Deinstitutionalizing Art of the Nomadic Museum

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.

Eva Marxen is Assistant Professor of Art Therapy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, US.

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