Life in Art

Art practices reveal the entwinement of perception and understanding, opening possibilities for new ways of enacting the political. An artwork can serve as more than solely an aesthetic object: in the public sphere it beckons us to resist, challenge, and change 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. Thirteen 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 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 new worlds.

Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Carnalities, The Art of Living in Latinidad and In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. She is editor (with Andrea J. Pitts and José Medina) of Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance and (wit h Linda Martín Alcoff) Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader.

Helen A. Fielding is Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Western University. She is author of Cultivating Perception Through Artworks and coeditor (with Dorothea E. Olkowski) of Feminist Phenomenology Futures, and (with Christina Schües and Dorothea E. Olkowski) of Time in Feminist Phenomenology.