The work of art : rethinking the elementary forms of religious life / Michael Jackson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Jackson, professor of world religions at Harvard Divinity School, provocatively challenges our understanding of the categories art and religion. Rather than being distinct practices, he writes, both are attempts of individuals or communities to bring about in the world something hidden, as an attempt to cope with, understand, and reshape existence. Key to this argument is Jackson's consideration of art from the perspectives of production and reception, recognizing that both are essential to understanding its impact. Relying on his ethnographic research among the indigenous peoples of West Africa and Australia, his encounters with living artists, biographies, and works of an impressive collection of geographically and chronologically diverse artists, Jackson weaves together anthropology, memoir, and philosophy to make his argument. The main thread of his claims is difficult to trace in some of the anecdotes. For dedicated readers with the patience for philosophy and oblique reasoning, the work offers intriguing insights into how we might understand art and religion as two modes of the same creative impulse. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

Jackson (world religions, Harvard Divinity School) offers an erudite meditation on the role of art in human existence. Building on his experiences among Indigenous peoples of Australia and West Africa and his intimate knowledge of art--ranging from the work of such great masters of the Western European tradition as Bruegel, Bosch, Van Gogh, and Cezanne to that of such 20th- and 21st-century artists as Colin McCahon, Mark Rothko, Ian Fairweather, Joseph Beuys, and Paddy Jupurrula Nelson--the author considers how art, like religion and ritual, transforms perception of the world. In doing so, Jackson focuses on the process of producing the artwork--the mysterious interplay, as he calls it, of inner and outer realities. With its 13 color and 16 black-and-white figures (including a frontispiece), this is a book for scholars of anthropology, art, art criticism, philosophy, religion, and the social sciences. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Carol Crown, University of Memphis