Full 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.
Contents
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 Breve, 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 Cezanne 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
