Welcome

THE WORK OF ART AND THE WAY ART WORKS:

In Honour of Paolo Knill on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday

Paolo Knill, the founder of the European Graduate School, is a pioneer in developing ways for the arts to work in the lives of contemporary individuals and communities. He has taken the psychological framework in which art is understood within the arts therapies and turned it towards a recognition of the centrality of the work, not the subjectivity of its maker. His concept of “decentering” emphasizes both the radical separation of the alternative world of the imagination from the concerns of the everyday and, through subsequent “aesthetic analysis,” the importance of works of art for our experience of life. Art is not self-expression, but it has an undeniable effect on the person or community which receives it. Achieving this “effective reality” is the responsibility of all those who work with the arts to help bring about change; it is our “aesthetic responsibility.”

In this special issue, we invite members of the EGS community and others to reflect on the work of Paolo Knill as well as on the place the arts may have within our experience. Can the work of art still play the central role which it did in traditional cultures or has what Walter Benjamin called the elimination of the “aura” of the work in the “age of mechanical reproduction” rendered it impossible for art to give meaning and value to life? Does the “age of digital reproduction” in which we now live intensify this process or open up new possibilities for artistic creation? In what ways can we reinvent the arts so that they have a connection with our lives? Heidegger once wrote, Das Werk wirkt (The work works). How can the work work for us today?

Click here to view the Audio and Video Gallery

Click here to order a hard copy from Caversham Booksellers, our preferred bookseller.

$37.50 Cdn / $37.50 US
ISSN 1492-4986/2012

THE HEAD OF ORPHEUS:

Voice, Song and the Poetics of Resistance and Transformation

Are voice and song primary modes of communication? How is it that voice-work can affect us in such a powerful way? In this issue of the journal, we explore the primacy of the voice in poetry and song, seeking to understand its communicative and transformative power. Our authors explore the resurgence of the oral tradition, the origins of the poetic, the extreme reaches of vocal expression and the ways in which digital media both close off and open up new possibilities for primary vocalization. More than an academic exploration of voice, the issue speaks to us as we read it, and sometimes it even seems to sing.

And for the first time, the journal has links to audio and video presentations connected to the theme - we can look and listen as well as read.

Articles: Rishma Dunlop, "Vox Humana," Elizabeth Gordon McKim, "Ride the Poetry Bus: An Excursion Into the Oral Tradition of Song/Story/and Poem," Fides Krucker, "Chiaroscuro: The Bodhisattva in the Voice," Vivian Darroch-Lozowski, "Making Worlds: the Extended Voice Work of Richard Armstrong," Richard Armstrong, "The Irritant," Linda Wise, "Voice and Soul: The Alfred Wolfsohn/Roy Hart Legacy," Enrique Pardo, "Figuring out the Voice: Object, Subject, Project," Allucquére Rosanne Stone, "Song and Resistance," Christina Foisy, "Gloomy Sunday on a Tuesday: The Unsound Voices of Suicide re-membered Through Sound Poetics," Peter Price, "Digital Sound and the Post-Human Future"

Poetry: Norman Minnick, Rebecca Chamberlain, Shara Claire, Jeffrey Thomson, Domenico Capilongo, Alison Luterman, Stephen K. Levine, Tomas O'Leary, Vivian Darroch-Lozowski, Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship, Kristin Briggs, Andrew Sofer, Ewan Whyte, Lamont B. Steptoe, Phil Woods, Barry Dempster, Mihku Paul, James P. Lanfestey, Frank Miller

Art Work: Jenn E. Norton, Yi Xin Tong, Nicholas Hooper, Martha Townsend, Erin Gee, Rory Dean, Faye Mullen, Michael Caines, Nicola Woods, Jennifer Chan, Audio Lodge

Featured Artist: Elise Kermani

Click here to view the Audio and Video Gallery

Click here to order a hard copy from Caversham Booksellers, our preferred bookseller.

$29.95 Cdn / $29.95 US
ISSN 1492-4986/2011

THE POIETICS OF ALTERITY

How can we represent the Other? How can the Other represent us? In this issue of the journal, we are looking at ways in which we may open to the Other in the arts, media and the arts therapies. Is art a vehicle for the expression of the self or does it necessarily imply transcendence toward otherness? What, if anything, is a self and how does it reach out to the Other, both the other person and the otherness of itself? Can poiesis be a basis for ethical practice or is there, as Kierkegaard thought, an insuperable gap between the aesthetic and the ethical?

Featuring articles on working with others, especially those considered radically different, through the arts, as well as articles on the political significance of the arts in Critical Theory:

“Asylums Rededicated: A Concrete Utopia,” “Anthropologists of the Mind,” “Conversations at the Edge of The Numinous,” “Encountering the Other-Self: Essential Forms and New Therapeutic Developments in Transitional Phenomena,” “Edith Turner: A Lifetime of Encountering the Other,” “Teaching Peace by Piece: Two Quilts One World,” “Contact Zone: The Ethics of Playing with “the Other”,” “Doing the Dishes, Aferim,” “Art as Counter-Thinking: Aesthetics and Revolution in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School,” “Sound as an Expression of Critique: Theodor W, Adorno’s Philosophy of Music,” “Art as the Experience of Alterity: Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.”

Poetry by: Stephen Levine, Elizabeth Gordon McKim, Adriana Marchione, Charles Coe, Isabelle Schenkel, Thomas R. Smith, Phil Woods, James P. Lenfesty, Rebecca Chamberlain, Barbara Claire Kasselmann, Danielle Legros Georges, Margo Fuchs Knill, Sally Atkins, Alice Beecher, Anna M. Warrock, Judith Steinbergh, Shara Claire, Chris Brandt, Alison Luterman.

Artwork by: Susanne Sekula, Issa Ibrahim, John Tursi, Brent Taylor, Angela Silver, Kelly Lycan, Annie Si-Wing Tung, Jordan Bower, Jen Mann, Gisele Amantea, Olexander Wlasenko, Steve Cribbin, Paris Visone, Stephen Schofield, Juliana Pivato.

Click here to order a copy from Caversham Booksellers, our preferred bookseller.

$29.95 Cdn / $29.95 US
ISBN 2147483647

ECOPOIESIS: Imagining the Earth

This issue of the POIESIS journal brings together writers from the fields of philosophy, media studies and the expressive arts in an effort to grasp our relationship to the environment in a more imaginative way.

Paul Virilio, writing about Grey Ecology, (“…the pollution of the self-created world”) looks at our situation through the lens of speed and the acceleration of reality, while Jason Adams applies Virilio’s concept of popular defense to an aesthetics of resistance. Thomas Zummer’s eco/sophia calls for a remediation of technics and a re-membering of the world; and for Wolfgang Schirmacher, Eco-Sophia becomes an ethics for the human being as technician, the art of living humanely.

David Abram reminds us that underlying our technologized experience is a direct sensuous relationship to the world, one which we can return to through the re-awakening of our primary oral culture in story-telling. For Wes Chester, our fundmental relationship to the world is through an aesthetic encounter which can be cultivated in a disciplined way. And Thomas Trenchard and Sally Atkins make this encounter come alive by telling us of their experiences in the woods - either at night or in the mountains.

The journal is filled with art-work and poetry that embodies the call for a new aesthetics of the natural world, featuring a lengthy excerpt from the important new work by Rishma Dunlop, The New Republic: Reading Towards Ecotopia. As Dunlop says,

Everyone reaches
for nomenclature. Hoop the names of things
to your belt. When you are empty,
eat the words, drink them.

We invite our readers to join us at the feast.

Click here to order a copy from Caversham Booksellers, our preferred bookseller.

$29.95 Cdn / $29.95 US
ISBN 2147483647

This volume is offered as a gift to the life and work of Stephen K. Levine and to the thinkers and the practitioners in the field. In the spirit of Levine’s thinking, it offers a lively array of ideas about the current state of work in the expressive arts: therapy, coaching, education, consulting, and social change.

This collection of writings, poems and visual images honours the thinking and the work of Stephen K. Levine, philosopher of the field of expressive arts therapy. Levine’s work in this field over the past 25 years has focused on the central role of art and art-making in human experience, calling attention to the uniquely human act of shaping and its embodiment in artistic activity. Levine places the concept of poiesis at the center of his thinking and, by doing so, provides an important guidepost for practitioners of therapy, education and social change work through the arts. His ideas have influenced a whole generation of teachers and practitioners of expressive arts therapy and this volume is a testament to that influence.

Levine has issued a series of challenges to the authors contained in this volume. Each writer, student or colleague, has responded from his or her own standpoint. In the longer articles, the writers were asked to address ideas at the forefront of their thinking in these times. For the medium-length pieces, they were summoned to respond to a concern: can the expressive arts move from its original focus on psychological disorder and its treatment to a broader social and political perspective? Finally, in the short responses, the writers were asked to consider what new directions are needed for the field of expressive arts.

Click here to order a copy from Caversham Booksellers, our preferred bookseller.

$24.95 Cdn / $24.95 US
ISBN 2147483647