Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Spacing it: Expanding perception of spatial relationships through art therapy
Get PDFThis article explores, in the context of art therapy, the perception of space as represented through maps. It focuses particularly on the way spatial perception is embodied, and worked through by the use of images which map and stand in for a physical space, such as the therapy room or a geographical location. Spatial perception is reviewed through the lens of brain research (Tolman 1973; O\u27Keefe and Nadel 1978; Maguire et. al. 2000, 2006), and approaches in psychoanalysis (Bick 1968; Meltzer 1975; Weddell 1975) and art therapy (Schaverien 1991; Meyerowitz-Katz & Reddick 2017). This investigation into spatial perception is then developed by comparing two individuals\u27 uses of what I call ‘geographical images’, based on Meltzer\u27s (1975) concept of personality organization as a geographic space. The first account is of maps representing the art therapy room created by an autistic child. These images seemed to embody a bizarre perception of space and transference relationships. The second is of an adolescent girl who created maps of her neighbourhood, which helped her to expand her ability to explore her environment as well as her object relations. Through comparing the two cases, the article aims to discuss the formation of mental space perception and to highlight the importance of making maps in art therapy as it expands—cognitively, conceptually and interpersonally—the quality and range of a distorted or limited perception of space
Preface by the Editor-in-Chief
No full textWe hope that readers of Volupté are keeping well in these challenging times. Most, if not all, of us have experienced some kind of confinement over the last three months due to COVID-19, and some of us, of course, will have been directly affected by the virus. Our thoughts are with you.
The shocking rampancy of fever and disease – both the physical and political varieties – has meant that scholarly activities like attending conferences and visiting libraries and archives are now out-of-bounds. The kinds of in-person socializing that we were able enjoy a few months ago have been reduced to Talking-Heads communications via glitchy web platforms and social media. We Whereby and we Zoom, but it is not surprising perhaps that technology falls short of human need. We feel sensory-deprived; we pine for the rust smell of foxed endpapers, for the must of an ancient tome
Decadent Historicism
Get PDFIn what respects might we consider decadence as a historical concept? And in what ways do literary writings associated with the fin-de-siècle decadent tradition approach the question of history? In response to these two interrelated questions, ‘Decadent Historicism’ discusses the manner in which writings and artworks identified as decadent reveal a preoccupation with the historical authority that four different gender-transitive icons from Classical Rome and a broadly conceived Renaissance exert upon late-Victorian sexual modernity. The first example is the young transgender Syrian emperor known posthumously as Elagabalus, whose sexual insubordination fascinated Simeon Solomon, J.-K.Huysmans, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Oscar Wilde. The second case study is the sexually ambiguous Elizabethan boy-actor ‘Mr. W. H.,’ who emerges in the short homoerotic fiction that Oscar Wilde wove around him in 1889. The third section of the presentation shifts to Vernon Lee’s long-standing interest in the legendary castrato Carol Boschi (Farinelli), in both her early story ‘A Culture Ghost; or, Winthrop’s Adventure’ (1881) and its subsequent recasting as ‘Voix Maudite’ (1887) and ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1890). The final instance is the ‘fair girl-boy’ pantomime dancer Pylades in Michael Field’s Roman Trilogy (1898-1903), whose politically contentious performances reveal his power as a bearer of cultural and historical knowledge. In each case, these performers exist in perilous proximity to pain, punishment, and death
Feeling Like an Outsider: Harold Acton, Anna May Wong, and Decadent Cosmopolitanism in China
Get PDFIn his Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948), the decadent modernist Harold Acton (1904-1994) chose to include a photograph of himself in his home in Beijing with the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong (1905-1961) [fig. 1]. Wong, known for her roles in The Toll of the Sea (1922), The Thief of Baghdad (1924), and Shanghai Express (1932), was at the time on a year-long tour of China, during which she hoped to study Chinese theatre and acquire a deeper understanding of her heritage. She went with the hope of locating roots and a cultural home, but she also carried with her a deep ambivalence about these aspirations. ‘Perhaps upon my arrival’, she said, ‘I shall feel like an outsider. Perhaps instead, I shall find my past life assuming a dreamlike quality of unreality.’ Acton resided in Beijing from 1932 to 1939, and in his life-writing and fiction related to this period, he represents himself as perpetually working to come into communion with the culture of China and perpetually frustrated in these attempts. In the image Acton chose to include in his memoirs, the two sit beside one another in the moon gate of Acton’s home. In the words of Kun Xi, Acton has ‘modelled himself after a Manchurian nobleman’. Wong wears a patterned gown and holds a fan. These cosmopolites, raised in Florence and Los Angeles, who lived hybrid and peripatetic existences, longed similarly for connection with China, and they appear here staged in a manner that allows them to perform a sense of embeddedness within a culture from which they often felt disconnected.
 
‘A strange breath of salty air’: Revealing Walter Edwin Ledger’s Decadent Collection
Get PDFIn his autobiography, Arthur Ransome provides a compelling glimpse of Walter Edwin Ledger:
He used to come to town dressed as an old-fashioned Jack Tar, with open neck and a blue-and-white sailor collar and bell-bottom trousers. He was an extremely efficient seaman, […] and in general brought a strange breath of salty air into the somewhat greenhouse atmosphere of the literary Nineties.
Although Ledger would probably have been flattered that Ransome placed him within the sphere of the literary 1890s, he was not a novelist, playwright, poet, or artist. It was as a devoted collector and bibliographer of Oscar Wilde’s works that Ledger became known to many of the individuals connected to the decadent tradition. Though less well known than figures such as Robert Ross and Christopher Millard, who famously engaged in efforts to ensure Wilde’s literary legacy and posthumous reputation, Ledger played an important role in this work and was a friend to both these men. Ledger, in fact, chose to name his magnum opus, ‘The Robert Ross Memorial Collection’, after his close friend. According to the memorandum left with Ledger’s will, the collection was a ‘tribute of admiration and affectionate esteem to [his] friend the late Robert Ross in appreciation of his chivalrous and selfless devotion to and friendship in adversity for Oscar Wilde’. Ledger’s desire to memorialize his friend resulted in a remarkable decadent archive, now housed at University College Oxford. In this brief account, I shall look at what we know about Walter Ledger and the origins of the collection and suggest why it is important.
 
‘Skin’ and Pigment: a glance back at the nature and use of the oil pastel
Get PDFIntriguingly, I find myself recalling the birth of ATOL, of which I was a part, happening in a church or church rooms, although I think this unlikely. But, this miss remembering, if it is, carries an interestingly symbolic resonance in so far as the depth of belief that was felt at the time. A belief that art therapy and its representation(s) needed to be as broad and as creative as possible.
Over the ensuing decade this was a guiding light and I feel proud to have been part of the nurturing process that enabled authors to develop their work and to publish freely to anyone who had access to the internet.
I retired from practice over six years ago and stepped back from ATOL in the last two. When I received an invitation to contribute to this tenth anniversary edition I was both flattered and, to be completely honest, a little daunted feeling that my distance from practice starved me of relevant material. After a period of mild paralysis I recalled a piece I had written for an exhibition on art therapy curated by Dave Edwards and held in Sheffield in 2018. It describes my recollections of people’s use of the oil pastel in a learning disability context. The piece was structured in an attempt to make my thoughts and memories as accessible as possible
Final Thoughts on the Clinical Supervision of Art Therapists
Get PDFIn the UK, all registered counsellors and psychotherapists – including art therapists – are required to have their clinical practice supervised for the duration of their working life. This article explores this requirement and examines some of the expectations and values that underpin it.
 
Review: Stéphane Guégan and André Guyaux, eds, Joris-Karl Huysmans: De Degas à Grünewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2019)
Get PDFJoris-Karl Huysmans was unimpressed by the Salon of 1879:
Of the 3,040 paintings listed in the catalogue, there’s not a hundred that are worth looking at. The rest are certainly inferior to the advertising posters on the walls of our streets and on the pissoirs of our boulevards, those tableaux that represent little slices of Parisian life: ballet gymnastics, clown acts, English mimes, racetracks and circus arenas
Although he is best known now as a novelist, Huysmans was active as an art critic throughout his life. As well as writing for periodicals, he published three major essay collections and incorporated commentary on art and artists into his fiction. The recent exhibition, De Degas à Grünewald at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the accompanying catalogue and critical collection edited by Stéphane Guégan and André Guyaux testify to increasing interest in these activities and their relationship. His broad dismissal of the Salon is suggestive here, since he rejects the canvases on display in favour of street art. The implication is that this represents a more authentic mode of expression than the scenes from classical myth and Roman history that dominated work by the likes of Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bougereau. As André Guyaux observes:
Il cherche dans la peinture ce qu’il cherche dans la littérature: le vivant, le vrai, un art qui ne ment pas, qui s’éloigne des clichés académiques, un art où il retrouve la vie, sa vie – la vie libre et même quelque peu débauchée qu’il mène à Paris. (p. 93)
[He seeks in painting what he seeks in literature: the living, the true, an art that does not lie, that moves away from academic clichés, an art where he finds life, his life – the free and even somewhat debauched life he leads in Paris.]
Just as Huysmans’s earliest novels, Marthe: Histoire d’une fille (1876) and Les Sœurs Vatard (1879) dwell on the lives of prostitutes and working girls, so his artistic tastes tended towards the realities of the street too.
 
The Intersection of Military History and the History of Emotions: Reconsidering Fear and Honour in Ancien Régime Warfare
Get PDFThis article reinterprets combat training and tactics in terms of the “execution” of the emotions, the shaping of actual military practice by the perceptions of fear and honour by different emotional communities. In the early modern European example emphasized here, the command community comprised of officers and commanders perceived itself largely driven by honour, but saw the emotional communities of the men in the ranks as most influenced by raw fear. The result was a tactical system based on supervision and control, minimizing soldier initiative. Only change in the compositions and perceptions of emotional communities allowed tactical revolution