One pressing issue in the anthropology of art today is to overcome 'representationalism,' Representionalism here means a standpoint that seeks to inquire into questions about art by reducing them to questions about the representation of any world or reality. Whether relativism or constructivism, much of our theorizing on art has shared that standpoint. However, representationalism ultimately leads to excluding the origin of art from the world in which we live, because that standpoint is actually enabled by the premise of the dichotomy between the external-objective world (the physical, body, nature, etc.) and the internal-subjective world (the mental, mind, culture, etc.) . That standpoint is based on the traditional idea of so-called 'cognitivism,' which reduces human cognition to the operation of mental representations in our brain, so as such, the origin of art is often shut away in the 'inner world' of artist, completely mystifying the practice. For example, one genre of modern art is called 'Art Brut.' But it is a typical case of the mystification of art in a sense that its notion is defined by the peripheral condition in the sociocultural world in which its makers (include psychiatric patients, prisoner, or the mentally-disabled persons) are situated, and their absolute 'solitude, silence, and secret.' The ecological approach created by J. J. Gibson, an American perceptual psychologist, suggests one way out of the problem of representationalism and dichotomy. His perspective, which stresses in principle the reciprocity between humans and the environment, closely parallels M. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological thought on body and his unique theory of painting. Merleau-Ponty says that every use of the human body is already 'a primordial expression,' and that the painter's work is to prolong that expressive operation of the body and amplify it into painting. 'It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into painting.' According to Merleau-Ponty, painting/art is not the representation of the world but the crystallization of the painter's/artist's style of dwelling in the world. Another crucial implication of Gibson's approach is pragmatic ontology. Unlike substantial ontology, pragmatic ontology associates reality not with substantial essence but with relational action. As Gibson says about his theory of affordance, 'the object offers what it does because it is what it is.' By the way, Gibson's view shares basic ideas with the anthropological theory of art of A. Gell, since he also seeks to consider the efficacy of the art object in the relational field of actions in which objects are situated. According to Gell, the art object is not a vehicle of meaning, such as a sign or symbol in semiologic or interpretative theories of art, but an index in which the artist's intentionality and agency are inscribed. It causes its viewers to act through the process of abduction, and by doing so it creates a social relation around itself, which in turn provides a channel for further social relations and influences. Based on the above discussions, this paper examines painting activities in two art schools for people with mental disabilities in Denmark. Those schools are a part of the network of activity and employment offers for the mentally handicapped that has been established in each community since the 1990's. But their distinctive feature is their management by the framework and ideas of adult learning (leisure), known as folkeoplysning, which developed in Denmark in the 19^<th> century. Some of the students in the art school participate for just one year, while some move into and out of the school every a few years. Still others have continued to participate for many years as 'artists.' First, it should be noted that
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