“My” Wonderland
Amanda Ravetz
I didn’t believe until recently that recovery from addiction and mental ill health was possible. Near the end of his life my father attended Alcoholics Anonymous. Not so long afterwards he developed lung cancer. I felt angry for him, but also with him, when he died; I had ugly feelings of being cheated, feeling ashamed, sad and taken apart. This was thirty years ago and I assumed I’d come through to the other side. But at the inception of the Wonderland project I realised that despite or perhaps because of this family history, recovery was still a foreign concept to me.
In 2015 I’d seen a call for funding1. Together my partners2 and I pulled together a bid called Wonderland: the art of becoming human. Our project was ‘co-produced’, which is to say it was developed collaboratively. We met to agree our plans before, during and after delivery. We thrashed out questions of authorship, ownership and ethics. The partners took part in the research and recruited additional participants. Those who participated mostly did so because they saw it as another step in their own recovery journey.
The ten Wonderland participants came to Manchester School of Art over several months. At the heart of the project were two three-day intensive workshops led by Cristina Nuñez. Nuñez guided participants in making photographic self-portraits (singly, in pairs and in groups) using her well-established methodology3. Between workshops, participants followed a programme set by Cristina to stimulate their emotional and photographic processes. They collected family photos where these were available and also took images of themselves. These were reviewed and edited by the participants (with guidance from Cristina and each other), into self-authored ‘artist books’. Those of us based in the north west of England met face to face over those months as a group of peers to make further work, discuss what we would showcase and share our recovery experiences.
Self
At the beginning of the research I wasn’t sure what to make of the intense focus on self that Cristina introduced to the project. Isn’t the C21st a time of unprecedented obsession with individuality? I thought. Isn’t this self-centredness to the detriment of political action and social justice? On the other side of the project I have a different view. Cristina’s method makes use of the fact that the camera, as others have noted,4 can catalyse a form of performative truth. Standing alone in the studio, enacting self to camera can offer the chance to face, and begin to process, difficult emotions. It is not about re-enacting unresolved trauma, but sitting with pain and frustration until these are accepted as personal fate.5 People in the recovery community feel they are not represented anywhere. We see dramatic images of addicts and addiction, but not what recovery looks like. Feelings of shame can be dissipated by looking at oneself honestly and not as others represent us.6 This may also have something to do with transforming the horror of an impersonal world immune to our desire for omnipotent control, into the acceptance of our personal fate. It is about allowing the suffering of this personalisation to be felt.7
Does this acceptance lead to quietism or individualistic retreat? Reviewing the portraits first with the artist on a one to one basis, and then with the bigger group, gave a sense of correspondence and connection. Participants felt closer and more trusting of their own and others’ humanness. Feeling emotions was not a panacea, did not lessen the will for justice. In our small experiment it released fresh energy and resolve for social connective and political action. This observation is lent credence by evidence that 79.4% of those in recovery have volunteered in community groups since beginning their recovery journey, compared with 40% of the general public.8 Looking at self is easily conflated with narcissism. But self-reflection can also be a means to suffer the truth of one’s imperfect self and through acceptance to reconnect with others and speak out against injustice.
Recovery
I got involved in this research for several reasons. When I met Mark Prest it was a moment of personal realisation. I felt buoyed up by his and others’ talk that “recovery is possible!” Mark put this experience and his background in the arts together to make something visionary happen; fighting for the knowledge and dignity of people in recovery to be recognised, fighting for issue-based artwork to have a place in the highly competitive art world.
Recovery and art are a recent fusion - developed here and in Europe in large part through Mark’s work. It was a combination that made sense to me. Art kept me going during my teenage years and later life. Painters like Mary Potter, Winifred Nicholson and Gwen John gave me what Kenneth Clark in his essay on Potter’s work called “enchanting moments of heightened perception”.9 But I was troubled by the tensions too between caring for people and caring for art. Since at least the Renaissance in cultural centres of the Northern world, ‘fine’ art has stood in opposition to the supposedly functional concerns of social life and the ‘low’ arts. This causes a dilemma, if, like me, the art you choose to look at has no apparent use or purpose beyond what it allows you to see, feel, consider, or to be surprised or shocked by. How to resolve this conundrum between a sense of responsibility to a fucked up world and a need for the shock, abjection, beauty or solace of art (depending on your preference)? I suppose ‘my’ Wonderland was a small gesture towards grappling with this.
Research
I was also interested in asking whether Wonderland could lead to a better understanding of the value of what is called artistic research. Artistic research, unlike much other academic research, some of it within art and design, refuses to separate what the artist makes from the ‘knowledge’ produced. This unwillingness to disentangle knowledge, object and process places artistic research at odds with the norms of most other research. Is it good or bad research, useful or not? Is it repeatable? Is it true or false? The questions asked by most researchers cannot be applied to artistic research in quite the same ways. For example, where social scientists think of using method A to achieve result B, artistic research refuses to disentangle A from B. The curator and writer Mika Hannula describes artistic methods in poetic rather than procedural terms: ‘1) Like Trying to Run in Waist-High New Snow [...] 2) crossing a River by Feeling Each Stone [...] 3) Moving like Smugglers’ Boats, moving quietly in the night, with no lights, almost colliding with one another, but never quite making contact’. 10 These poetic phrases speak of the need at times in artistic research and practice for resistance, friction, stealth, non-disclosure and uncertainty rather analytical naming and scientific truth.
Language
The refusal to break up art processes or the art object into discrete units of analysis does not mean we cannot talk about what artistic research does, makes possible, or feels like. We cannot provide belt and braces proof of our claims, but we can listen to people’s talk of their experiences. During Wonderland we discovered that caring for art – talking about the composition of a picture, the quality of a gesture, the play of light, the multiplicity of an image, the premise and conception of different aesthetic concerns could also be acts of caring for one another.
What is this person feeling and thinking?
What has happened here in this image do you think?
Why do we interpret this image in this or that way?
How does it leave us feeling? What would improve this image?
How does it feel to you that in your pain I see something strangely beautiful?
What is vulnerability when seen and experienced through an image, and when met in another human being?
How do I now feel about myself because of the way that light hits the shoulder of the photographic representation of myself?
The language of art school and the language of emotion knit together.
Value
A further conundrum stems from this - how to judge the artistic, research and social merits of our attempt to make trustful spaces and quality images emerge, one from the another?
Here’s what I think: we set out less to prove something analytically than to experience it, and truthfully so.
If the emphasis is on our experience though, what does this give you the reader and viewer, you who were not there, to judge these claims by? Are the words of the participants, the images taken, the books, this website, enough for you to evaluate the work - as art that does something powerful, as a contribution to building social justice, or as a valid form of academic research?
I do not have an unequivocal answer to this. Those of us who took part in the project hope these representations and signs communicate some of the feelings, insights and transformations we experienced – in ways that are also transformative. To an extent however, artistic knowledge is an act of faith and art a matter of taste, class, culture, politics and history. There is a fugitive aspect to lived experience that escapes evaluation. Perhaps the impossibility of keeping lived experience live after ‘extraction’ by research underlines the futility of using normative research procedures as a means to measure art’s value, dependent as art is on lived experience.
Repair
So what did I learn from Wonderland? That the things that divide us - class, “race”, gender, sexuality, the past - can be overridden by shared (and often hidden) experiences of pain, loss, survival and repair; that it is possible to care for people and to care for art – even if the tension between these never fully resolves; that I must keep trying to explain artistic research to whoever will listen, because it is too easily over written by more established and powerful knowledge regimes so that what really makes it live is lost; that people who have lost the things that I and others take for granted - somewhere to live, children, families, a job – are unusually generous in recovery, and in ways we might learn from if we actively try to understand. That not having control over life in big and small matters does not necessarily result in a fearful retreat into individualism, but can be a catalyst for the shared fight for human dignity and life. That everything can be seen as a matter of relationship and that in recovery, relationship is everything that matters.
1 The call was for the Connected Communities Research Festival 2016 on the theme of Community Futures and Utopias.
2 Those who worked on the project were Mark Prest from PORe; Michaela Jones and Alistair Sinclair from UKRF, GMRF and in2recovery; artist Cristina Nuñez, artist filmmaker Huw Wahl, early career researcher Lucy Wright, and ManMet Arts for Health director, Clive Parkinson.
3 For more details of Cristina’s work see The Self Portrait Experience
4 See for example Jean Rouch’s use of the term Ciné-Trance to describe this effect.
5 This difficult idea is foundational to the work of psychoanalyst Bion. Potentially de-politicising if mis-used, because of the suggestion of ‘accepting one’s lot’, I am interested in the equal and opposite effect – the release of solidarity and activism through such acceptance.
6 Michaela Jones pers. comm.
7 See James Grotstein on Bion in his book An Beam of Intense Darkness, 2007, for an expansion of these thoughts.
8 http://www4.shu.ac.uk/mediacentre/volunteering-and-working-are-central-addiction-recovery
9 Foreword by Kenneth Clark to “Mary Potter”, Whitechapel Art Gallery 1964.
10 M. Hannula, Catch Me If You Can: Chances and Challenges of Artistic Research, volume 2. No. 2. Spring 2009. http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/hannula1.html