Learning from Experience

Abstract

In recent years, a growing number of artists and performers have become involved with a group psychoanalytic practice called the Tavistock method. British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) initiated this methodology, which centres on the study of the ‘here-and-now’ within group life. Exploring the unconscious dynamics within groups, Bion’s approach evolved into a model known as a group relations conference, an experiential meeting in which members examine the group dynamics that form within the conference itself. Within the last fifteen years, various artists have participated in group relations, attending conferences as members and staff as well as introducing Tavistock within art departments and cultural institutions. Olive Mckeon’s article, ‘Learning from experience: Disciplinary hybridity between group psychoanalysis and performance’, investigates the liminal, hybrid space between Tavistock and performance. Expanding approaches to interdisciplinary work in the arts, Mckeon demonstrates that the encounter between group relations and creative practice contains the possibilities of fruitful, cross-disciplinary learning as well as the dangers of appropriating and aestheticizing another field. The article focuses on a case study of an artistic project that hybridizes with group relations: a work by artist Leigh Ledare titled The Task (2017). Ledare’s project stages a Tavistock conference as a work of art, a piece that is simultaneously an aesthetic object and a group relations conference. As an example of disciplinary hybridity, Ledare’s project reveals the difficulties of working at the boundary and intersection between two fields. The interpretative questions that group relations asks — how is affect distributed within a group? how is authority established? — offer an instructive lens to look at the dynamics of cross-disciplinary compositional methods. This article provides insight into two dimensions of hybridity: hybridity between disciplines and practices that hybridize experience and reflection.