artmaking directives keyed to potential uses, studies of psychological testing, and so on—but rather the pedagogy of its delivery. Instead of essayistic reading responses, we made and shared art that metabolized key concepts. In classes presumably run like seminars, factual inaccuracies did not meet the immediate censure of clarifying rebuttal. Things were additive, with acceptance of error functionally extended to introducing information that might facilitate another perspective. One arrives at insight or doesn’t, just yet. Discussions absent the quick and sharp parry with which I was accustomed from art history turned on moments of alignment or dissensus that—defanged of vitriol but not stakes—somehow felt much the same. In place of the customary no I heard the earnestly affirming refrain of yes, and. It felt like group therapy, and not just in our interrogation of transference and countertransference. And maybe it was.

I didn’t keep most of the art that I made. The classroom-grade materials are hardly conservation friendly, nor was longevity the point. The artmaking was punctual, effervescent in its conjuring and representing, and the words uttered around it quickly fell away. Some cut sheets are leaved into my notebooks, and a small sculpture, a ribbon-encircled gift box (absent a prize within), is tucked into a closet from which I retrieve it occasionally and cradle it in my palm. One larger watercolor, crushed unceremoniously in transit, harbors concentric circles radiating from a blurry core, each composed of strokes become calligraphic dashes. I cannot remember its corresponding prompt or summon why I floated color—pale sea green and chartreuse—on so much water in some spots and interrupted its passage with comparably drier marks of blackish ash, the visual equivalent of petrichor. I judged the space better along one edge than another, so that the outermost ring bleeds, ending at the physical limit of the support. It carries a different weight there. The image might be cosmic or bodily or floral or geometric; its orientation is comparably unfixed. It offers no title or date. Even to me, now, it is a cipher.

What remains so productive about this experience making art as an art therapy student was how it undermined my sense of sanctity in the roles of assessor and assessed. These roles shift. And relationality might well exist in perceived similitude with another just as much as in the incommensurability of self-regard. If I had started as an interloping scholar and became a participant observer, I emerged my own subject. Far from an excursus, this period helped me to make ever-stranger the pervasive will to interpreting the art of others within art history. Amelia Jones helpfully frames this bias of art-historical positioning as “a methodological suspicion of the subjective, accompanied by an erasure of the specificity of bodies and desires … while stating [authorial] opinions as fact.”¹⁴ Art history claims jurisdiction over visual evidence. It rationalizes accrediting one to speak for others and has never pretended to be therapeutic, much less reformist.

*

Finding evidence of art therapy’s imbrication within institutions of modernism has led me to imagine very differently the objects, narratives, and methods attending the history of art, which remain further than I think they should from medical principles—of diagnoses and treatments; of instruments and therapies—more broadly. For its part, though, as evidenced in selective retellings of its own “pioneers,” art therapy still deals remarkably little with (its) histories, much less those of art. The latter might establish that technique, material use, and theories of the image, among so much else, have changed over time, and might be extended to consider how the ideas of art and process that underpin the work of art therapy are necessarily socially and historically contingent.

And far from my experience alone, after these last few years, many more of us have partaken in art-allied mediums of “care”; we might wield comparable analytics, burnishing them with anecdotal truth. Museums responded to the scale of unhealth the pandemic exposed—to say nothing of the calls to decolonize collections and to address grotesque racial misadventures of their own—with hopeful appeals to art. Among much ameliorative programming, the Metropolitan Museum of Art released “Frame of Mind: An Art & Wellness Podcast,” sharing “uplifting stories about how art supports well-being, especially during times of struggle and stress.”¹⁵ Others turned to at-home artmaking workshops and hands-on distance learning that encouraged expressive participation, stopping short of selling it as a remedy. Part of a larger therapeutic discourse that Maria Walsh sees as engendering productive, self-regulating neoliberal subjects, they were symptoms all, more so than cures.¹⁶

Together with art made under comparable domestic circumstances, I have lived with one of Edith Kramer’s paintings. I chanced upon it on eBay when I was searching for one of her books. Backlit on the screen, its sunflowers arrayed in a tin bucket glowed. Recalling it from an installation photograph of a makeshift arrangement of her landscapes and still lifes, I bought it gleefully, impulsively. When the piece arrived, the crude handmade frame was coming apart at the joints, and evidence of overpainting around blossoms and brittle plumes of grass was more pronounced than I’d expected. The listing had posted a shot of the canvas from the back, revealing Kramer’s title as Wild Sunflowers in Bucket. In the flesh, they look rather more like bodega-procured specimens a few days in; some stalks droop or collapse on themselves, detumescent, even as others radiate outward, heliotropes seeking an unseen light. I like that they might still be wild.

I imagine Kramer painting after a day spent otherwise and wonder if this effort was a product of her own therapeutic artmaking, washing away the hard work with others, or a testament to its course—or something else entirely. I linger over the details and the unforgivingly mute backdrop, with its modulations of grey. For the art therapist, observing artmaking is a cornerstone of the practice, which yields critical behavioral information about the subject apart from whatever form the image might also assume. The scene of her making it is impossible to reconstruct, and I contemplate to what ethical effect I try. So I find myself tracing Kramer’s open petals as contours of possibility but stop short of doctoring them. I weigh for whom artmaking attains agency, much less retains it.

As I have inhabited this project, and found myself unwilling to finish it so many years in, I have learned to embrace the unmooring that it has urged about what I do and how I do it. Kramer’s painting has become a talisman. I regard it with the benevolence of kinship as I write, thinking of her but taking responsibility for myself. What happens when we ask art to change us and then it does? What is transference but feeling?