Life in Art
Phenomenology and World Making

Contributions by Rajiv Kaushik,Amanda Boetzkes,Nader El-Bizri,Monique Roelofs,Jorella Andrews,Martina Ferrari,Stefan Kristensen,Anna Barseghian

ISBN13: 9780253075673

Imprint: Indiana University Press

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Format: Hardback

Published: 28/04/2026

Availability: Not yet available

Description
Art practices are inherently political, engaging systems of perception and understanding to open possibilities for new ways of being. An artwork can serve as more than solely an aesthetic object: as it enters the public sphere it can resist, challenge, and change how we think about and understand the world around us. Wide-ranging in scope and application, Life in Art showcases how, at the intersection of art and phenomenology, sociopolitical issues can be examined anew. Eleven diverse, international, established and emerging academics and artists reveal how art opens possibilities for breaking colonial logics, resisting injustice, and addressing climate catastrophe. Through their multilayered and multidisciplinary phenomenological analyses, these original essays reveal how a variety of artworks from diverse fields—dance, sculpture, performance, photography, literature, architecture, film, and virtual reality—can engage perception in ways that transform the self and the world. Some essays focus on engagement with specific artworks; others consider theoretical questions that frame the intersection of aesthetics and phenomenology; and still more expand on the ways art can lead to political and social action. Offering a multiplicity of diverse views on the intersections between phenomenology and aesthetics, Life in Art highlights how this entanglement fosters our desires to mend, repair, and make worlds anew.
Introductions, by Mariana Ortega and Helen A. Fielding Part I: Sensing Anew, Decolonial Trespassings 1. Perceptual Thinking through Movement, by Helen A. Fielding 2. Perceiving in Red: The Visible, the Invisible, and Aesthesic Trespassing, by Mariana Ortega Part II: Spectralities 3. The Pink Crosses of Juárez: On Ephemeral Art's Power to Memorialize and Denounce Feminicidal Violence, by Martina Ferrari 4. Disrupting Spirits: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Ancestrality, by Stefan Kristensen and Anna Barseghian Part III: The Intimacies of Space 5. On Melting Ice with Jessie Kleemann, by Amanda Boetzkes 6. Deconstructing the Fetishist Aura of Capitalist Tech-Spectacles, by Nader El-Bizri Part IV: Art and the Political 7. Pictorial Rationalities and Why They Matter in Our Struggles for Identity and Community, by Jorella Andrews 8. Aesthetic Experience as a Site of Social Transformation: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of the Call, by Monique Roelofs 9. Distance and Proximity in Merleau-Ponty: Literary Usages of Language and New Usages of Power, by Rajiv Kaushik Part V: Artists' Mending Work 10. Blessings of Liberty and Interpretative Horizons, by Sarah Stefana Smith 11. Decolonial Re-worlding: Potential Ecologies of the Virtual, by Dolleen Tisawii'ashii Manning and Mary Bunch Index
  • Philosophy: aesthetics
  • Phenomenology & Existentialism
  • Professional & Vocational
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List Price: £83.00