Why Create? A psychosocial question

Collaboration and cross fertilisation of ideas is at the heart of so much art practice and this marries with the ethos of a psychosocial approach – the transdisciplinary approach mixing and melding from across, rather than between, disciplines and genres.

If we accept that emotion is created in the interaction between the audience and the art object, it follows that its presentational context is key. But the exhibition space is a separate space from lived experience which governs how we react to or with the art, which may or may not facilitate contingency. How can this be encountered? Is true audience participation in art the solution?

For us as a working sector I would like to open a debate about how psychological knowledge can help us work with artists and audiences better. Does this explanation of creativity resonate with you and is it relevant to contemporary practice? Does this differ across art and presentational forms?

The art experience is an ambivalent one; we can seek it out or we can actively avoid it, as if fearful of its psychological confrontation. How do community arts, art therapy and our work to increase access and participation accord with this way of approaching audience interaction? Is it only with contemporary participatory art that we see a move from a dialogical relationship, with art that is effectively ‘othered’, to a relational one, with the ‘expert in the room’ being the artist, the participants and the work they create. Or can other forms of presentation learn from this?

We look to artists for many reasons and artists fulfil for us many cultural roles; but we must not forget that they are also human and they will encounter the same problems as us (the audience), and will be just as resistant to change as the next person. We must not collude in their message but find our own narrative in the art experience. And we must accept that art is one of a number of resources we have to change ourselves and our society but that, as with therapy, it can only ‘help’ not ‘solve’.

The transdisciplinarity of art and psychology has an engaging potential when they come together. There is a psychosocial perspective of the arts that demands not just a reflection on practice but also poses some urgent questions of the arts sector at this time.