A problem smile: workshops, tours and discos

Abstract

This research considers my broad participatory art project, comprising anger, fear and laughter workshops; naturist tours; and discos. The project is defined by the use of active meditation for stress reduction. The project seeks to create spaces for participants to challenge and disrupt imperial hegemonic concepts of anger and nudity and the psychological dominance that hegemony produces. Non-imperial catharsis provides the participant with the power to experience personal transformation through the movement from a stressed state to a relaxed one. This project is part of an ongoing investigation of fear, shame and embarrassment and education through feeling. The research raises multiple and complex issues regarding spectatorship, authorship, self-help psychology and social power dynamics, and is centred around a core question: How do we understand participatory processes, particularly those involving naturism and catharsis, in relation to principles of compression and reduction? The research explores how my broad participatory project informs a planned doctoral work involving a solo, naturist self-tour of an educational space comprised of workshops, studios, lecture rooms and staff offices. A key research finding was the discovery of the complex nature and personality of the principles compression and reduction themselves, and identifying how they are manifested within each participatory work. The finding meant no longer defining the principles as neutral because the body is not neutral; which in turn expanded my neutral and imperial theorisations of compression and reduction to consider social power dynamics, including gender and race issues. This resulted in compression and reduction becoming terms for discussing psychophysiological pressure and stress operating as both eustress and distress or hurt offence. Defining compression and reduction as imperial pressure effectively challenged the neutrality of the body I had unwittingly promoted, thus creating a forum for reflective practice. The reduction of people to a homogeneous, egalitarian entity causing those same people disadvantage, harm pressure and stress (for example, sexism, racism and violence) does not respect differing individual subjectivities. This is at odds with the non-imperial pedagogical frame I have hoped to establish for the broad participatory project. The types of compression force designated in the research included the psychophysiological pressure relating to people and the psychophysiological pressure between people and art. The research depicts how the participant stress is in a context of a flow of stress involving the potential abatement of stress. A significant research finding was discovering the agency of the unclad gallery goer on a naturist tour to unlock dormant meaning in art, meaning that is inaccessible to the clad gallery goer. Applying an intersectional lens to these research findings revealed and demarcated the broad participatory project as being a conflict of intent and result highlighting the imperial and non-imperial forces at play. The discussion raised many concerns regarding imperial and paternal habits; and thus remain considerations for the proposed Monash doctoral work. It is therefore anticipated the solo self-tour structure of the Monash doctoral work will create greater individual agency for a participant and release them from a dominant gaze, freedom from reductive imperialism. The research findings have the potential to significantly alter the nature of all future work.