Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 46
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We see how performance art challenges our notion of the traditional art object as
we shift toward an activated amalgam of artist, audience, space, and time.
Freedman and Combs write about narrative therapy, “When we say that our
sense of self is performed (Combs & Freedman, 1999; Goffman, 1959; Turner,
1986) … Each of us is always performer and audience at the same time” (2016, p.
3). In Mendieta’s work, we see a blurring of forms as the viewer-artist relationship
becomes the work of art. In therapy, these interactions allow the therapist and
client to perform collaborative stories of becoming.
I share with most narrative therapists the need to be part of the world’s story and
for the world to be part of ours. Our identities manifest relationally, in process,
and in public. Maggie Carrie and Shona Russell (2003) write, “Narrative practice is
founded on the idea that the stories that we tell about ourselves are not private
and individual but are a social achievement” (p. 3).
In The Process That Is the World, Joe Panzner (2015) explores the relationship
between John Cage’s music and Deleuze’s philosophy. He writes,
For Cage and Deleuze, creativity is a property of the world itself, not
a property of individuals. Artists do not exert absolute authorial
control – they harness and abstract a kind of dynamism, a multiplicity
that opens onto divergent realizations exceeding any kind of
prefiguration. (p. 13)
This echoes Mendieta’s (1988) desire to conjure the “... one universal energy
which runs through everything from insect to man, from man to spectre, from
spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy” (p. 72). My client, Jen, provides an example
of this kind of dynamism and transformation:
Jen:
I have to be affecting big change, otherwise I’ll implode. It definitely
feels like a volcano.”
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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