Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 45
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Mendieta states, “Using my body as reference in the creation of these works, I am
able to transcend myself in a voluntary submersion and total identification with
nature” (1988, p. 70). We see complex themes of exile, pain, ancestry, and the
maternal feminine in Mendieta’s imagery.
Mendieta’s art helps me understand postmodernism’s dissolution of the subject.
As we question the art object, we also interrogate the fixity of identity.
Mendieta’s clay-baked bodies and etched silhouettes challenge ideas of a rarified
self. In art, identity is intertextual, with a plurality of meanings in flux. Multiple
contributors to Western philosophy have us question individualistic, bounded
definitions of the human subject as an object (Mitchell, 2013, p. 80). Bakhtin
(1984) describes the unfinalizable self. Foucault discusses the subject as
“constructed by ... various discursive forces” and operations of power (Mitchell,
2013, p. 85). Michael White deconstructs the idea of the self as personal property
(Dulwich Centre Foundation, 2018, 3:22). Deleuze and Guattari (1994) describe
art as producing sensations of affect and precepts that are separate from a
subject's observations and responses.
The art critic Simon O’Sullivan (2001) explains how affect operates beyond
representations and the division between subject and object (pp. 125-134).
Although affect is often associated with the somatic embodiment of felt
experience, in this context, “affect” refers to the potentials of the virtual. For
Deleuze, intensities are emergent encounters that enable creativity to actualize in
novel expressions beyond known identities and forms. Art helps me see this life
force of difference and becoming, as evident in this Deleuze quote: “What we are
interested in, you see, are modes of individuation beyond those of things, persons
or subjects: the individuation, say, of a time of day, of a region, a climate, a river
or a wind, of an event.” (1995, p. 26)
David Epston speaks of identity, saying, “I was not represented, I was performed”
(personal communication, April 30, 2015). Performances of meaning are integral
to narrative therapy. They appear in the rich practices of definitional ceremonies
and Insider Witnessing Practices, which counteract the effects of pervasive
individualism that separate people from one another and from the environment.
Breaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practice – Part Three
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2026 Release, p. 25-51.
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