The Work of Art
Rethinking the Elementary Forms of Religious Life
1st Edition
Published on 26. June 2017
256 pages
978-0-231-54199-2 (ISBN)
Description
How are we to think of works of art? Rather than treat art as an expression of individual genius, market forces, or aesthetic principles, Michael Jackson focuses on how art effects transformations in our lives. Art opens up transitional, ritual, or utopian spaces that enable us to reconcile inward imperatives and outward constraints, thereby making our lives more manageable and meaningful. Art allows us to strike a balance between being actors and being acted upon.
Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa, as well as insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, literature, and the philosophy of art, Jackson deploys an extraordinary range of references-from Bruegel to Beuys, Paleolithic art to performance art, Michelangelo to Munch-to explore the symbolic labor whereby human beings make themselves, both individually and socially, out of the environmental, biographical, and physical materials that affect them: a process that connects art with gestation, storytelling, and dreaming and illuminates the elementary forms of religious life.
Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia and West Africa, as well as insights from psychoanalysis, religious studies, literature, and the philosophy of art, Jackson deploys an extraordinary range of references-from Bruegel to Beuys, Paleolithic art to performance art, Michelangelo to Munch-to explore the symbolic labor whereby human beings make themselves, both individually and socially, out of the environmental, biographical, and physical materials that affect them: a process that connects art with gestation, storytelling, and dreaming and illuminates the elementary forms of religious life.
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More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York, NY
United States
Publishing group
De Gruyter
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
Digital original
Product notice
Reflowable
Illustrations
16 color and 12 b&w illustrations
File size
34,75 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-231-54199-2 (9780231541992)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
10/2016
Columbia University Press
€43.40
Shipment within 10-20 days
Person
Michael Jackson is Distinguished Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of the prize-winning Paths Toward a Clearing (1989) and At Home in the World (2000). His most recent Columbia University Press books include As Wide as the World Is Wise: Reinventing Philosophical Anthropology (2016) and Harmattan: A Philosophical Fiction (2015). He is also the author of The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-being (2013); Between One and One Another (2012); and Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (2012).
Content
Preamble
Part 1
Worlds Within and Worlds Without
Melbourne Now
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Art as Religion
The Interplay of Coming Out and Going In
Consciousness
From Joyce to Beuys
Production and Reproduction
Axes of Bias
A Visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel
Part 2
The Life and Times of Paddy Jupurrula Nelson
Ecstatic Professions
Art and Adversity: Ian Fairweather and the Solitude of Art
Transplantations: The Art of Simryn Gill
My Brother's Keeper: The Art of Susan Norrie
Heroic Failure: The Art of Sidney Nolan
Une Vie Brève, Mais Intense
The Pare Revisited
A Man of Constant Sorrow: The Existential Art of Colin McCahon
Part 3
Landscape and Nature Morte: The Art of Paul Cézanne
Art and the Unspeakable
Marina Abramovic and the Shadows of Intersubjectivity
Exodus
Making It Otherwise
Art and the Everyday
The Work of Art and the Arts of Life
Notes
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Index
Part 1
Worlds Within and Worlds Without
Melbourne Now
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Art as Religion
The Interplay of Coming Out and Going In
Consciousness
From Joyce to Beuys
Production and Reproduction
Axes of Bias
A Visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel
Part 2
The Life and Times of Paddy Jupurrula Nelson
Ecstatic Professions
Art and Adversity: Ian Fairweather and the Solitude of Art
Transplantations: The Art of Simryn Gill
My Brother's Keeper: The Art of Susan Norrie
Heroic Failure: The Art of Sidney Nolan
Une Vie Brève, Mais Intense
The Pare Revisited
A Man of Constant Sorrow: The Existential Art of Colin McCahon
Part 3
Landscape and Nature Morte: The Art of Paul Cézanne
Art and the Unspeakable
Marina Abramovic and the Shadows of Intersubjectivity
Exodus
Making It Otherwise
Art and the Everyday
The Work of Art and the Arts of Life
Notes
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Index
